Three Jews, Four Opinions

Source of Values and Virtues

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 22:46:00 +0000

A common critique of more liberal ideas of Judaism is that people make up their own definitions of goodness and other values, "pick and choose" freely, and essentially do what they want without any constraint or boundaries. If values are not directly derived from God, this argument goes, then maybe Nazis or racists or murderers are right. The only proper source of values, this argument continues, is God's commands.

In the previous thread, Moshe asked in a comment: More fundamentally, I would ask you and Jason how do you know, and from where do you derive, your ideas as to what is "good or sensible"? Why, for example, should I be in favor of, say, equal rights for woman, if I am male. I assume he was starting down this path.

There is much to be said in response, and my co-bloggers Steve and Diane have written about this topic more extensively in earlier posts, but I want to focus on one problem with this claim: its incompatibility with the Torah itself.

When Cain and Abel came along, God has issued only one command: don't eat from the Tree of Life. And presumably, this command was rendered moot by the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. After Cain kills Abel, God asks him where Abel is. Cain then disingenuously asks, "Am I my brother's keeper?" God responds, "What have you done? Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground."

God's response presupposes that Cain has some knowledge of right and wrong. God did not say, "I commanded you not to murder." Instead, God vividly appeals to Cains sense of empathy, shame, and horror. And this response presupposes that Cain has -- or should have -- a sense of empathy, shame, and horror, and that this sense is part of the foundation for his belief in right and wrong.

Similarly, Noah is described as "righteous in his generation". But what on earth could "righteousness" mean here, in the absence of any detailed instructions from God as to how to behave (other than the now moot instruction regarding the Tree of Life)? The answer is that righteousness means righteousness, and it exists independently of any divine command.

But perhaps the clearest example comes from the story of Abraham arguing with God over Sodom and Gemorrah. After God announces that he will destroy the city, Abraham asks if he will really destroy the city if there are 50 righteous people in the city. Abraham then says to God "חָלִלָה לְּךָ" / "chalilah l'cha" / "shame on you" to do this thing. Abraham then asks "Shall not the judge of all the earth do justly?"

Now if justice or righteousness were derived solely from divine commands, then Abraham's question would be completely foolish. God would of course be acting justly because anything that God does is definitionally just. Abraham's impudence -- saying "shame on you" to God -- would not only be foolish and disrespectful, but completely incoherent. But it is not. Justice exists independently of divine commands or actions, and Abraham holds God responsible for apparently acting unjustly.

The Torah (as well as common sense) presupposes that we all have an idea of goodness, regardless of whether God has issues specific commands.

So the answer to Moshe's question is that I get my ideas of what is good and sensible from the same place that he and everyone else does. I have certain ideas of what is good, including ideas regarding human dignity, happiness, empathy, concern for others, and avoidance of harm, pain, and misery. Of course, we can argue about where the edges are, which concern takes precedence in difficult cases, and what the ultimate source of these values are. But there should be no dispute that goodness exists and is a coherent concept, even in the absence of a direct divine command.

Combing Through Medieval Syllogisms To Find Gems That can be Laboriously Related to the Present Human Condition

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 06:33:00 +0000

Jason GL left a really thoughtful comment on the previous post about meaning and counting the omer. It nicely captured the problem that we modern Jews face. It also prompted an extensive conversation with Mrs. Bruce on how Judaism is and is not meaningful. I thought Jason's comment deserved its own post. First his comment, then my response.

Hello! I enjoyed your post. I am a consumer protection lawyer living in San Francisco, and I am a Jew. At various times I have been strongly involved with the Conservative movement, the Renewal movement, and a nondenominational community synagogue. I am currently experiencing what is usually called a "crisis of faith," but I prefer to call it a crisis of doubt, as it's not the faith that's bothering me.

I like your explanation of tradition, and I agree with you that traditions are created by the people who participate in them. No doubt the technique of counting from 1 to 49 was as unneeded to the rabbis of the Roman Empire, with its geometers and its mathematical calendars, as Pirke Avot's injunction to "ration your drinking water" is to people who live on America's eastern seaboard, with its ecologically sustainable, essentially cost-free tap water. The ancient rabbis clearly added new layers to prehistoric Judaism; there is no reason why it would be *wrong* for us to add our own layers to the late-medieval Judaism that we have inherited.

My concern is that such a project might not be worthwhile. You've put the essence of the problem far better than I could: An impoverished religious core is often surrounded by religiously peripheral - albeit important - issues like cultural Judaism, support for Israel, the Holocaust, anti-semitism, and social action.

These religiously peripheral issues, however important, have not in any way forced the Jewish tradition to engage with either the scientific or the social-scientific revolutions. Our tradition is badly, badly out of date. For all that we (or some of us) have learned to welcome people of all genders and sexual orientations into God's sanctuary, I am not aware that we have any modern traditions worth mentioning.

By "modern traditions," I mean traditions that depend on and reflect the state of the world as it has changed during and after the Enlightenment. I studied with a great rebbe who is a living testament to the power of prayer to transform and improve one's psyche. Power, though, is not the same thing as efficiency. Why take twenty years, an unrelentingly intense effort, and hours of daily devotion to do what can be done in a hundred hours of cognitive-behavioral therapy? Why comb through medieval syllogisms in the hopes of finding gems that can be laboriously 'related' to the present human condition when every day a new issue from a journal on neuroeconomics or neuropsychology is published that reveals empirical *evidence* about the human condition?

If, for whatever reason, you see such projects as inherently valuable, I wish you well. It's not my intent to dissuade others from updating old traditions. But (and it breaks my heart to say this) I can't see wanting to teach these traditions to my children in any great depth, or even wanting to renew my efforts to live by them. The traditions have plenty of use -- but what is their advantage? In a world where we all may choose our affiliations and our commitments, why re-commit to Judaism?

Again, this comment really hit the nail on the head. Any modern and thinking Jew must face this "crisis of doubt" head-on. (Non-modern Jews can be oblivious to the modern world, and non-thinking people can avoid facing pretty much any problem, at least until it clobbers them.) I cannot offer a comprehensive response, but I can offer quite a number of things that have worked for me. (In fact, this blog is an elaborate attempt to deal with exactly this problem.)

1. Some preliminary thoughts. I would take science off the table completely. I accept the idea of non-overlapping magisteria, and if one wants answers to empirical questions, turn to science. And do so without even attempting to correlate it with religious thought. I am always amused, for example, by people who attempt to show that the creation stories in Genesis line up somehow with a modern account of cosmology. It was interesting to me when I was 20, but now these attempts are just amusing and perhaps a little sad.

The same goes for history, archeology, and social science, with the caveat that parts of the Bible are historical documents.

2. For me, religious thought is about values. Traditional Jewish law, stories, and rituals are the first word in Judaism, but are certainly not the last word. Instead, they are the beginning of a long "great conversation" that has come down through the ages. Some parts of this conversation are quite deep and meaningful today and are worth studying. I think the traditions involved in counting the omer are a good example of that.

Other parts of this conversation -- and Jason put it well -- require "comb[ing] through medieval syllogisms in the hopes of finding gems that can be laboriously 'related' to the present human condition." Exactly. Cut those combing sessions short.

Others just seem completely irrelevant today. For example, the precise details of the laws of sacrifice just seem tedious, boring, and a little gross. At a higher level, several things are interesting about the sacrifices. There are different sacrifices for different purposes (sin, thanksgiving, etc.). These are communal affairs. (As my rabbi put it, you cannot sacrifice an ox and have 1200 pounds of roast beef that need to be eaten by tomorrow without inviting a few of your friends -- or perhaps the whole town -- over to share.) But some of the details of how to do these sacrifices are quite far from the present human condition.

But as I have previously argued, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit here. If a Jew just did the easy and meaningful stuff (at least easy and meaningful after a little learning), I think he would have a moderately observant lifestyle. Certainly more observant than most contemporary Reform and Conservative Jews, although less observant than most contemporary Orthodox Jews. The existence of the obscure, difficult, and seemingly meaningless -- and I agree there is a lot of that -- is no reason to avoid the rest.

3. Judaism is a communal affair. (Although this is perhaps belied by the fact that I am now writing about Judaism late at night, by myself. Mrs. Bruce and the kids are asleep.) The enterprise Jason described -- reading a text, relating it to the modern condition, reading scientific literature, engaging in therapy -- is a rationalistic, scientific, intellectual, and usually solitary activity. But joining a community is a very different type of thing.

Interestingly, the book of Ecclesiastes is quite cynical about most human activities. But one of the key activities omitted in the book is being part of a community, having friends, and helping others.

4. Judaism is often counter-cultural. For example, American culture highly values freedom of speech. It is a protected constitutional right (and one that I have defended on appeal several times), and "expressing oneself" is widely viewed as a valuable activity. But Judaism disagrees. A Jew is often obligated not to say certain things, and the extreme individualism of expressing oneself is tempered to a large degree by things like modesty, humility, and consideration of others.

I think this clash of ideas and ideals is a good thing. American freedoms force American Jews to examine Jewish ideas from a different perspective, and Jewish values force American Jews to critically examine American freedoms. We gain a deeper understanding of both by critically examining each in light of the other.

5. Judaism is often fun. Best example: sukkot.

* * *

Jason's other point is also a good one. There have been surprising few interesting and valuable post-enlightenment traditions that we have developed. Perhaps the bat-mitzvah is one (and egalitarianism in general). A participatory and engaged seder might be another. I think this is largely due to the inherent conservatism of Judaism as it is currently practiced. This might change as time goes on.

* * *

In short, I cannot point to a single thing that makes Judaism meaningful to me. But I find that there many smaller things collectively that add up to a pretty meaningful Judaism.

Counting the Omer - The Creation of Meaning (Part 6)

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 21:41:00 +0000

In previous posts, I discussed the murky historical origins of counting the omer and Shavuot. I also discussed how this is reflected in textual ambiguities and confusion. In this post, I would like to examine how people have come to create meaning for this ritual. This historical gloss---wholly apart from any underlying original meaning of the ritual---is in fact what most of us who count the omer experience when we count the omer.

Various midrashim (and later the Zohar) state that the Jews had descended to the 49th level of impurity in Egypt. Another midrash (Ecclesiastes Rabbah 3:11 and Song of Songs Rabbah 2:5, included in Bialek's Sefer HaAggadah, p. 78, no. 25) states that the Jews could have received the Torah on the day they left Egypt, but they were physically weak and needed a few months to recover. In both cases, they needed spiritual or physical healing, and this took place during the time between Passover and Shavuot, or during the omer-counting season.

This idea gave rise to the kabalistic tradition of assigning the seven lower sefirot (or emanations of God) to each of the seven weeks and days, giving 49 combinations. The details of this idea are pretty well known and covered in many places on the web. Aish HaTorah has a good explanation. The basic idea is that just as the ancient Jews spiritually improved themselves from the degradations of slavery to the holiness of a people ready to receive a direct revelation from God, we too can improve ourselves during the omer-counting period.

This is actually quite a useful activity. I have had some great conversations with my kids about real examples of the omer count of the day (one of which---pertaining to a baseball game---I recounted here). And I have had some more serious adult discussions and introspections about the different sefirot.

But there is an important aspect of all this that should not be overlooked: it has nothing to do with the original understanding of counting of the omer. No early text mentions the sefirot or anything similar. These are all later creations that were linked to the counting of the omer, and because of their cleverness, wisdom, and utility have become widely accepted.

There are many other examples of this. For example, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has a thoughtful discussion of how the omer counting reflects two different ideas of time: cyclical time and linear time. (Joni Mitchell picked up on the same theme, more or less, as I discussed here.) Like most of Rabbi Sacks' commentary, this one is really insightful. But it is an analysis that is prompted by the omer counting rather than solidly contained within the omer counting.

One final example. Pirke Avot is a volume of the mishnah with collection of wisdom sayings. Pirke Avot 6:6 states that "Torah is acquired through 48 things" and then lists 48 character traits, such as "study, attentiveness, orderly speech, an understanding heart" etc. Rabbi Noach Weinberg, the Rosh Yeshiva of Aish HaTorah, picked up on this idea and linked it to the counting of the omer. He called it the "48 Ways to Wisdom" and this set of teachings is one of the central study units of Aish HaTorah. Each of R. Weinberg's "ways to wisdom" is a contemporary version of the methods of acquiring Torah from Pirke Avot 6:6. These can be studied, one at a time, during the omer counting period. The webpage with all the information is here.

R. Weinberg developed a smart and useful set of wisdom ideas, and this is and well worth studying. But a few aspects of this stand out for our purposes here.

The first one is the discrepancy in the numbers. There are 49 days of omer counting but only 48 methods of acquiring Torah. R. Weinberg neatly solves this problem with "Organization" as the 49th way: review what you have learned, memorize it, keep it in a logical order, etc. And there is a 50th one of the 48 ways as well: "gratitude" on Shavuot itself.

But a more interesting issue is the differences between Pirke Avot's 48 ways and R. Weinberg's 48 ways. Many of these are the the same, and R. Weinberg simply elaborates on Pirke Avot. For example, the first method of acquiring Torah is "study" (or "talmud"), and R. Weinberg's first way to wisdom is "being aware every minute," which is a form of studying life itself.

But in several instances, R. Weinberg reverses the plain meaning of Pirke Avot. For example, the 14th way of acquiring Torah in Pirke Avot 6:6 is "a minimum of business activity." This method of acquiring Torah is followed by five other "minimizations": a minimum of preoccupation with worldly matters, a minimum of indulgence in worldly pleasure, a minimum of sleep, a minimum of conversation, and a minimum of laughter. These six collectively paint a stark image of a Torah scholar: minimal involvement in worldly affairs and pleasures, and instead long hours studying Torah. This is how great Torah scholars become great Torah scholars, but this is not a message that will sit well with Aish HaTorah's key target audience: non-Orthodox Jews who are thinking of becoming Orthodox. Americans are not into austerity.

Rabbi Weinberg deftly handles this problem. For example, he recasts the first method "minimizing business activity" as "Apply Business Accumen To Living." He starts off by noting briefly that we need to work to earn a living, but we should not overdo it and should also work to acquire wisdom. After this initial nod to the original text, he then notes that we can use some of the tools of business to do so. The rest of the article is a elaboration of these tools: operate efficiently, commit to goals, etc.

He does the same with the other minimizations. Instead of minimizing pleasure, we have Harnessing the Power of Sex (in the context of marriage) and The Use of Physical Pleasure. A "minimum of conversation" becomes The Art of Conversation. And a "minimum of laughter" becomes Laugh at Your Troubles.

I certainly do not have a problem with any of R. Weinberg's teachings here. They seem wise to me, and in many ways fit more comfortably with my worldview than the original Pirke Avot teachings. I am not a hedonist, but I am not ascetic either. I simply note here that several of R. Weinberg's ideas are not quite the same as the original teachings in Pirke Avot, and do not have any inherent connection with counting the omer.

This is not a criticism. R. Weinberg and R. Sacks and the kabbalists did what Jews have always done, and in fact have done it better than most Jews. They created new ideas full of wisdom and insight and linked them to existing ideas or ritual---here, the counting of the omer.

The meaning or importance of counting the omer does not lie in its original context. Best that I can figure, that original context was a way of setting a late-spring wheat offering relative to the date of an earlier early-spring barley offering. That does not carry much significance for me, a lawyer living in Los Angeles in the 21st Century. The importance lies in the layers of meaning that subsequent generations have added to this earlier ritual: the bridge between freedom from slavery celebrated at Passover and the holiness required for the giving of the Torah celebrated at Shavuot, personal growth and spiritual improvement and wisdom, and God and godliness refracted through 49 separate paired combinations of seven aspects of God and godliness, and themes of historical and cyclical time.

At the beginning of this series, I noted that many Jews have problems with relevance and authenticity. I think counting the omer shows a way around this problem.

Counting the omer seems to be inherently irrelevant: counting to 49 one day at a time. The best argument for its inherent irrelevance is that no one other than Jews does this. But the relevance of a mitzvah like this comes from the inherent importance of the ideas and themes created over time and associated with this mitzvah.

The authenticity of the ritual comes both from its relevance and its long historical tradition. People do not passively receive and understand a tradition; they also help create it. The great thinkers that have come before us have developed some pretty great ideas, and those ideas have become part of Judaism, regardless of whether they were there initially. (We also have had some terrible ideas that have been discarded along the way in the gale of creative destruction.) These all are an authentic part of Judaism.

Here is my humble addition to counting the omer. I told my kids that if we counted all 49 days without missing one, we could go out for ice cream after Shavuot. My older son stopped counting somewhere in the 30s, but I finished last night and my younger son (whose bedtime is before it is completely dark) finished this morning. We did it.

So in addition to relevance and authenticity, counting the omer---properly construed---also involves ice cream.

Chag sameach.

The Historical Confusion - Counting the Omer and Shavuot (Part 5)

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 10:20:00 +0000

In the previous post, I discussed the textual confusion about the date of the omer-counting and Shavuot. The historical record is similarly muddled. Let's start with what the Torah says about the date of the giving of the Ten Commandments and then see how early Jewish communities understood this

The Torah never states the date of the giving of the revelation at Mount Sinai. The Torah explains that the Exodus from Egypt took place on the 14th day of the first month. (Exod. 12:17-18.) After crossing the Reed Sea, the Israelites went to Elim (Exod. 15:27), then to the "wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month." (Exod. 16:1.) ("Sin" is a Hebrew word, not the English word.) After an indeterminate stay, they then went to Rephadim. (Exod 17:1.)

Exodus 19:1 then states, "In the third month after the children of Israel were gone forth out of the land of Egypt, the same day came they into the wilderness of Sinai." It is not clear what "the same day" of a month means, although it arguably means the first day of the third month (later called Sivan). They then camped before Mount Sinai for some indeterminate amount of time (Exod. 19:2). Moses speaks with God (Exod. 19:3), then speaks with the people (Exod. 19:7-8), and then speaks with God again (Exod. 19:9-11). God tells Moses to tell the people to ready and on the third day, he will come down. (Exod. 19:11.) It is not clear from the text how much time this camping, and speaking took, but in any case the people do what they are told, and God appears on the third day. (Exod. 19:16.)

The rabbinic tradition is that the revelation on Mount Sinai occurred on Shavuot, which was 50 days after the second day of Passover, or (after some arithmetic, left as an exercise for the interested reader) on the 6th of Sivan. But as noted in earlier posts, this does not directly follow from the text. Shavuot in the Torah is an agricultural holiday and (unlike Passover) is not linked at all to the revelation on Mount Sinai (0r anything else, for that matter), and in fact its date---seven weeks and one day after "the shabbat"---is also not clearly specified.

Given this, it is not surprising that there were early alternative traditions as to this date and the dating of Shavuot. The book of Jubilees was probably written in the second century BCE. It begins, "And it came to pass in the first year of the exodus of the children of Israel out of Egypt, in the third month, on the sixteenth day of the month" that God tells Moses to come up to Mount Sinai. The book later put Shavuot in the middle of the third month (and states that Isaac was born on this day): "And she [Sarah] bare a son in the third month, and in the middle of the month, at the time of which the Lord had spoken to Abraham, on the festival of the first fruits of the harvest, Isaac was born." This puts Shavuot 10 days later than the traditional rabbinic account, and thus the counting of the omer began 10 days after the traditional day, or on the 25th of the first month. Apparently, the author of Jubilees used a solar calendar where days fell on the same day of the week, and the 25th of the first month was the Sunday after the last day of Passover.

The later Christians adopted a similar understanding, putting the holiday of Pentecost at 50 days after Easter. Counting Easter Sunday as the first day, that put Pentecost on a Sunday, seven weeks later. But in the conventional account, the first Easter was the Sunday after the first day of Passover which was on Thursday night / Friday day, not the Sunday after the last day of the 7-day Passover week, as suggested by Jubilees.

The Talmud contains a debate regarding this issue. In Menachot 65a-66a, the Mishnah describes an elaborate procedure for the barley offering, and then asks why this procedure was necessary. "Because of the Boethusians who maintained that the reaping of the omer was not to take place at the conclusion of the [first day of the] festival." (The Boethusians were a sect that was related in some way to the Sadducees.) Thus, the Boethusians, like the Christians, placed the beginning of the omer counting on the Sunday after the first day of Passover, not the day after the second day of Passover.

The Gemara then picks up on this debate. One foolish old Boethusian (described that way in the Talmud) offers a silly argument for Shavuot being on a Sunday (and thus "the shabbat" being on Saturday), and R. Yochanan ben Zakkai responds by calling him a "fool" and offering a weak but possibly sarcastically made argument. The Gemara then offers four other arguments for "the shabbat" being the second day of Passover, none of which are very persuasive.

The obvious dispositive counter-argument is that if Shavuot had in fact commemorated the revelation at Mount Sinai, then it would be on whatever day the revelation at Mount Sinai occurred. If that was on the sixth of Sivan, then that's when it was. But no one in the Gemara makes this argument, presumably because the Boethusians either (1) did not believe that Shavuot commemorated the giving of the Ten Commandments, or (2) did not believe that the date was the sixth of Sivan.

In Louis Finkelstein's book "The Pharisees", he picks up on this debate. (Chapter VII.B, pp. 115-118.) He notes that "nothing could be more trivial than such a debate" and correctly explains that "[t]he Biblical verses in Leviticus which give the provisions of the law are concededly ambiguous." He then notes that the Pharisees linked Shavuot to the revelation at Sinai. They were more separated from agriculture than the Sadducees and more interested in history and the Law. The Sadducees, on the other hand, did not believe the holiday had any historical significance, and they were more attuned to the agricultural aspect of the holiday.

The historical upshot is this. Neither the fixing of the beginning of the omer counting (and equivalently, the date of Shavuot) or the link between Shavuot and the revelation at Sinai are based on the text of the Torah. Both were the subject of considerable debate in the period before the Talmud was written.

One can certainly believe that there was a reliable unbroken oral traditional going back to Sinai that established both the relevant dating and the link between Shavuot and the revelation at Sinai. But if one does not believe this, then it the holiday must have evolved in the thousand years before the Talmud was written. The holiday initially began as an agricultural festival, vaguely set at 50 days after an initial barley offering. The omer counting was either just a way of establishing this date or perhaps required actual counting. But over time, the date became fixed, the actual counting of days became required, and this agricultural holiday was linked to the revelation at Sinai.

In future posts, I will look at how Jews have created more layers of meaning attached to the counting of the omer, including most importantly the mystical sefirot.

The Textual Confusion - Counting the Omer and Shavuot (Part 4)

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Thu, 19 May 2011 18:41:00 +0000

As noted in earlier posts, the Torah itself indicates that Shavuot is an agricultural holiday commemorating the wheat harvest and involving a grain offering. However, the later rabbinic literature links the holiday to the giving of the Ten Commandments (or perhaps the whole Torah) on Mount Sinai. This claim is found nowhere in the Torah or any early literature, and the precise date of this event was disputed from an early period. Let's review the facts and then figure out what to make of them.

As noted in the second post in this series, Shavuot is 50 days after the day after "the shabbat" after the barley offering. One key question is what does "the shabbat" mean here. The answer gives us the date of Shavuot, or if we know the date of Shavuot, reasoning backwards will give us the date of "the shabbat."

"Shabbat" usually means the seventh day, sundown Friday night through sundown Saturday night. But in some contexts, it means a generic day of rest. For example, later in Leviticus 23 (the chapter mentioning the counting of the omer and Shavuot), the Torah calls Yom Kippur a "shabbat shabbaton" or a "sabbath of complete rest." (Lev. 23:32.) Similarly, Leviticus 25 discusses the sabbatical year, where no planting or sowing is permitted and the land is to rest. God commands that the land will keep a "sabbath" (Lev. 25:2) and calls it a "shabbat shabbaton".

Back in Leviticus 23, there are three holidays mentioned before the omer-counting passages. The first holiday listed is shabbat, and it is decreed to be a "shabbat shabbaton." (Lev. 23:3). The second holiday is Passover, and it is decreed to be a "mikrah kodesh" (or holy convocation) and no work is permitted. (Lev 23:7.) Importantly, even though no work is permitted, the day is note called a "shabbat." The third holiday is the seventh day after Passover, and this too is called a "mikrah kodesh," no work is permitted, and is not specifically called a "shabbat." (Lev 23:8.) Then the counting of the omer and Shavuot passages noted earlier occur (Lev 23:9 ff), and this counting is to start the day after "the shabbat". Which one?

There are three possibilities: (1) the normal Friday/Saturday shabbat, (2) Passover, and (3) the seventh day of Passover.

As a simple matter of textual interpretation, the first argument seems the strongest. After all, shabbat is the only day that is specifically called "shabbat." The second best argument is the third one. The holiday where no work is permitted that immediately precedes the omer counting command is the seventh day of Passover. The one the rabbis went with, Passover itself, is the weakest argument, at least as a purely textual matter. But of course there is a lot more to understanding the meaning of this passage than simply interpreting an ambiguous passage, and the historical tradition is quite important. I will look at that next.

Creating Authentic and Relevant Meaning

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Wed, 18 May 2011 16:11:00 +0000

In re-reading the last two posts, I realized that I never explained my basic point. Here it is.

The (simplistic) Orthodox world view is that God wrote the Torah and commanded the commandments. Our job is simply to decode the text, follow the oral law, and do the mitzvot. We might have some discretion in borderline or ambiguous cases, and there may be some complexity in the particulars of tough cases. But for the most part, the general approach is all very straightforward.

But that is not the way it actually works in practice, or the way is has worked in history. The act of not only figuring out exactly what a mitzvah entails but figuring out how it is meaningful and important involves a lot of judgment and discretion, and often a lot of creativity. We have several thousand years of people creating these idea, acts, interpretations, and discussions, and then reacting to others. It is a rich tradition.

Authenticity involves learning about this tradition, then doing mitzvot (or even sometimes changing mitzvot) in light of this tradition. That type of authenticity is equally available to Orthodox Jews and non-Orthodox Jews.

Relevancy involves an evaluation of mitzvot or texts in light of that tradition. This requires some flexibility and even playfulness with the texts, the mitzvot themselves, and even the ideas behind the texts. This is not some wacky left-wing New Age idea --- it is exactly the approach taken by the Talmud, the midrash, the kabbalists, and even contemporary Orthodox rabbis.

So far, I have claimed a lot more than I have proven. But rather than discussing all this in very general terms, I thought I would discuss it in light of a particular mitzvah, counting the omer. So stay tuned ....

Inauthenticity, Irrelevancy, and Counting the Omer: The Basics

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Wed, 11 May 2011 20:30:00 +0000

In the first post on this topic, I laid out two basic problems that liberal Judaism seems to have. Jewish practice either seems to be irrelevant (or insignificant or unimportant), in that there does not seem to be much benefit in doing it. Jewish practice also seems to be inauthentic, in that we do not take seriously the traditional claim that God literally commanded us to do these things by speaking commandments on a mountain 3,400 years ago. That leaves non-Orthodox Jews in an intellectual mess, to say the least, and the result is what we often see in non-Orthodox synagogues: low levels of observance, knowledge, practice, and most of all enthusiasm.

I claimed in the first post that there is at least one way out, and I would use an odd and under-appreciated (and under-practiced) mitzvah---counting the omer---to illustrate this. In this post, I would like to explain the basics of counting the omer and its Torah origins. I will discuss the historical evolution of both the mitzvah itself and ways of understanding its significance in later posts.

The mitzvah of counting the omer is straightforward. After reciting a short single-sentence blessing ("Blessed are you, Lord our God, who sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to count the omer"), Jews count the days and weeks, from the second day of Passover to the day before Shavuot. For example, on the second day of Passover, we recite the blessing then say "Today is the first day of the omer." The next day, "Today is the second day of the omer." On the seventh day, "Today is the seventh day of the omer, which is one week of the omer." On the 23rd day, "Today is the 23rd day of the omer, which is three weeks and two days of the omer." We continue until we reach 49 days. The next day is Shavuot.

Not very complicated. Here are a few additional rules. We should count the omer at night. Someone who forgets to count the omer at night can say it without a blessing the next day, and remains on track. But if someone forgets to count for a full day (that is, skips one day of counting completely), that person can continue to count, but without saying the blessing.

Aish HaTorah's website has a good page on the basics of this mitzvah.

This mitzvah is not complicated, and can be done each night in about 15 seconds. Non-Orthodox Jews cannot claim that the mitzvah is too difficult or complicated or onerous to do. The problem is that it seems silly.

Before jumping into the problem of significance, let's take a careful look at the historical origins of the mitzvah. And this requires a little bit of elaboration about Shavuot.

The mitzvah of counting the omer comes from the Torah. In Leviticus 23, God tells Moses to tell the children of Israel about several biblical holidays. After Shabbat and Passover (on which Jews are commanded to do no work), God then explains that when the Children of Israel enter the land of Israel, they should bring an "omer" of the first reapings to the priest as an offering. (Lev. 23:9-10.) (An omer is a unit of measure of grain.) After some instructions about this (Lev. 23:11-14), the Torah then explains the counting:

"And you shall count unto you from the day after the shabbat [ha-shabbat], from the day that you brought the sheaf of the waving; seven weeks shall there be complete; even to the day after the seventh week shall you number fifty days; and you shall present a new meal-offering to the Lord." (Lev 23:15-16).

Deuteronomy contains a similar description of the counting, and explicitly identifies this second holiday as Shavuot. After discussing Passover (Deut. 16:1-8), Deuteronomy explains:

"Seven weeks shalt thou number to yourself; from the time the sickle is first put to the standing corn you shall begin to number seven weeks. And you shall keep the feast of weeks [hag shavuot] to the Lord your God after the measure of the freewill-offering of your hand, which you shall give, according as the Lord your God blesses you." (Deut. 16:9-10.)

Just to clarify: the word "shavuot" literally means "weeks" and is related to the Hebrew worked "sheva" which means "seven." So Hag HaShavuot literally means the Festival or Holiday of Weeks, and this comes from the fact that it occurs seven weeks after, . . . well, something.

These two passages from the Torah raise (at least!) two important questions. First, what day does the counting start? Leviticus says it is on "the shabbat". Does this mean a regular Friday evening and Saturday day Shabbat, or does it mean more generally a day of rest? And if so, which day of rest? And Deuteronomy says from the time the sickle is first used, but what day exactly is this? Second, once we figure out when it starts, do people have to literally count (that is, say "one", "two", "three", etc., on each day) or is this instruction (count 49 days) just an elaborate way of setting the date of Shavuot as 49 days after the starting point. I will cover those next.

The Two Foundational Problems With Liberal Judaism (And the Solution)

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Tue, 10 May 2011 21:23:00 +0000

Liberal Judaism is stuck between two foundational intellectual problems: inauthenticity and irrelevancy. They usually manifest themselves in an attack from the right and an attack from the left. I do not think the problems are intractable. But rather than arguing in generalities, I will take a ritual that is easily subject to both of these attacks---counting the omer--- and see if we can not only defend against the attacks but show how counting the omer can be meaningful and important, regardless of its historical origins.

Here's the basic problem. Liberal Judaism generally accepts the conclusion of modern Bible scholarship that the Torah was written well after Moses and by multiple authors. In doing so, it rejects the traditional historical claim that the Torah was literally written by God. It adopts a more flexible approach to halacha and rituals, and in doing so runs into two quite serious foundational problems.

The religious right argues this type of Judaism must be inauthentic. If liberal Jews do not believe in the literal historical truth of the foundational story of Judaism---God gave the Torah to the Jews on Mt. Sinai---then nothing solid remains of Judaism. Under that view, the Torah is just a bunch of stories and laws written by ordinary people a long time ago. There is no compelling reason to do any of it. Sure, it might contain some wisdom or good ideas here and there, but Jews cannot take it too seriously if they do not believe that God told us to do these things.

The non-religious left makes the opposite argument. Jews should do certainly do the parts of Judaism that are "good" ideas, like don't steal, be nice, and give charity. But one should do them because they are good ideas, not because Judaism says to do them. And there is no reason to do the "bad" ideas, or the "neutral" ideas, or most rituals. That knocks out things like keeping kosher, fasting on Yom Kippur, and putting on tefillin. And once a Jew does the good practices because they are good, and avoids doing the other practices because there is no reason to do so, there is nothing left of Judaism. Thus, the non-religious left argues that Judaism is irrelevant.

This is the scylla and charybdis of liberal Judaism: inauthenticity and irrelevancy. And these two manifests themselves in much of liberal Judaism. I attend a Conservative synagogue, and I certainly see both of them. Many Jews my age (mid 40s) simply opt out of many traditional Jewish practices. They do not keep kosher, attend synagogue, celebrate many holidays, daven, wear tefillin, etc. The attitude of many of my friends is simply that it seems irrelevant, sort of silly, and a little strange to do these things. After all, God did not literally said to do these things, and there just does not seem to be a good reason to do so. And when they do do these things (for whatever reason), it lacks authenticity. So someone might to go synagogue (say, for a bar-mitzvah), but will not feel elevated by the davening, does not know what the Torah parsha says, and does not expect these things. They feel a little like a religious tourist, watching and even going through the motions without really participating.

The result is what we see in the Conservative movement. Synagogue membership is declining, and adults who were raised Conservative become less religious and unaffiliated with a synagogue (in lots of cases) and Orthodox (in a handful of cases).

The solution to the twin problems of inauthenticity and irrelevancy is (not surprisingly, and, in fact, definitionally) authenticity and relevancy. The issue is how to achieve these.

For liberal Judaism to be relevant, Jewish practices and beliefs must reflect divinity (however understood), elevate us spiritually, help Jews live much deeper and richer lives, and contain some insights into life that are not generally available in secular culture. And to be authentic, it must not be dependent on the historical origins of the Torah, but on how it has evolved and been interpreted for the past 3000 years, regardless of its historical origins. Jews must be able to feel fully engaged when doing these things.

I think that Judaism for the most part meets these challenges. The problem, as I see it, is that most liberal Jews lack even the most basic education about what Judaism is, and this ignorance is too often (but fortunately, not always) fostered by ineffective religious schools. The problem is not inherent in liberal Judaism itself.

I have detailed some general thoughts on these ideas in many other blog posts. But rather than arguing from a general level, I thought I would take a particular example of a simple mitzvah and show this works in practice. My example is counting the omer. In the next few blog posts, I will explain the mitzvah itself, it biblical and historical origins, and its subsequent history. In doing so, I hope to show how this seemingly odd mitzvah is highly relevant to life and how liberal Jews can authentically count the omer.

Fun With Google Stats

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 16:50:00 +0000

The online comic strip xkcd sometimes includes funny charts and graphs showing the number of google hits for variations of a phrase or sentence. For example, "x bottles of beer on the wall" shows a spike at x=100. I figured I would try a few Jewish themed ones just for fun.

Here is the chart for "When is x" where x is a Jewish holiday. (This might vary by time of year, which would explain the current Purim spike.)

"n branched menorah"

"Jewish x" for different family roles and occupations.

Egalitarian Weddings and Evolutionary Halacha

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 21:19:00 +0000

Ben Z at Mah Rabu has an interesting five-part series of posts on his egalitarian wedding (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.) In short, he took three things quite seriously: the traditional Jewish ideas and rituals of marriage, contemporary gender and sexual-orientation egalitarianism, and pragmatic reality. He then reshaped some of the rituals and ceremonies and ideas of the traditional marriage.

This is an important project for several reasons. If a contemporary and more liberal view of halacha is to evolve and emerge, some people have to take it seriously. Perhaps some of these innovations will become widely accepted, perhaps they will be rejected outright, and perhaps they will be modified or supplanted in some way. But this on-going dynamic process is itself important to keep traditions relevant and meaningful in light of serious contemporary challenges.

I am not a fan of change for change's sake. But marriage might be a good place where some change is warranted. The traditional Jewish non-egalitarian view of marriage is not the way most Jews view their marriage or live it. Ben Z. has taken an important and thoughtful step here, and it is worth reading.

Problems With Orthodox Attitudes Towards Tradition and Authority

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 18:49:00 +0000

Orthodox thinking is often characterized by a strong reliance on the authority of tradition. In contrast, more liberal Jewish thinking is often characterized by undervaluing the importance of tradition. Both can be problematic. But two posts at Cross-Currents on two very different issues show, albeit in an unintentional way, the problem with the Orthodox world view.

In the first post, Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein discusses a recent denunciation of Kupat Ha'ir's solicitation methods as theft. I had never heard of Kupat Ha'ir or its solicitation methods, and checking out the links reveals that this organization apparently solicits funds for charitable purposes, but in doing so suggests or claims in some way that giving such tzedakah will help the donor solve various personal problems: obtain a spouse, recover from illness, earn more money, etc. Apparently many devout Orthodox Jews have given money with this expectation and then were bitterly disappointed when the spouse or recovery or financial security never showed up.

My initial reaction was to roll my eyes, and note that this is sad, and somewhat pathetic, on several levels. I realized that this type of problem is simply non-existent among the the Conservative and Reform Jews that I know. (To be fair, it is also apparently non-existent among the Orthodox Jews that I know, but it is a problem in some segments of the Orthodox world.) I wondered why. Reform and Conservative Jews are not smarter or less foolish, on average, than Orthodox Jews. They may have less of an absolute faith that God will solve their problems if they pray or give tzedakah, but why do these beliefs differ.

I think the answer, or at least part of the answer, is that more liberal Jews, embracing modern skepticism, simply tend not to believe such supernatural claims. The reaction of virtually every Jew that I know to such a solicitation would range from amusement to anger, but no one would think that giving such tzedakah would be effective. But apparently there is at least a segment of the Orthodox world where this is not true. Rabbi Adlerstein bluntly notes, "I can think of few regular, familiar features of Orthodox life that bring more disgrace to Torah life than the KH brochures and ads. They proclaim to the public that Torah is the province of worshippers of miracle-rabbis." I think the problem, simply put, is that many Orthodox Jews tend to be less skeptical, and tend not to critically examine claims put forth by established and respected rabbis or institutions.

The same problems revealed itself in a very different way in the second Cross-Currents post entitled I Thought The Greeks Lost by R. Dovid Landesman. The article is about the conflict between Greek (or more generally Western) values and Jewish values, including science. R. Landesman notes that science, although not strictly part of traditional Jewish learning, is built on observation, anyone could do it with enough time and effort, and is not antithetical to Judaism. He explains, "These fields of knowledge do not depend upon Divinely revealed wisdom accessible only through Torah; they are a byproduct of the Divine gifts of intelligence and creativity with which all mankind was imbued and which everyone can develop to the extent that his potential allows." He argues for teaching subjects of general knowledge.

All that is fine as far as it goes. But it reflects a much deeper problem. The scientific approach is emphatically not based on a respect for tradition. To the contrary, it is based on doubting and questioning the received wisdom at every turn. This approach to thinking cannot be easily reconciled with the Orthodox approach.

I am not sure Rabbi Landesman realizes where this path will take him. Students (and adults for that matter) who approach scientific problems using the scientific method will then start to apply it to traditional Jewish teachings. They will not accept on faith that God exists, that the Torah is a divine book, that the oral law did not evolve, or that a rabbi should be listened to and obeyed when he says something doubtful.

There are two approaches the Orthodox community can take here: they can separate themselves from Western ideas or they can try to balance between Western ideas and tradition. The former might work to some degree, but it tends to be repressive, xenophobic, and ultimately separates such communities from the real benefits of things like science, technology, literature, music, and even plain old critical thinking and skepticism itself. The latter approach probably makes more sense, but it runs the risk of undermining traditional Judaism.

To take perhaps the clearest example, when critical principles are used to examine the Torah itself, a remarkable consensus has emerged over the past 150 years or so among scholars of all faiths and of no faith that the Torah is a composite documents written well after Moses's time. There is a huge debate about exactly when and where and how these documents were written, but there is unanimity in the basic rejection of a unified document written by Moses. Nothing that the Orthodox world has come up with the in past 150 years has even dented this consensus, and in fact the paucity and in some cases dishonesty of the Orthodox response to Bible criticism has underscored the real problems with a traditional understanding of the Torah.

My claim is that you cannot teach students to use critical scientific methods to learn about biology and physics and history, noting how powerful such methods are for discovering truth and weeding out falsehood, but tell them not to use them the same methods towards Judaism itself.

Incidentally, the solution to this problem by more liberal forms of Judaism is not without its costs. By embracing science and skepticism, Reform and Conservative Judaism has knocked down some outdated or incorrect or problematic beliefs in Judaism. But it has not been as successful in building Judaism, either in some new form or as a modified form of traditional Judaism. But all that might be part of an on-going evolving process.

In short, the problem is that the Western, skeptical, scientific worldview that doubts tradition and authority and the traditional Jewish worldview that respects religious tradition and authority are fundamentally at odds. This problem can be smoothed over in some areas, but it ultimately cannot be ignored.

Old Haloscan Comments Imported!

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 23:37:00 +0000

I have now imported all of the old Haloscan comments.

About a year ago, our old commenting system Haloscan changed over to a paying system. We switched to Disqus (which is a much better commenting system in any case). I was able to download all the old comments from Haloscan to my hard drive, but was unable to upload them to Disqus. Disqus has now modified and fixed its importing system, and after a little programming, I was able to convert the old Haloscan comments into an XML format that Disqus recognized.

The bottom line is that all of the old comments to this blog (about 1000 of them) have now been successfully uploaded.

Saturday Morning Conservative and Reform Shabbat Services

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 17:56:00 +0000

Our Conservative synagogue has one critical problem with its Saturday morning shabbat services. I know other people, synagogues, and minyanim have the same problem, and I was wondering how others have addressed this.

The services themselves are fine. We have a regular service that is fairly well-attended. The rabbis are good, the cantor, choir, and music are good. The sermons involve some audience discussion, which is interesting and works out well. We also have a more traditional library minyan that meets twice a month, and that service is also fine. It is well-run by competent lay leaders.

So what's the problem? Younger people do not attend services. Families are virtually absent, and people under 50 are virtually absent. The people who do attend tend to be older, and often much older. Virtually everyone who attends the regular service and library minyan is over 50, and the median age is considerably higher than that.

I am certainly not objecting to older people attending services; to the contrary, I celebrate that. But I am concerned about younger people not attending. The religious school has been running a "family shabbat service" for families with younger kids, and—despite the size of the religious school and the day school—virtually no one attends.

The result is problematic for several obvious reasons. We lack a community; the families do not regularly see each other at synagogue. We are not teaching our kids by example that services are important. We are not teaching our kids the basic skills necessary to be a competent Jewish adult. And we are missing out on shabbat services.

The problem is not the synagogue itself. To the contrary: if any synagogue could be expected to have services where younger people show up, it is ours. We have extremely intelligent, articulate, and well-liked rabbis. The synagogue is doing fine financially; we could afford anything reasonable that would help solve the problem. The synagogue is large, and we have both a day school and a religious school. But neither the parents there nor the kids show up at services.

The problem was even more serious several years ago at my father's (then) Reform synagogue. The synagogue did not have a Saturday morning service if there was not a bar- or bat-mitzvah. My dad showed up on Saturday morning all the doors were locked. (He has since switched synagogues.)

I see several causes of the problem, and several potential solutions.

1. Adults Do Not Think The Service Is Meaningful Or Interesting. This is the most basic problem. I think most adults in their 30s and 40s at suburban Conservative and Reform synagogues have a negative view of prayer itself. Bluntly put, they view it as all about sucking up to a supernatural Being that they do not believe in. Given that, it is silly and meaningless, and they just do not want to go.

The solution to this problem is to help parents reformulate their understanding of prayer and the Saturday morning Shabbat service. There's much to be said about the details of this, including whether it is even possible. And it obviously takes a time commitment. But this is basically an intellectual or educational problem. If adults learn about prayer and the Shabbat service and think differently about them, they might be more inclined to show up. (Or at least not to not show up because they think it is not meaningful or interesting.)

This was actually my primary problem for years. I did not attend services. I had belonged to our synagogue for several years, and someone asked me something about the shabbat service. I had no idea of the answer; I had never attended. But in the last year or two, I have been attending sporadically, but more regularly.

BTW, there is a new book called "Making Prayer Real" by Rabbi Mike Comins. I'm about halfway through it, and he (and about 50 other rabbis and educators) address some of these issues. I intend to blog about it at some point.

2. Adults Do Not Know The Details Of The Service. It is quite frustrating to most adults not to be able to follow the service and read the Hebrew. It is even more frustrating to get lost and not even know what page everyone else is on. This is especially true for people who competent or even excellent in all the activities in the rest of their lives. A Shabbat service can be a long experience of incompetence and frustration.

The solution here is to teach adults the service. There are lots of ways to do this: a teaching service, a class, podcasts. But again, it takes a time commitment and willingness or interest in doing this.

By the way, this problem was absent for people who grew up in a more traditional background and then wanted a traditional but non-Orthodox shul. The Conservative movement rode this demographic wave up in the 1940s - 1970s. During that time, Conservative synagogues could assume that most members were knowledgeable and competent with regard to practices like a Shabbat service. But most Conservative and Reform synagogues today have to assume the opposite, at least with regard to most younger members. And them means today's Conservative synagogues must be educating synagogues.

3. Kids Sports. They are on Saturday. Not much can be said here. But it is worth noting that there are some Saturdays when the kids don't play, or play later or earlier than the service.

4. Younger Kids and Child Care. Younger kids have a hard time sitting through a long service, especially one with lots of Hebrew. Most synagogues where parents with younger kids regularly attend services offer some sort of child care. (I blogged about this problem before.) I spoke to my rabbi about this several years ago, and he told me that the synagogue used to offer child care but no one showed up. He told me that if I let him know ahead of time that I was coming to services, he could arrange child care. But the problem is not that I personally need a babysitter. It is a collective action problem. I would like lots of people to want to come to services, and if child care helps everyone (not just me) then it should be worth doing.

This is actually a serious problem. I went to the library minyan at our synagogue yesterday, and last might my wife asked if I planned to regularly leave the rest of the family on Shabbat and go to services. She has a good point. It does seem odd that a shabbat service should be the thing that divides a family on shabbat.

* * *

Some hopeful signs.

There are st least four hopeful signs that I have seen for this problem.

First, there are the independent minyanim. In short, these minyamin are mostly in urban areas and mostly attract younger single people (20s and 30s). They are vibrant and dynamic, and full of Jews who take prayer seriously and are knowledgeable and competent. (Ben Z. over at Mah Rabu is one of the leaders of this movement; his latest post is here.) These members often get married, get older, and move to the suburbs. Established suburban congregations should welcome them and their energy; they could help revitalize the synagogue service for younger people.

Second, Camp Ramah. Some appreciable number of (mostly) Conservative kids to go Camp Ramah and come back liking shabbat services. This proves that the problem is not intractable. If some of Camp Ramah's energy and enthusiasm could work its way into the regular shabbat service, it would also help.

Third, Modern Orthodox synagogues. An appreciable number of Conservative Jews who want a active shabbat-observant community find it lacking in Conservative synagogues and end up at Modern Orthodox synagogues. They are not Orthodox in their beliefs. They are often egalitarian, accepting of gays and lesbians, and not completely shomer-mitzvot. But they are willing to tolerate joining an Orthodox synagogue so that they can have the benefits of shabbat. But if Conservative synagogues would offer this, they would feel more at home there.

Fourth, churches. Many churches have families who regularly attend on Sundays. If they can do it, we can too.

* * *

In short, I think this is a huge collective action problem. Adults in their 30s and 40s with young kids do not attend services for lots of reasons, including the fact that other adults in their 30s and 40s with young kids do not attend. If lots of people would start attending at the same time, they might just find that they would like to attend because lots of other people are attending. The question is how to jumpstart this.

Comments and suggestions are obviously welcome, and I would be especially interested in hearing from people who do not attend shabbat services about why they do not attend.

Building a Sukkah - Some Pics

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 07:01:00 +0000

My prior post (from two years ago) on building a sukkah did not have pictures. I have now remedied that problem.

The most important thing about a sukkah is that it be structurally sound. You don't want it falling on guests. As noted in the earlier post, I accomplished this by bolting 2x4s together using metal L-straps to prevent racking. Here is what my basic corner joint looks like:

Note that the two 2x4s sandwich the L-strap between them, and each joint has 3 bolts. Each bolt protrudes by 1/2". So since standard 2x4s are actually 1.5" x 3.5" (don't ask), there are two "short bolts" (at the top and the left) that are 2" long (1.5" for the board, plus an extra 1/2"). There is also a longer bolt in the center that is 3.5" long (it goes through both 1.5" boards, plus an extra 1/2").

Also, each bolt has two washers.

Here is a "double" joint in the middle of the sukkah.

This is a double version of the first joint. There are actually two horizontal boards that end in the middle of the vertical board. (You can't see it from this side.) Note that in the first picture, the holes were centered on the vertical board, but in this picture, the holes are offset. I needed room for two L-straps. This takes some careful measuring. As noted in the previous post, I carefully made a template and then used it to mark all the holes.

Finally, here is a three-way corner joint. This joins three orthogonal boards.

A few things to note.

Note the marking on the right side mostly covered by the L-strap. It says "L3-R4 Down" This indicates that this is the lower board that goes from L3 (the third vertical post on the left side) to R4 (the fourth vertical post on the right side). (I have an extra vertical board on the right side to accommodate the door.) Uniquely marking each board is critically important.

There are two sets of three holes here. I had to make sure to offset them so that the bolts did not bump into each other. So I raised the board on the right by 1.5" by simply placing an small offcut from a 2x4 under the template while I marked the holes. I did that with all boards going that direction.

The joint on the left is the same as in the first picture. But the joint on the right used bolts of different lengths because two of them are going through the long size of the 2x4. So the 3 bolts are 4", 5.5", and 2". (I leave the formal proof as an exercise for the interested reader.)

* * *

One final structural point. I have two doors in the sukkah. (The sukkah is located at the corner of my house, and it blocks access from driveway to the backyard. The two doors give us that access. Here is the small door on the left, and part of the larger door on the right. Not that the doors do not have a bottom board (it is easy to trip over them). To give that side support, each side with a door has a complete square of 2x4s (top, bottom, left, and right) next to the door opening.

Here's the view from the front.

And here's the view from the inside (with a special cameo appearance by Dad, another Jew with another couple of opinions).

Note that the height of the vertical boards (7') is calibrated to the 6' height of the plastic-bamboo walls, plus 7" for the two 2x4s, plus all little extra for some space at the top and bottom. 2x4s commonly come in 8' lengths, but if I left them at 8', the extra space would raise an issue as to whether the wall is a complete wall. Also, I could attach the top bolts on a 7' vertical board without standing on a ladder, but not on an 8' board.

Finally, although none of the pictures show it, I marked the top-front-left corner of each board by making a slight bevel on top-front and top-left edges next to the top-front-left corner. So not only is each board uniquely placed, but it is easy to orient each board. I simply orient the board so that the notches are on the top-left and top-front edges.

It took a lot of careful planning and drawing to think through all the joints, to count up all the nuts and washers and bolts (in various sizes) that I needed, and to make templates, notch the boards, drill the holes, and square up each side. But it was worth it. Three years ago, two friends and I designed and built our sukkahs using the same design methods, but with slight variants in size and orientation. It was a lot of time and a lot of work. But we ended up with sukkahs that look good, are very strong, and can easily be stored. If a part gets lost or broken or damages, we can easily replace the part at the local hardware store. And most importantly, the sukkah can easily be put up and taken down; we built each sukkah in just 2 - 2.5 hours this year.

Chag sameach.

The Perils of Bible Translation

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 16:58:00 +0000

The Velveteen Rabbi has a detailed summary and review of a talk by Dr. Joel Hoffman on The Perils of Bible Translation. Some of the examples are funny and thought-provoking. It's worth reading.

Is the Historical Truth of Torah Important?

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 16:59:00 +0000

Our worldview influences what questions we ask and what categories we place things in. For many Jews, the debate over whether the traditional account of the historical origins of the Torah is accurate is determinative of their religious beliefs. If the traditional account is correct, they are Orthodox. If not, they are not religious at all. I think this entire approach is wrong.

This emphasis on historical truth is misplaced. Take (as an odd but illustrative example) the story of the Three Little Pigs, an obvious myth with a simple but important lesson: take the time to do things right. The lesson is good and quite valuable, and the story is fun and playful. Suppose someone heard the story and then argued that it was false because wolves do not have the lung capacity to blow down houses, even houses made out of straw or sticks. Moreover, pigs lack opposable thumbs and cannot construct even the most rudimentary structures. I think most of us would think that the person missed the point of the story.

But then suppose someone else replied that the story was in fact true and offered a detailed explanation of how pigs could construct a very rudimentary house and how a wolf could blow it down given the right wind conditions. The first person disagreed, and they started arguing about the wind force that wolf lung could exert

I think most of us would respond to the debate by noting that it is simply absurd. If we had to, we would side with the first person and concede that the story is not an account of an actual event, but we probably would not want to go there. The purpose of the story is to teach a valuable lesson, not to recount a historical event. That is, given our worldview, we place the story in a certain category, and this determines what questions we ask about it. And its historical truth is not a question we ask.

So why do we typically not take this approach with the Torah? I think the answer is largely historical

In Talmudic times people were much more playful with the text. They created midrashim with clever life lessons. These are clearly false (that is, they do not describe historical events) but they make quite valuable points. And frankly, they are fun. Chazal never offered proofs of God's existence or systematic theology. Instead, they simply offered a way of life: love God, do mitzvot. They certainly believed in the historical accuracy of the text, but there was no other credible option. And in the ultimate sense, it is not clear how central this was to their entire worldview.

When the medieval period rolled around, the quest for certainty was in full swing. We got detailed proofs, and ikkarim, and systematic theology. And since this was a pre-scientific age, these claims had wide scope; they covered scientific assertions and facts.

Then when the Enlightenment and real science rolled around, we started asking scientific questions about the contents of the text. Is the account of Creation correct? Is the account of the Flood correct? Did the Exodus occur? And then we started asking scientific questions about the text itself: who wrote it? when? On all of these account, the traditional explanations took a beating. Without jumping into the merits of these debates, for these purposes, it is sufficient to note that the traditional explanations became more and more untenable and most Jews rejected them.

But some did not, and they defended the traditional accounts. In doing so, many painted themselves into a corner. They adopted a scientific worldview, staked their entire religious belief system on the accuracy of some scientific questions, and then resorted to strained arguments (to put it mildly) to defend their positions. So we have all sorts of absurdities, like rabbis with no scientific training arguing the details of evolution against scientists. Not just one scientist at the other podium, but the entire scientific establishment.

One effect of this debate is to keep the issue of the historical truth of the traditional account of the text in the foreground. And this presents an unattractive choice: take Judaism or modern science, but not both.

This problem can be seen in XGH's latest post (and many other posts, for that matter). XGH is caught squarely in this dilemma. He has (another) interesting discussion entitled "A Non Fundamentalist Conception of TMS." One key sentence caught my attention: I do believe that religious language and mythology has value, whether the myth is true or not.

This sentence reflects the importance of the historical truth of the account in his worldview. Note that one could say, "Myths have value, whether or X" and plug in a lot of Xs: (e.g., whether or not the protagonist is left-handed, whether or not the story teller is standing or sitting when he tells the myth, etc.) We would consider most of these to be absurd statements --- what does being left-handed have to do with the value of the story? They are technically true, but we never would think of characterizing the issue this way.

I think the same is true here. The value of the Torah lies in its value, not in its historical truth. And (for lots of reasons explained elsewhere in this blog), I think the Torah is quite valuable.

Jewish Particularity: Can't We Live A Meaningfule Life Without Judaism?

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Tue, 04 May 2010 16:52:00 +0000

Dan left a good comment to the last post. He agreed with my thoughts on God, but argued that this general idea of God has no relationship to Judaism in particular. In other words, one can simply lead a good life in all respects and blow of Judaism completely. This is a serious and important challenge, but ultimately one that I think comes up short. And Andre Ethier and the Dodger game on Sunday helps illustrate why.

Judaism is a derech or path or way of life. It is a way of experiencing the good things in life. It helps focus us and teach us, and does so as part of a community. Of course, there are many such paths, some better than others. But being on some specific path is necessary. We will lead a less meaningful and fulfilled life if we try to simply have general thoughts, or even general experiences, in the abstract.

For example, I can sometimes get some sense of the Infinite or God or Goodness. (For me, it usually involve both nature and bigness - think Yosemite or the ocean or space). I can act ethically, love and be loved, and experience beauty. But a Jewish path helps me experience these things better. For example, I know that freedom is a good thing, but having a discussion with family and friends about freedom during a seder, and realizing that this experience is being repeated (with lots of variations) all over the world, and has been done throughout Jewish history, and will be done into the future makes it a lot more special. Davening sometimes brings me closer to the things I find important. Hearing a clever d'var Torah sometimes brings an insight that I would not have thought about.

Here's a real example from last night. We counted the omer, and my kids and I (briefly -- school night, ya know) discussed the sefirot. Last night was the malchut (nobility) of hod (humility). In addition to the English rhyme (the Hebrew rhyme came the night before, with the yesod of hod), we talked about how being humble is also part of being noble. And we ended with with a great example.

We had gone to the Dodger game the day before, and I had read the kids the wrap up of the game in the paper. My 6-year-old explained that Andre Ethier (who had hit 2 home runs) mentioned that an important reason they won was the Dodger pitching. (Kuroda pitched 8 innings and gave up only 1 run.) My son noted that Ethier was being humble by talking about the pitching and not his own (amazing) hitting. And that humility made him more noble or admirable.

Now of course there are lots of ways of thinking about such virtues. Classical Christianity lists pride as one of the seven deadly sins and humility as one of the seven virtues. Other religions and philosophies and world views no doubt also discuss such things. But Judaism provides one particular way of doing this. And our tradition is to take seven aspects of God, generate 49 2x2 combinations, and think of them during 49 days between the second night of Passover and Shavuot.

One could throw out Judaism completely and simply acknowledge as an intellectual matter that humility is a virtue. The problem is that there is much more to life than asserting intellectual propositions, and Judaism also offers the rest. It offers particular ways to think about the idea, and particular times to think about it, and particular rituals associated with it, and particular teaching opportunities regarding it, and a community of people also interested in this.

We use this approach with regard to other abstract ideas. As a general matter, it is good that people should have a partner that they love. But I do not simply acknowledge the general idea. I also love my wife in particular. In doing so, I am not making a general claim about my wife (everyone should love my wife) or about me (I should love everyone's wife.) My relationship with my wife is one particular manifestation of the general idea, and another person's relationship with his or her partner is another.

But the bottom line is that Judaism, at least if done well, helps us get the most out of life.

A Relationship With God? Yeah, Right.

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Mon, 03 May 2010 19:06:00 +0000

XGH asks a good question: how can someone have a non-delusional relationship with God. If God does not exist, no relationship is possible. And if God does exists, how can one have a relationship if God does not directly respond. XGH analogizes this to someone who writes letters to Queen Elizabeth and Britney Spears and claims to have a relationship with them. XGH dismisses the conventional response -- God answers me in cryptic ways -- as delusional and indistinguishable (in theory) from a terrorist's claim that God told him to kill innocent people. In the comment section, Evanston Jew proposes two responses (walking and talking with God, and inwardness), but acknowledges the difficulties. He notes -- correctly and insightfully -- that the problem stems from Maimonidean rationalism.

I want to pick up on EJ's last point and the offer a possible solution to XGH's question. As I have argued before, I do not think the Enlightenment has been kind to traditional Judaism. I am a huge fan of the Enlightenment. Its philosophical progeny -- strong forms of rationalism, empiricism, and skepticism -- have done a tremendous amount to advance science, eliminate false ideas, advance true one, and improve the world. These philosophical ideas are useful in explaining many things, but are not useful as the exclusive approaches for explaining or understanding Judaism.

Traditional Judaism claims that God spoke at Sinai and entered into an eternal covenant with the Jews. A modern approach to Judaism tries to analyze this claim scientifically, looking for evidence of all kinds to support or refute this claim: archaeological, textual, historical, etc. The result seems to be a lot of foolishness on one side and a sad abandonment of Judaism on the other. At one extreme, we have rabbis with no scientific training arguing against biologists and paleontologists about DNA and the fossil record. And at the other extreme, we have ordinary Jews concluding that "Judaism is false" and either leaving it completely or treating it as someone quaint and childish, but nothing that has anything of serious value to a sensible adult.

I think both extremes suffer from trying to fit Judaism into a modern scientific framework. This approach gained traction after Maimonides and continued through the 19th or 20th century. Maimonides helped bring Judaism into the medieval period, but it may be time to move forward.

One better approach to Judaism (as I have argued here, here and here) is to ignore the scientific questions about God and focus instead on our own experiences of God. That is, we don't ask whether God exists or what God's properties are, but instead ask how we experience God (regardless of whether God exists or not). God is simply the name we give to the things we experience as Godly. There's a lot to say about this, as discussed in the posts quoted above.

Under this approach, a relationship with God is then like a relationship with any abstract thing. There are all sorts of things that "exist" but do not have a corresponding physical entity. For example, goodness, the American spirit, and mathematics all exist in the sense that the terms meaningfully describe things, but the things they describe are not actual objects. So we can have a relationship with God the same way we can have a relationship with goodness, the American spirit, and mathematics, but not the same way we have a relationship with Queen Elizabeth and Britny Spears.

We have a relationship with goodness by doing good and thinking about goodness. We have a relationship with the American spirit by feeling proud to be an American, knowing something about America and American history, and observing American holidays and rituals. And we have a relationship with mathematics by knowing, doing, and appreciating mathematics. As we describe these relationships, we necessarily are speaking subjectively. The mathematician would simply be speaking of his own inner feelings towards mathematical, and those feelings are real. It would be absurd to argue that there is no physical entity that corresponds to the work "mathematics" and thus the mathematician is delusional.

Along the same lines, we have a relationship with God by knowing about God and doing Godly things. There are many ways to do this, including prayer. One could imagine talking to goodness, or America, or mathematics to further or deepen that relationship. We do not typically do this, but that is largely out of custom, and we sometimes do (sort of) speak to these things. People commonly say "My goodness." We pledge allegiance to the flag as a symbol of America. We are not addressing the flag directly (we don't say "I pledge allegiance to you") but we are talking to nobody in particular about pledging allegiance to the flag. So it is neither inconceivable nor delusional to speak directly to the goodness, America, or mathematics without making some strong ontological claim. I do not see prayer as any different.

None of this denies or affirms the traditional understanding of God as a real entity that responds to prayer. This approach simply goes in a different direction.

Wagner Probably Didn't Count the Omer

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 10:52:00 +0000

It was an odd experience last night—returning home after seeing Gotterdammerung and then counting the omer. The juxtaposition heightened the difference between Judaism's and Wagner's weltanschauung (the word is wonderfully appropriate here.) But first, some background about Wagner, the Los Angeles Opera, and me and my (present in real life but largely blogo-absent) co-blogger Steve.

Two characteristics stand out about Wagner. He was a exceptionally brilliant composer and an exceptionally awful person. He is not merely another really good composer among many. He revolutionized music, especially opera (although he would not have used that word), in the 19th Century. (Many others far more knowledgeable than I am have written much about this; google him for details.)

At the same time, Wagner was reprehensible in pretty much every way. He was petty, vindictive, mean, a perpetual moocher, and an anti-Semite. His essay "Jewishness in Music" and later essays were exceptionally spiteful. And Hitler loved Wagner's music. Other than Wagner's musical genius—and genius is the right word—Wagner pretty much had nothing going for him.

There are some serious issues about whether Jews should listen to Wagner, given his anti-Semitism and the Nazi's love for his music. (The last piece the Berlin Philharmonic played in April 1945 was, appropriately, the final scene from Gotterdammerung.) I have never been particularly bothered by this. I never forget who Wagner was, but I separate the man from his music.

Wagner's magnum opus is a four-opera, 16 1/2 hour "Ring cycle", based on the Niebelung myths, the same Norse and Germanic myths that Tolkien used (among other things) for Lord of the Rings. The basic story involves magic gold in the Rhine, protected by mermaid-like Rhine-maidens. The gold can be made into a magic ring that will allow its owner to rule the world, but only a person who renounces love can take the gold. Alberich, an ugly dwarf, figures no one will love him anyway, and so he renounces love, takes the gold, and later makes the magic ring. Wotan the chief God wants the ring, as does a bunch of other people. The story rolls on through a series of adventures and misadventures, loves gained and lost, scheming, fraud, fighting, killing, betrayal, incest, and the obligatory slaying of a dragon (who actually used to be a giant - long story, don't ask). We have magic swords, magic apples, magic helmets, magic fire, and magic potions. The upshot: after far too much abuse of power, almost all the heroes, heroines, and Gods die, Valhalla (home of the Gods) burns down, the ring gets washed back into the Rhine, and (as Anna Russell put it) we are right back where we started 16 hours earlier.

Well almost. We've actually moved in a circle in one dimension but forward in another. The era of the gods is over, and the era of man has begun. Like Joni Mitchell, Wagner had a spiral view of time, not merely a cyclical one. In fact, "logo" of the Los Angeles Opera's production of this ring cycle is a spiral.

More background. In 1979, I took a great 9th grade history class, along with my co-blogger Steve (yes, we've known each other that long) and a bunch of other friends. The class covered the Renaissance to the present, and our teacher emphasized viewing the political and social history through a humanities lens; we studied the art, music, and architecture of the different periods and saw how it influenced—and was influenced by—the political and social history. It was a spectacular class, and made it clear that serious study of serious subjects could not be limited by a class curriculum. Everything was connected in very complex ways. In many ways, it was my first serious adult intellectual thinking.

Steve and I and a few other friends did a multimedia two-screen slide show (back before powerpoint) on Wagner, at the suggestion of the teacher. This was a very clever suggestion to several bright Jewish suburban kids: tell us about the brilliant composer and horrible anti-Semite. He knew exactly what he was doing (he is Jewish and designed a Holocaust curriculum, and has since trained countless teachers in how to teach the Holocaust.)

We were interested in seeing the Ring back then, but Los Angeles had no opera company. Well, the Los Angeles Opera opened in the 1980s, and last season they started their first Ring cycle. My wife categorically refused to see another Wagner opera after we endured a bizarre minimalist production of Parsifal, and so Steve and I got tickets. We saw the first two operas last season, and the last two this season. We saw the final opera, Gotterdammerung, yesterday. And we were fortunate enough to be joined—after all these years—by our 9th grade history teacher, now a retired principal and (as always) an opera fan. It took us 30 years to complete our Wagner project, but we did it.

By the way, the Los Angeles Opera has a few more shows of Gotterdammerung, and then is re-running the entire cycle three times in late May and June. If you are in Los Angeles (or anywhere close), I would highly recommend seeing this production. And Ring Festival LA is a loose collection of all sorts of events pertaining to the Ring cycle, and it includes several discussions and other programs exploring Wagner and his anti-Semitism.

Which gets us, of course, to counting the omer.

In the Ring cycle, Wagner pits love and power as irreconcilable opposites. Alberich must renounce love to get the ring and its power. The desire for the ring caused the giant Fafner to kill his brother Fasolt. Several other characters have their love cut short by power, or their power cut short by love.

This is a pretty dark view of the world. You can choose love, but then get clobbered the next time some powerful person rolls around. Or you can choose power, but you will have a miserable and loveless life.

Love and power are sometimes in tension. However, Judaism gives us a much brighter picture, as we are reminded when we count the omer. (I meant to post on counting the omer but never got the chance. I will try next year. Google it for details.)

All the seven "lower" sefirot are emanations of God (or goodness, if that is easier to think about), and we are reminded of each of the 49 combinations as we count the omer for 49 days. The first two sefirot are chesed (loving kindness) and gevurah (strength or power). And the first thing Judaism (but not Wagner) teaches about love and power is that they are aspects of the divine, and thus cannot be irreconcilably opposed. We can think of them as opposites in tension, but the resolution of that tension is itself the third sefirot, tiferet (beauty or harmony). That is, harmonizing these two is itself good and divine. Or we can think of them as complementary aspects of the divine. So, for example, a parent might be strict, but do so out of kindness. Or might be kind, by do so out of strength. The result is a much more optimistic—and I might add, realistic—view of both love and power.

Wagner's music is great. Go see the Ring. But when you think about love and power, remember the omer, not the gold in the Rhine.

Matzah and the "N-word"

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 18:56:00 +0000

The Passover seder is post-modern avant garde performance art. We not only tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt, but each of is required to regard ourselves as if we went out of Egypt. So the performance is by us, for us, and about us. All lines between the subject of the story, the performers, and the audience are erased. The whole purpose of the story is to cause people to ask questions and engage with the story, not merely to entertain and amuse. And we have innovative and unconventional props used in innovative and unconventional ways. "You wanna know how bitter slavery was? Eat this!"

The central object of the seder is matzah. And the symbolism of matzah makes an odd transition during the seder, and one that, in a strange way, reminds me of a changing symbol of oppression for American blacks: the word "nigger".

At the beginning of the seder, after Yachatz (the breaking of the middle matzah), we point to the matzah and say "ha lachma anya - this is the bread of affliction or poverty." This is the symbolism of Matzah at the beginning of the seder.

But at the end of the Maggid (or storytelling) section, the matzah symbolism takes a turn. We say "This is the bread that our ancestors ate when they left Egypt in haste." It is now the bread of freedom, the bread we ate when we left Egypt. The symbolism of the matzah changed from oppression to freedom during the seder itself.

Why? The answer, I think, lies in what came between these two mentions of matzah: freedom. One was before Maggid and the other after. And once we complete the Maggid section, we are free. Only a free people can change the meanings of their symbols—the signified of their signifiers—especially symbols of oppression. But we do.

Perhaps the closest analog is the use of the word "nigger" in American life. This was the worst term of oppression for American blacks during much of the 19th and 20th century. But towards the end of the 20th century, a strange thing happened. Some American blacks staring calling each other "nigger" in a lighthearted or joking or casual way. When I first heard this, I was startled and surprised. And that was exactly the point. They were reclaiming this word from their racist oppressors, in effect saying "I am free. I own this word, and I can use it anyway I want. I am not afraid of it, and you cannot use it to oppress me."

Yup. That sort of in-your-face up-yours attitude towards oppression is exactly what Passover is about.

Innovative Passover Seder Ideas

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:29:00 +0000

Do you have any innovative Passover seder ideas? If you have tried something interesting, please share it here.

Passover is a great holiday. But unfortunately too many people turn this into a boring ritual by simply take turns reading paragraphs in the haggadah. Fortunately, in recent years, numerous new haggadot have been published with all sorts of interesting commentary and ideas. Also, many books have been published on how to have interesting and meaningful seders. Hopefully, the era of the boring seder is drawing to a close.

Here are a few things that we have done in recent years.

1. Notice. I realized that one important part of having an interesting seder is to have it be more participatory, and this requires that people come to the seder with that expectation and perhaps with a little preparation. To help do this, I sent e-mails to the guests ahead of time explaining a little bit about the seder and asking them to bring something interesting to do or read or share. Many Jews who have been doing seders for years have only the most rudimentary understanding of the holiday and the seder. In some years, I assigned parts of the seder to different guests, and in other years I have left it more open-ended: come with something. And over the years, the guests have come with all sorts of interesting things (and some less interesting things).

2. Questions. I usually start the seder by explaining that in our house, we have a strict seder rule: no interesting questions are permitted. Anyone who violates this rule and asks an interesting question will be punished and have a candied nut (or raisin, or passover candy, or whatever other goody you have) thrown at them. This sets a fun tone for the evening, and usually produces some giggles. (And some good questions.)

3. Munchies. Most of the food in the first part of the seder comes right at the end: matzah, maror, Hillel sandwich. But the blessing over the karpas comes right at the beginning. At that point, it is open season on veggies. There's no need to be "symbolic" and limit yourself to a tiny bit of parsley. Eat! Prepare some veggie platters with (appropriate Pesach) dips and bring them out once you say the karpas blessing. Guests can eat carrots and celery and jicama and bell peppers and anything else covered by the blessing during the rest of the first part of the seder. This keeps people interested and comfortable.

4. Tell the story wrong. I would briefly tell the story of the exodus from Egypt during the maggid section, but first tell the kids that I was not too sure of all the details. Then I would tell the story with some clear errors. (E.g., "Abraham's mother put him in a basket.") They kids would yell "NO!!!" and correct me, and I would then act frustrated and throw a candied nut at them. This works great for smaller kids. Teenagers are less impressed.

5. Have the kids tell the story. My co-blogger Steve had a great idea that we implemented last year: let the kids the story. (The kids have to be old enough.) I explained that I was very frustrated with all my errors in telling the story in previous years and them correcting me all the time. So now they needed to tell the story. I gave them a short outline of the story, and the kids went into the other room to prepare a "play" about the exodus. The adults had 10 minutes of grown up talk, and the kids came back and put on their play. They had props, heavy melodrama, and it was really cute.

6. Props. Plastic frogs, pharaoh masks, etc. The best frogs are the ones with the bulgy eyes.

7. Serious discussion topics. Passover is about some really serious topics. Freedom can be understood politically and psychologically. There's a lot of serious ideas here, and plenty to talk about. Google around - it's amazing what is out there. The extent of this discussion depends on how many children are present and who the adults are. But I think there should be room for at least some serious adult discussion. Judaism is often presented as a religion for children, and I think it is good for children to see adults engaged in a serious adult religious discussion, even if they cannot follow all the details.

8. Good wine. One suggestion is to progress through the evening. Start with a light wine like a moscato, then try a chardonnay or a light red wine. Conclude with a heavier red wine and then a dessert wine. Or have the more serious wines before dinner, and end with something like the mosato or a port.

9. Performance art. The seder is essentially performance art. We not only tell the story, but we experience it. (They ate matzah. Here, have some. You wanna know how bitter slavery was? Eat this.) The goal of the seder is to re-create the exodus from Egypt. And each part of the seder (or broadly speaking, each glass of wine) is like a roadmap. The breakdown is kiddush (introduction / celebrating the holiday), maggid (telling the story), birkat (being thankful) and hallel (praise). So one aspect of the seder is to imaging all the feelings you would have leaving Egypt. The second half, with being thankful and praising God, is an important part of that.

* * *

A quick note on timing. To do some of these innovations lengthens the seder. This results in either a very long seder (my preference) or requires shortening other sections (the preference of everyone else). In modifying the seder in any way, keep in mind a few things.

First, a good haggadah with some commentary is a good guide. We used "A Different Night" and it identifies a "bare bones" seder with the critical parts as well as many suggestions for additional activities.

Second, keep in mind the mitzvot of the seder itself. There are five of them. Two from the Torah (eat matzah, tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt) and three from the mishnah (eat bitter herbs, drink four glasses of wine, say hallel). Whatever else you do, don't eliminate any of these.

Third, think about the participants. We are doing three things when we are doing a seder: celebrating a Jewish holiday in a traditional manner, celebrating an ethnic and family-oriented Jewish holiday, and having a meaningful religious experience. These three goals are frequently in conflict with each other, and each of the participants may favor one over the other. So, for example, a common issue in some homes is whether to even do the second-half of the seder. (Its late, the kids are tired, we just had dessert. Enough is enough.) The traditionalist perspective would favor doing the second half because it is the traditional thing to do (and part of the hallel is in the second half of the seder). The family / cultural perspective would not, since the important part of the seder is that the family is all together and we are "doing something" Jewish. The specifics don't really matter. From a family and cultural perspective, Elijah's cup may be far less important then Aunt So-and-So's gefilte fish. And from the meaningfulness perspective, it is not clear. It depends on what happens during the second half. Striking the balance is very tricky. Do so carefully.

Have you tried anything novel that worked well (or that didn't)?

More on Miracles

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:08:00 +0000

My friend (and long-time reading group colleague) "LA Guy" over at PajamaGuy challenges my post on miracles and Purim. He and I agree on much, but end up in very different places. And I think a simple example -- colors -- will help illustrate where we disagree.

We both agree that modernity has been hard on more fundamentalist or literalist forms of religion. Empirical observation and science are the most important, and probably the only, way of knowing objective empirical information.

So far, so good. But when discussing miracles, I then shift the focus away from an objective description of reality to a more phenomenological description of how we experience things. LA Guy objects to this move: "I think the best you can say is science doesn't yet fully explain our subjective feelings. I'm not sure where this gets us. Does that mean we give up trying to understand them?"

No, not at all. I'm just asking a different question, and not a scientific question. Let me offer a simpler and (hopefully) less controversial example: colors.

Scientifically, we know what the color of an object is. It is simply light of different frequencies reflected from the physical object. But this objective account of light and color does not explain how we perceive color. We experience red as hot and exciting, and blue as cool and calming. Some colors or color combinations upset our sense of aesthetics (mud brown and lime green), while others (blue and yellow) are more esthetically pleasing. None of this is captured by an objective account of the physical properties of colors.

OK. Maybe we can help the scientific approach by shifting to an objective account of our brains and our eyes, rather than light and objects. That helps a bit. We might note that certain colors or color combinations trigger different neural paths and "light up" different regions of the brain. But it does not really solve the problem. Even this description does not capture our experience of perceiving color.

A better way of understanding this may be to turn to poetry. Homer's use of "rosy-fingered dawn" nicely captures the faint red before the sun rises. Or Robert Browning:

The gray sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low:

- "Meeting at Night"

Or perhaps turn to painters. Or even a book on how to paint. All of these things focus on our experience of color, not on the objective characteristics of color itself.

This is certainly not to deny the importance of a scientific understanding of color or even of our brains. But this scientific account simply does not capture everything.

LA Guy then argues that this is a "god of the gaps" sort of argument. That would be true if I were trying to rely on this experiential description or miracles as a substitute for scientific descriptions. I am emphatically not doing that. Objectively, the gaps in our empirical knowledge are simply gaps. They may get closed or they may not, and science is the proper way of doing that. Instead, I am simply asking a different question. In fact, extending LA Guy's argument slightly, I would argue that this "god of the gaps" does not really capture what God is. For example, a god of the gaps is simply a super-scientific principle. It explains some naturalistic phenomena, but -- like gravity and energy and matter -- it has no personality and is not deserving of being worshiped or even thought about all that much. We might occasionally note that gravity is a good thing, but that's about it for our "relationship" with gravity.

LA Guy then get to what I think is the key issue. We all have feelings, but why wouldn't we say "wow, it's amazing how the natural world supplies us with these awesome emotions"?

This is a causal statement. In response to an amazing feeling, LA Guy would identify the source of these feelings: nature. That's certainly one response, and a good one. But there are other responses as well. For example, how have other people experienced these feelings? How about my ancestors? Can I share these feelings with other people, either in some structured or unstructured way? Is there something I should focus on when experiencing these feelings? Are there other related feelings? These are all questions, but perhaps the deepest response to a feeling is not a question but the feeling itself. We should simply be mindful of the experiences of awe or amazement or gratitude when we have them.

And if one generalized from mere "feelings" to deeper questions about significance and our relationship with others, we are in a much deeper place.

My claim is that religion provides one good framework for experiencing all of these things. My example in my original post is that by giving charity on Purim, we help create a miracle as experienced by the recipient. Or to take a more significant upcoming example, the Passover story -- the narrative of freeing an oppressed people from a cruel and tyranical ruler -- is perhaps the paradigmatic example of life-altering goodness. In "Exodus and Revolution" political philosopher Michael Walzer traces how this story itself and many of its particular themes had been explicitly adopted in numerous liberation movements throughout western history. One can ask the scientific questions about this story: did it happen, was a supernatural God involved, etc. And science is the method we should use to answer these questions. But the significance of the story in our own personal lives and in the political sphere is not fundamentally a scientific question. It is an experiential one. The black American slaves singing about Moses and Pharaoh were not making historical claims, they were expressing hope and affirming the goodness of freedom.

LAGuy then argues that I have provided "a seriously watered down version of miracles." Yes, if the "real" question about miracles is their objective cause. But if the "real" question about miracles is how do we experience things that we perceive as miraculous, then a discussion about their stochastic or supernatural causes is watered-down. But of course, there is no "real" question about anything. We can ask whatever questions we want. My point is that the debate over the ultimate causes of things we perceive as miraculous is ultimately a futile debate (although sometimes fun). But the debate over how we react to spectacular things in life is not.

In a pre-scientific age, religion could make scientific claims. It was the best we had. But in a scientific age, religion cannot credibly make scientific claims, and in fact it gets into serious trouble when it does. But that does not mean that its account of things is not useful. To the contrary, Judaism has guided Jews for thousands of years and helped people live meaningful and sensitive lives.

What If Jewish Education Were Run Like the Boys Scouts?

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:45:00 +0000

Children commonly complain that they don't like religious school. But the boy scouts do something somewhat similar to religious school (teach particular ideas and skills, inculcate good character, have children help others) and they seem to have a good degree of success. Can the Jewish education establishment learn something from the boy scouts?

My knowledge of scouting is limited (I was a cub scout for one year, and my kids are not scouts). From what I understand, the basic approach of scouting is that there are lots of "merit badges" in numerous categories. They start out simple (like knot-tying) and then progress to things like camping, astronomy, first-aid, gardening, woodworking, reading, etc. (Google it for all the specifics.) To earn a particular merit badge, scouts need to be able both to explain a specified set of things and do a specified set of things. Scouts work together on these badges. And along the way, there are all sorts of character lessons.

I would imagine that some merit-badge categories are mandatory and others are optional. But the result is that all kids will have a common core set of knowledge and skills (they'll all know how to tie a square knot) but different kids will choose different paths beyond that.

The kids get an actual physical badge, and these get sewn on either a uniform or a sash that are worn on certain ceremonial occasions.

The structure of religious education is the same as scouting. A religious school teaches kids certain core ideas and values and practices, and then kids might explore others on their own. But the way this is taught is usually the traditional classroom approach.

Could a religious school or some umbrella organization implemented a system of Jewish merit badges? For example, one category might be prayer. Kids could get a merit badge for knowing (and demonstrating that they know) certain common prayers, along with their English meaning. Another category might be holidays. Kids could get a badge for knowing about the holidays and participating in them. (You do the 4 Purim mitzvot and explain what they are, and you get a Purim merit badge.) There could be merit badge in Torah, in social action, in Hebrew, etc.

Religious school, or at least part of it, could be run like scout meetings. It would be more fun, and kids would be working together to earn merit badges or demonstrating what they know.

I see at least three key advantages of this approach.

The first is that it would force religious schools to clearly identify what they would like the kids to learn and do, both in terms of knowledge and skills and actions. And this overall structure will help both kids and adults.

The second advantage is that it presumably would make continuing with Jewish education more attractive to kids after their bar- or bat-mitzvah celebration. Stick around and get the really advanced badges, like Maimonides and Gemara and Social Action III. In fact, the bar- or bat-mitzvah could be an opportunity to obtain a bunch of merit badges (reading from the Torah, etc.), and this would subordinate the ceremony to a child's Jewish education as a whole, rather than the other way around.

And the third advantage is that it would give the kids an incentive to work on Jewish education outside of religious school. If kids could earn a merit badge for (say) reading and understanding Genesis, at least some kids would be motivated to do so on their own. This sounds farfetched if Jewish education is seen as something boring and horrible imposed on children. But if Jewish education is something serious and interesting and fun, at least many kids will pursue it on their own. Decentralization seems to work in lots of spectacular ways, and education should not be any different.

I would appreciate any reader comments, especially from those who have direct experience with teaching religious school, with scouting, or with both.

Miracles and Modernity and Purim

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:17:00 +0000

The Enlightenment and modernity has not been kind to more traditional forms of Judaism. But these might not be all that traditional, and Purim may point to a clever way out of this problem.

The Enlightenment and modernity emphasize the importance of empirical data, rationality, skepticism, and most of all objectivity. This is without a doubt a major step forward in a huge number of areas. Most obviously, it made real science possible, and that resulted in huge increases in the quality of life, health, technology, and wealth. It also went hand-in-hand with tremendous intellectual developments like democracy, egalitarianism, and huge developments in areas like law, economics, psychology, and history.

But when these modern tools were used to examine "traditional" understandings of Judaism, traditional Judaism took a beating. Skepticism undermined the belief in God and the belief in miracles. Bible criticism and archeology undermined the importance of the Torah and the Bible itself. The physical sciences undermined the traditional understanding of creation and the flood as set forth in Genesis. And ideas like democracy and egalitarianism undermined the particularism of Judaism. There are of course responses to many of these problems, some persuasive and others not, but the effect of Judaism cannot be denied. Many Jews responded by abandoning Judaism entirely, and others watered it down. And some segments of Judaism responded by retreating and abandoning modernity entirely.

But there is an interesting reaction to modernity in philosophy that might help resolve this problem, and in many ways hearkens back to some strands of traditional Judaism.

One problem with strong types of naturalism or empiricism is that they often result in a type of naturalistic or materialistic reductionism, holding that everything can be explained by its physical properties. We are just a collection of atoms arranged in a particular way. But that sort of explanation tends to provide be a woefully incomplete explanation of things.

For example, one can use science to explain the development of a baby from a fertilized egg to birth. And that explanation paves the way for spectacular developments in medicine. But that explanation, important as it is, does not explain our own sense of wonder and amazement when we see a newborn baby. Not even close. Objective science explains scientific matters, but it does not explain how we experience the world. And even if we examined our own brains and were able to describe this subjective experience empirically—when you experience awe, these neurons fire over here but those neurons don't fire over there—it still would not capture own subjective experience of awe or of any other emotion. Scientific reductionism explains empirical facts (and does so spectacularly), but it cannot explain our own experience of reality.

This shift of focus—from an objective description of reality to our own experience of reality—may make many religious ideas more compatible with our modern (or post-modern) sensibilities. Ironically, this non-traditional approach to Judaism is often exactly in line with traditional understandings.

Purim provides a good example of this. As is often noted, the book of Esther does not contain the name of God, and the name Esther is similar to the Hebrew word "hester" meaning "hidden." Also, the story in the book of Esther evolves through a series of apparent coincidences: Esther happens to win the contest and marry King Ahashverosh; Mordecai happens to overhear a plot against the King, the King happens to read about this in the archives just before Haman shows up, etc. The connection between the hiddenness of God and these coincidences is obvious: they were miracles. God was hidden, working behind the scenes, but orchestrated all these supposed coincidences to save the Jews.

That objective explanation works for many people, but does not work for others. (I discussed a similar point regarding God here and here.) My preferred approach is to avoid this metaphysical question completely, for several reasons. We cannot resolve it. Also, focusing on this tends to conflate all Judaism with this view of Judaism, and if someone rejects this approach, they may unnecessarily reject Judaism as a whole. And it distracts from other more important issues.

Instead, I prefer to focus on our experience of miracles, rather than the objective nature of miracles. At some point, we have all experienced something resembling a miracle: an odds-defying rescue from danger, a coincidence bring good fortune, some unexplained good news. Regardless of our objective explanation for this—coincidence, supernatural intervention, karma, whatever—we all experience it in similar ways. We are amazed, grateful, happy, and sometimes a little stunned. And we should be. In fact, part of the "modim" prayer in the daily davening focuses us on this very point: we thank God for "your miracles which are daily with us." There are wondrous and wonderful things that happen to us all the time, and we should acknowledge them, appreciate them, and be thankful for them. I am not really interested in analyzing whether they have supernatural origins.

Just to clarify: I am neither affirming nor denying that the objective cause of miracles is supernatural forces. I am simply avoiding the question and focusing on something I think it more important and certainly more immediate. Both metaphysical beliefs work perfectly find with this understanding of miracles.

That is the lesson of the book of Esther. God is absent from the book because God is absent from the book. No one will ever resolve the question of whether God was intentionally working behind the scenes or whether (as Machiavelli would have put it) Esther and Mordecai simply showed their virtu and took advantage of fortuna.

My friend Danny Corsun runs cooking classes for kids at schools, synagogues, and elsewhere (and bakes a great challah, BTW). At synagogues, he intersperses Jewish teachings with Jewish cooking, and he had an interesting lesson along these lines that he taught the kids as they baked hamantaschen. He noted that one of the mitzvot of Purim is matanot l'evyonim, or gifts for the poor. (Note: this is different than mishloach manot, or gifts of food for family and friends.) From the perspective of the giver, this is simply giving a gift. Objectively, it is quite simple: person X gives gift Y to needy person Z. But from the perspective of the recipient, this gift may arrive unexpectedly and in a time of need. It may be an actual miracle. And the experience of the recipient is completely unexplained by an objective description of the facts surrounding the gift. In short, by performing this mitzvah, we ourselves may actually create a miracle.

In short, a miracle is whatever causes the things we experience as a miracle. I do not care much for the metaphysical question of what that thing is objectively. Instead, I care about how I and everyone else experiences that miracle, whatever its ultimate cause. One lesson (or several, perhaps) from Purim and the book of Ester is that we need to act like God and create miracles for ourselves and others, and we need to be thankful and amazed when we experience these miracles. And that, to me, is a more interesting and important topic to focus on.

Blog Comments - Converting from Haloscan to Disqus

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 17:35:00 +0000

Just a technical update that might be of some interest to other bloggers.

Many of us have used Haloscan for our blog comments. A few months ago, Haloscan decided to end its free service. It would convert the comments to another system, Echo, but would charge an annual fee. Anyone who did not want to do this could export comments from Haloscan in XML format to his or her own hard drive. All the comments would be saved, but unfortunately, no other commenting service had an easy way (or even a difficult way, for that matter) to import these files.

I exported the Haloscan comments from this blog and then poked around the web. I switched over to a new commenting system, Disqus, that seems to be working pretty well. Disqus allows bloggers to import comments from other commenting systems, like IntenseDebate and JS-Kit, but unfortunately not from Haloscan. (Disqus says that are working on that.)

I realized that if I could convert the comments from the Disqus XML format to one of these other formats, I should be able to upload the comments. So I wrote a short Perl script to do that. I converted one big comment file into a second big comment file and tried to upload that. The comments failed to upload and generated a (unspecified) error. To isolate the problem I then modified the Perl script to create a bunch of smaller XML files (one for each post with all the comments to that post), and tried uploading each of those files. Some files uploaded, but others did not. This shows that the general approach works, but there are some particular problems. I e-mailed the technical people at Disqus to try to isolate the problem. If that doesn't work, I have a few other ideas about how to move these comments into Disqus.

The bottom line is that all the prior comments to this blog are saved. I have been able to move some of them to the new commenting system, and -- one way or another -- I will move the rest of them as well. Once I do so, I will explain how I did so.

If you are a blogger who used Haloscan, I would suggest exporting your Haloscan comments immediately. Don't worry if you don't understand any of the technical information. Just save that file on your hard drive, remember where you put it, and hang on to it. At some point, someone (Disqus, me, someone else) will figure out how to easily convert all the comments, and at that point, you can convert your old comments as well.

In the meantime, you need a commenting system. Feel free to add Disqus, go back to blogger's default comments, or use some other commenting system.