Out of Step Jew

Warning: This post has no Jewish content.
Read this short piece in The New Atlantis and tell me if you don't say: "Wow!" afterwards.
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This past month's issue of First Things has a review of the new (Christian) translation of the Bible – the English Standard Version (ESV) meant to be traditional and scholarly enough to replace the old standard King James Version (KJV). The debate amongst the Christian faithful over translations has gone on a long time as translation after translation seem (at least in the articles and comments I read) to either be too shallow or too modern, or both.

The traditionalists still cling to the KJV although they seem to understand that the English speaking world is due for a new one. Robert Alter is paraphrased in the review as saying that "the problem with the KJV is its shaky sense of Hebrew, while the problem with more recent versions is their shaky sense of English".

We in the Jewish world have had similar problems with our translations – the JPS over the last 100 years has issued an "old" (1917) translation and an updated (1960's) version. Recently, Art Scroll has issued a simplistic translation that has caught the eye of the Orthodox world.

The basic point is that if you want to truly appreciate the Bible, the Tanach, you must learn Hebrew. Those who rely on whatever translation, no matter how good, are missing the beauty of the prose and the poetry that make up the 24 books of the Tanach. They are reading a divine work through the eyes of mere mortals.

The reviewer, Alan Jacobs writes toward the end of his review: " Everyone who grew up with the KJV feels the loss of a shared language, of particular words and phrases that resonated in the common ear—words and phrases whose meanings could be tested, considered, deployed and redeployed in an infinitely varied set of contexts".

What that means for us Jews is that our shared language of the Tanach cannot be an English translation. If there is to be a continuation of the dialogue of Judaism the first place to start is with the Tanach – and that dialogue can only be accomplished if both speakers read and understand the Tanach in its original language. Those who rely on translations (and a good number of even young Orthodox – haredi and modern - seem to rely on them) are not only missing the beauty of the Tanach but also a chance to participate in the 3,000 year old dialogue that has made Judaism what it is today.

Way back when, there was an ideal in American Jewish Day Schools and Yeshivot to teach Jewish Studies subjects in Hebrew (Ivrit b'Ivrit). That value has with a few exceptions, sadly left us.

The Christian world rightly mourns the loss of a common language – we don't have to.
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The father stood stone faced, the mother with moist eyes holding her husband. The chayalot (female soldiers) were crying and the chayalim (male soldiers) stood at attention the best they knew how.

The funeral of Cpl. Angelina Shachirov was the first of three in Kfar Saba today. Three young women from Kfar Saba, two of them soldiers, were killed in the terror attack at a bus stop in Petach Tikva yesterday. One soldier from Elkana was also killed.

Today will make four military funerals in Kfar Saba since we have started writing this weblog – the first since my son was drafted one month ago.

The whole town mourns when one its sons or daughters in uniform is killed. Today, we bury two young girls who were just starting out on their lives and who died while protecting Jews the world over. We bury two young girls who by helping to destroy the innocence of the Jewish people have provided it a lasting legacy. We bury two young girls – daughters, sisters, friends.

Cpl. Angelina Shachirov, Cpl. Rotem Weinberger – yehi zichran bruchot.
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A few weeks ago we commented on the infamous article in The New York Review of Books by Tony Judt. According to Judt, the State of Israel is an anachronism that apparently insults his moral fiber. Our response then was not to deal with the "meat" of his article, if it could be said to have any meat, but in reiterating our claim for a state in the Land of Israel.

That post, "A Narrative of a People and its Land" staked the claim of the Jewish people to the piece of real estate we call the Land of Israel, or Palestine, or the Fertile Crescent. We looked at the 3,000 year old narrative that connects the Jewish people to the Land of Israel. The fact that a group of people decided in 1948 to set up a democratic government to rule themselves and declared it both a "democratic and Jewish" state was irrelevant to our argument.

Judt is back (thank you to ZS Berger for pointing this out) via the letters section of the NYRB.

Again, unlike the other respondents in the NYRB (like Michael Walzer and Abe Foxman) and elsewhere, we don't feel a need to respond to Judt's arguments because they are irrelevant to our story. He may say that "it is not the state that is anachronistic … but the Zionist version of it" but that is like saying "it is not the play 'Hamlet' that I object to, but the Shakespearean version of it". There is no other version of Jewish statehood in the Land of Israel than the Zionist one. To object to a Zionist-Jewish state is to object to ANY Jewish state – and to object to any Jewish state is to reject the Jewish people's own claim to self governance.

There can be no discussion of Israel's right to exist as long as its citizens will its existence and it has the capabilities to defend itself from physical annihilation. Insulting the moral sensibilities of (even Jewish) intellectuals is not enough to form the basis of a discussion that questions the right of Jews to live in their land as they see fit. The citizens of Czechoslovakia split into The Czech Republic and Slovakia because its citizens willed it (and they no longer faced the physical threat from the USSR), not because western intellectuals were fed up with it.

A good friend of mine said to me the other day that questioning the right of Israel to exist is no different than Holocaust denial.

Tony Judt and his friends may deny our right to live as Jews in a Jewish state but we need not rationalize our presence here to satisfy their racist declarations.
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One of the earliest mentions of Hanukah in Jewish sources is in Megillat Ta'anit (The Scroll of Fasting), a rabbinic work which, contra its name, is a list of days where it is not permissible to fast.

Ha'aretz reviews a new critical edition of this rabbinic work by Vered Noam.

The reviewer ends his interesting essay by stating that:
"It is hard to say that Megillat Ta'anit has been rescued from oblivion: From the time it was written, people have known about it and studied it. But like other such works, parts of the text have become garbled over the centuries. There is no longer a clear line between the composition as it was originally handed down, and material added in the course of transcription. The goal, writes Noam, is 'to unravel the knots in Megillat Ta'anit and elucidate each of its many versions and emendations.' Those who sit down and give this stunning volume its due will see how successful she has been."

Read and you shall learn.
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What is that holiday that started Friday night? Oh yes, Hanukah.

You can wander the streets in Israel and not know it is Hanukah. Purim is different. As Purim approaches you see children aged 1 to 100 dressed in costumes on the way to nursery, school or an office party. On Hanukah, although apparently most people light candles in their homes, you don't see many public displays.

I think this says more about the Christianization of the holiday in the US than the lack of observance here in Israel. It is doubtful that if Hanukah was closer in date to Ash Wednesday than to Christmas if American Jewry would treat it with any more significance than it treats Purim or Shavuot.

That is not to say that there is really anything wrong with this emphasis on Hanukah. It is a religious celebration with much to teach us in our present attempt at nation building. Hillel Halkin, in his current article in the Jerusalem Post has some interesting things to say about its state of observance here in Israel. (I tend to agree with much of what he says, although there apparently are much fewer Sufganiyot - doughnut - stands in his hometown of Zichron Ya'akov than here in Kfar Saba.)

Halkin concentrates on the importance of Jewish power in the birth of Rabbinic Judaism during the time of the Second Temple. Halkin claims that "… not only was it under them (the Hasmoneans) that rabbinic Judaism took form and began to grow into the great culture of law-driven learning that it became, it is very likely that without them there would have been no rabbinic Judaism, and indeed no Jewish people, at all."

That is a bold statement and its assumptions on the future of a post-Holocaust Judaism without a State of Israel are ominous. Maybe US Jewry by its raising of the religious profile of Hanukah has (inadvertently) taught us an important lesson here in Israel.
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We wrote a few days ago about the philosophical relationship between R. Soloveitchik and Emanuel Levinas by pointing out an article by Seymour Kessler in "Judaism".

Following Kessler, I would like to concentrate on the importance of the material or of "Olam HaZeh" (literally This World, as opposed to the World to Come) in the thought of these two great men.

Levinas speaks of Solitude, Freedom and Materiality – three related concepts that form a process.

Solitude for Levinas is the state of a person (existent) when he comes into contact with himself (his existence) This state is necessary, for Levinas, in order for someone (the existent) to rule over himself (his existence). It comes "at the beginning" – that is when the existent (the individual) "knows" himself to exist, knows himself to be a "substantial" person (the action that Levinas calls "hypostasis").

This state of 'solitude' – of man alone with himself is not the start of a radical despair over his limited place in the cosmos but is the necessary condition for the freedom necessary for one to rule over himself.

If we understand Rav's "loneliness" as the state of Solitude that Levinas describes we can better understand the importance of the individual and his freedom in the world of Halakhah. For the Rav's "loneliness" is a state when coming into contact with his own existence, and in seeing it in relation to God – to his Creator. But he can find his freedom (or redemption) "by dovetailing his accidental existence with the necessary infinite existence of the Great True Real Self". However, this too, would lead to despair if "Being" was only in relation to the Infinite.

This would then follow Heidegger's claim that man's "existence" or "being" is a "being towards death" – or an existence that can never come to terms with its own demise. This way of thinking led Heidegger and those who followed him to the totalitarian life of Nazism and Communism: The only way out of the 'despair' of a "being towards death" is to connect yourself with a higher calling – a totalitarian calling – a nation, a race, a class. This removes the individual from having to come to terms with his own (limited) existence. This also removes any sense of responsibility the individual has toward himself, toward others or towards God.

For Soloveitchik and for Levinas there is another way out of the despair – and this is the responsibility of the individual to act according to ethical (Levinas) or Halakhic (Soloveitchik) imperatives. This is the partial negation of freedom that Levinas speaks of and it is the core of his concept of 'materiality' – of the belief in the primacy of Olam Ha'zeh.

For both of these great thinkers, the material world is not a come down from some life of the spirit - it is not, in the language of Halakhah a "b'dieved" existence – hence justifiable only ex post facto - , but a "l'chatchila" existence - an a priori good, in and of itself).

For Levinas "… everyday life, far from constituting a fall, and far from appearing as a betrayal with regard to our metaphysical destiny, emanates from our solitude … Everyday life is a preoccupation with salvation" (Time and the Other).

R. Soloveitchik, uses the halakhah in his struggles to unite the majestic (material) and covenantal (faith) while fully understanding that the two worlds will continue to clash.
He writes in Lonely Man of Faith: "Accordingly, the task of covenantal man is to be engaged not in dialectical surging forward and retreating, but in uniting the two communities … where man is both the creative, free agent and the obedient servant of God. ..[T]he Halakhah sees in the ethico-moral norm a uniting force. The norm which originates in the covenantal community addresses itself almost exclusively to the majestic community where its realization takes place."

For both R. Soloveitchik and for Levinas the ethical/halakhic norm is independent of existence and being. It requires of the existent though a non-reciprocal responsibility of one towards the Other. And this is how man escapes the despair of his contact with the Infinite. Not in surrender to some greater and more spiritual "World to Come ,or heaven on earth, but in taking command of the spiritual for use in the material.

For both R. Soloveitchik and for Levinas, the 'ethico-moral' norm exists independently of being as it "originates in the covenantal community". Its realization, however, can only take place in the 'majestic community' – in Olam Hazeh.

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ZS Berger has an interesting review of Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua's lecture at YIVO. Yehoshua is an interesting thinker. In addition to being a good novelist, he straddles the space between the post-Zionism that the Israeli left has become and the Ben-Gurion Zionism that it once was.
He, like Amnon Rubenstein are two of the few strident advocates for Zionism that remain on the left side of the Israeli political spectrum.
I am not sure that I agree with him that the diaspora is a disease of the Jewish people, but its nice to see someone talking up aliya for a change.
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One of my pet peeves regarding religious Jewish tourism to Israel is the neglect of Tel-Aviv. There is so much Zionist and religious-Zionist history in Tel-Aviv that it is a shame that it is missed out by so many visitors. Even the religious-Zionist summer programs for high schoolers such as Bnei Akiva's all but ignore Israel's most lively city.

Culturally, historically and religiously, old TA is a treasure trove. There were at one point eight hasidic courts in the city and it was the center of a thriving religious-Zionist community. There are shuls that date from the 1920's in the Neve Zedek neighborhood, the area surrounding the Shalom Tower and even the southern part of the boardwalk.

There is even a neighborhood named for the namesake of YU's rabbinical school, REITS -R. Yitzchak Elchanan Spector (Nachlat Yitzchak).

It was the cultural center of early Zionism, with Agnon and Bialik, Ahad Ha'am and Alterman claiming the city as their homes (at least for awhile).

This past Friday's Ha'aretz has an interesting piece by David Rapp on wall paintings that adorn much of the early housing in then young Tel-Aviv. The article is worth a read, and Tel-Aviv a good old Zionist visit.
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Well, I am not quite sure what to make of the snide little comment about me from the Protocols blog. He attacks my praise of Meir Soloveitchik's Azure article first by misinterpreting the Soloveitchik article and then by asking "how much ass-kissing is going on" when I called him, hopefully as the next Rav Meir?

I guess my writing is not on the highest of levels, yet I do expect those who can learn gemara to be able to read a bit closer than they do. First I was criticized in my Comments and now on this popular blog when all I was doing was hoping that Meir Soloveitchik could be one of the next 'gedolim' for the modern-Orthodox community.

To quote myself, I wrote that with the two articles of his that I read that it "could be that we are seeing the works of a real intellectual and religious leader". I then ended by stating that: "Hopefully this is just the start of a long relationship he will have with the Jewish community in general and the modern Orthodox community in particular". As I told my eleven year old daughter when studying Torah the other day: Just read the words.

As for the "ass-kissing" that the elder accuses me of, well, I can't really imagine what I stand to gain by praising (or condemning) anyone. I am neither a professional writer, nor a rabbi nor a professor, nor a Jewish community leader wannabe. Although I am old enough to have heard the Rav give Yahrzeit shiurim, I have never met a Soloveitchik and don't ever expect to. In any event, I don't think they look to blogs to help their self-esteem.

But it is the article itself that Mr. Protocol has completely misread. It is neither "condescending" nor "smug", nor a "polemic". It is an honest assessment of two religion's views on redemption - honest enough that I would not expect the "padres and preachers" to object to its tone or content: Just ask the editors of First Things who have published a similar article by the same author comparing Jewish and Christian views of hatred.

As for the youngsters at Protocols, please don't take this personally as I enjoy your blog immensely (this is ass-kissing) so I hope you continue to visit this blog and mention it many more times.
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Is there any common ground between R. Yosef Dov Soloveitchik and Emanuel Levinas? Both come from the world of German philosophy – Levinas studied in Freiberg with Edmund Husserl and R. Soloveitchik received his doctorate in Berlin. Both are from the Lithuanian tradition with R. Soloveitchik from a family who could be said to have created it.

Both were important thinkers who apparently will continue to be studied and published for generations to come.

If you read them you will see an emphasis on the primacy of the individual and the importance of the ethical (or halakhic) act between individuals.

I recently came across an article first published in Judaism in 2002 by Seymour Kessler called: "Soloveitchik and Levinas: Pathways to the Other", that compares the philosophical Soloveitchik and Levinas.

Kessler starts his article by stating:
"EMMANUEL LEVINAS AND RABBI JOSEPH B. SOLOVEITCHIK, among the greatest Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, hailed from the same section of northern Europe, the Polish/Lithuanian Pale, then part of the Russian empire. Both stemmed from families steeped in mitnaggid tradition with a basic mistrust of the Chassidic world and of mysticism in general. Levinas was raised in a traditional, middle-class Yiddish-speaking family. His father owned a bookstore in Kovno, and he was exposed early on to secular studies including Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy, as well as the plays of Shakespeare. Soloveitchik, scion of a rabbinic dynasty, was born in Belarus, Russia, and was educated by his father, among others, in the so-called Brisker method of Talmud study. It is not known whether or not the two men ever met or, for that matter, ever read each other's essays. Nevertheless, there is an intriguing overlap in the themes to which they devoted much of their intellectual energies--God, Torah, ethics, holiness, infinity, time, messianism, existence, among others--and although their audiences and purposes differed in many ways, they came to similar end points by different roads."

After giving a good summary of the thought of both great men, Kessler goes on to use Levinas as a way of illuminating some of R. Soloveitchik's ideas.

Kessler concludes by saying that "Traditional rabbinic thought provided the foundation for both Levinas's and Soloveitchik's teachings. Thus, it is not surprising that, despite their differing approaches, their writings point in a common direction. Elaborated by Levinas's philosophy, readers may find fresh insights in Soloveitchik's key writings that would make ancient Judaic wisdom relevant to contemporary Western thought."
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... are now our favorite fruit.
v'hamevin, yavin.
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Its a shame to see two good organizations led and staffed by good people compete with each other over things like saving terror and accident victims and removing bodies from these horrible scenes. Yet the Jerusalem Post is reporting that Magen David Adom (MDA) and Zaka are in the midsts of just such a battle. MDA is still upset that some Zaka ambulances and motorcycle volunteers beat them to the scene for rescue purposes and have set up a competing 'service' for removal of dead bodies.
As if we don't have enough to fight about.
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Professor Robert Pollack's article on the soul deserves a better and more thoughtful response than the one we gave last week. After printing out the article and reading it more closely I would like to take a stab at clarifying the problem he presents and the solution he offers.

At first glance I didn't really see the need to identify a specific location of the soul (neshamah). Part of that which allows me to operate both in the worlds of Athens and of Jerusalem, as the saying goes, is to accept that at certain points, the language of one world cannot help in solving the problems the other. Just as God needs no physical space, so too, the soul.

However, I take Pollack's attempt to find the soul's location as an attempt to explain the soul in its relation to the body. We can call this the "smaller" metaphysical question – as opposed to the larger metaphysical question – that of God.

The study of metaphysics is the study of that which is "about" the physical - or a way of explaining the physical world from a non-physical viewpoint. For the atheist, metaphysics does not exist since their can be nothing outside of the physical or material world. For the mystic, physics is just the whim of the metaphysical since any physical law that a scientist might discover can be changed or negated at the discretion of a Supreme Being. The mystic explains all physical phenomenon in the language of metaphysics. For many of us believers, the answer lies somewhere in between.

The workings of God in the world at large is the "big" metaphysical question. We ask what is God's influence on the world around us. The answers to this can range again, from the mystical to the agnostic: God controls the physical completely, or God creates the laws that rule the physical – or something between the two poles. In order to answer this question properly, we need to learn not only all that is possible about God, but all that is possible about the physical universe.

For Jews, we look to our halackhic and midrashic traditions to get an understanding of what God wants of us as the main actors operating in the physical world. Through this study and practice we may get a glimpse of the 'how' of God and the 'why' of the world in order to help us answer our metaphysical quest. We seek to understand how the material world operates by using both physics and meta-physics.

But it is the "small" metaphysical problem that Pollack is tackling here. Here we ask, what is the soul's influence on the workings of the individual person? In order to answer this question we must understand the laws of nature no less than in answering the "big" metaphysical question. In this Pollack helps us by describing the evolution of the "human personality" as passed on from generation to generation in our DNA germ line.

After he has analyzed how the human personality has reached this point materially he then moves on to tackle the question of how it got us here metaphysically. And it is in this 'how it got us here' that he locates the soul. Pollack writes: "The location of the soul of any one of us need not necessarily be in our minds or bodies or brains. Instead, it could be in the minds, bodies and brains of each of the people whom we have nurtured, and the minds, bodies and brains of those who have nurtured us". Further, he claims that there also is (can be) a part of the soul which has no "material content".

I would like to offer a clarification of his theory. Could, according to Pollack, the soul be located not in the mind, body and souls of our loved ones, but in the phenomenon that are the loving relationships we have with them? This would lead us back to our original attempt to tie Pollack's theories with the ethical theories (phenomenology) of Levinas in which the responsibility to the Other is the supreme ethical commandment, as it were.

For Levinas it is not too much of a stretch to say that the ethical (that is, this responsibility) is what makes us human. For the religious person (and Levinas was religious), it is the soul which makes us human. If we connect Pollack with Levinas we can locate the soul not necessarily in a person's responsibility to all Others, but in his (emotional and ethical) responsibility to the Others that are closest to him. If Pollack places the soul in these phenomenon which we call relationships, he no longer has the problem of the soul's mortality, since these relationships could exist in a metaphysical world (olam haba – the world to come) just as easily as in the physical world (olam hazeh).

I am not sure if I agree with what Pollack is trying to say - but I think it is an interesting attempt to answer the 'small-big' question in that it takes so many ideas from science, from Chazal (the Rabbinic tradition) and from philosophy. Does he succeed? Is this just a first but incomplete attempt at success? Or is he way off the mark?

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Yesterday's Ha'aretz has a very important article by Yair Sheleg and Rav Yuval Sherlow. Sherlow is the Rosh Yeshiva of the Yeshivat Hesder in Petach Tikva. A student of R. Aaron Lichtenstein and a graduate of Yeshivat Har Etzion, R. Sherlow is one of the shining stars in what is the younger generation of rational religious Zionists.

He is the author of many books including a short one on the dialectics in the thought of Rav Soloveitchik called "V'hayu L'achadim Beyadecha" (loosely translated as: And They Would be as One in Your Hands).

Sheleg writes:

"Unlike most rabbinical authorities, including
religious-Zionist leaders, who object to mixed
movements (even if they allow for participation
after the fact), Sherlow says that the laws of
modesty do not require refraining from talking
to members of the opposite sex. On the
contrary, he fears that investing energy in the
principle of a separate-gender movement
detracts from strengthening the rules of
modesty in a mixed one. His goal is to have a
mixed and modest movement."

He goes on to quote R. Sherlow:
"I am also one of the few rabbis with
a rational religious-Zionist point of view who
is trying to remove the tension that has taken
over religious-Zionism in the area of
relationships and sexuality."

He defines this "tension" as an "overly stringent approach,
the attitude that views sexuality as something
hostile, not giving enough weight to the need
to build relationships, the total separation
between boys and girls."

Sheleg has done a true public service by speaking about Sherlow and the web site (www.moreshet.co.il – for Hebrew readers) that includes his halakhic Q&A (Sh"uT).

Many of us here in Israel send our children to Bnei Akiva only to have them lectured to by religious-Zionist rabbis on the evils of mixed educational and other activities. It's good to have a keen mind on the level of R. Yuval Sherlow to level the playing field.

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It always amuses me that most Israeli rabbis insist on using only 'Jewish dates' many to the point of saying that it is assur (forbidden) to use the 'loazi' (non-Jewish) dates. It apparently hasn't occurred to them that the names of the Jewish months are from Babylonian gods.

I like to tease them also with the halacha in the diaspora of adding the request for rain "v'ten tal u'matar livracha" in the ninth blessing of the amidah, on December 4th (on leap years December 5th). Although I don't know the origins of it (the Shulchan Aruch says to say it 50 days after the "time of Tishrei" - "tekufat Tishrei") it does catch the Israeli rabbis off guard.

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Sometimes you start reading an article, keep on reading and, even though you don't necessarily agree with all of it you come to respect the rigor of its analyses and even more, the grand attempt to solve a problem that seems intractable.

The problem discussed by Columbia Unversity professor Robert Pollack in an article called "DNA AND NESHAMAH: Locating the Soul in an Age of Molecular Medicine" in Crosscurrents, is the physical "location of the soul". Pollack goes through an explanation of evolution and DNA and by describing what amongst our species is inherited biologically, comes to the conclusion that the soul or the "neshamah" is located in the relationships we have between individuals.

Below (November 20) we have discussed Levinas and his emphasis on the ethical relationships between individuals – the relationship to the Other. Levinas has stated that it is not important "what is said", just the fact of its "saying". Pollack apparently goes one further by emphasizing the quality of one's loving relationships with other people A the key for understanding the location, or locations of the soul. For Pollack, the soul is in the love that is given over by parent to child, teacher to student.

This is a long article and I don't want to give the impression that I am summarizing it properly. Print it out, read it once or twice. Put it down and read it again.

Note: There is a small editing error at the start when he confuses R. Shneur Zalman of Liadi (the first Lubavither Rebbe) with 16th century Kabbalist of Safed, R. Isacc Luria (the AR"I), just ignore it and go on.
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