Last post, I made a plea for comments on my posts. The response was overwhelming. I'm really touched to see that so many people are committed to my still keeping a blog. On that note, I'd like to say that until I go on some good dates, I will not post to my blog again.
Speaking of good dates, I had a delicious chicken tonight dressed in a honey date sauce (thanks Mrs. Knopf!), which caused me to stop watching the Eagles-Rams game in the middle. It was a tough game for me to watch, because for the first time ever, I was sort of rooting for an opponent of the Eagles, as the Rams' Quarterback is Harvard graduate Ryan Fitzpatrick. Despite the plethora of Harvard grads in professional sports (much love to Dov), Ryan is a special case. You see, he's an athlete, not a trainer, general manager, or lawyer. So I get a little excited when he plays, and even when he scores. But in the middle of being excited for Harvard's favorite son, I remembered that I don't even like Harvard. So take that Ryan Fitzpatrick, I'm glad you lost to the Eagles.
But as much as I really didn't like Harvard, especially at the end, I'm finding myself more and more nostalgic for it. I even watched all of Prozac Nation, with the incredibly unconvincing claim that Christina Ricci was Jewish and Jason Biggs a goy, just because I saw a shot of Kirkland. That movie of course was leagues better than Soul Man, about a guy who takes tanning pills to get an all-Black scholarship to Harvard Law. The Harvard in that movie seemed so much fun, even if only because the protagonist slept with a Civil Rights-loving white girl who told him that she could feel 50 years of oppression being released in every pelvic thrust. The sad thing is, I'm pretty sure I had a class with that girl.
So what's the nostalgia about? As much as I hated the pomp and bullshit of Harvard, I get a real thrill of recognizing my former home every time I watch a movie about college (even Old School has some aerial shots of Harvard). Realizing that I may never return there makes it nice to see it on TV. But then, when I'm actually missing Harvard, I hear some annoying Harvard person in Israel comment about how great it is to hang out with other Harvard people so they can have intellectual conversation. And I think about all the smart conversations I have with non-Harvard grads, and I remember how ridiculous Harvard people are. And in the middle of the Eagles game, I take my head out of my own ass, and celebrate my Eagles' flying on the road to victory.
18 December, 2005
06 December, 2005
On God, Torah, and Schwarma
This will be my last post...
If no one posts any comments. See, when no one comments, I assume no one is reading the blog, so what's the point of writing it? I already know what I think, and I've never really been one to keep a journal (GAL not withstanding). So nu? Respond!
So lately, there have been a few things on my mind of a pretty heady nature. Being at Yeshiva has done pretty much exactly what I was hoping, but I'm pretty surprised about how it happened. Around this time 2 years ago, I was probably at the peak of religiosity and observance. Then, over time, it sort of stopped making sense to me. I couldn't believe in a God responsible for everything that I saw wrong with Judaism. That is to say, the way that Jews around me envisioned God seemed totally foreign to me, and I had trouble thinking of God as a force that compelled me to buy into Judaism. I stopped davening, I grew a very cynical attitude toward mitzvot (though I remained observance), and I no longer wanted to be a Rabbi. I figured I was having all of these problems because of how intellectualized Judaism became to me at Harvard (people there overanalyze things a lot), and I assumed that I needed to return to a more emotional/spiritual community to learn to love Judaism again.
Two months ago, I decided that I loved the Yeshiva intellectually, but that it was even more difficult to be spiritual there than it was at Harvard. I pretty much reserved myself to being a hiloni Jew, albeit one who still kept mitzvot. It seemed sad that Judaism as a meaningful part of my life seemed a part of my past, but I just could not bring myself to find meaning it any more.
Thankfully, the Yeshiva has some of the smartest teachers and thinkers from whom I have ever learned. And apparently, since Judaism was ruined for me intellectually, I needed it to be rebuilt for me intellectually as well.
What changed for me could essentially be summed up in a short interchange between two members of the Yeshiva faculty discussing politics. The first, a teacher who believes that the Third Temple should be built in its right time (though not at the expense of doing anything to the holy sites currently there), stated that though he usually votes for Meretz, he was considering voting for Peretz in this election. The other, a rabbi who spends his days studying and teaching Talmud, encouraging students to develop a serious relationship with Tefilla, and has been learning at Yeshivot for the better part of his life (until recently, Orthodox yeshivot), responded by saying that he usually votes for Meretz as well. What impressed me about this was not that I recognized fellow liberals in Jerusalem--when I had become all but convinced that all liberals live in Tel Aviv--but that it was possible for two people with deep commitments to traditional Jewish lifestyles to affiliate with a party that seems at times to be the antithesis to the religious parties (Shinui notwithstanding).
I had come to think that as hard as I tried to find alternate meanings and values in Judaism when my values conflicted with traditional understandings of Judaism, that in the end Judaism had limited room for the kind of radical understanding that I sometimes see into Judaism. But knowing that traditional Jews could vote for Meretz--Jews with far greater knowledge of Judaism than I--proved to me that even in Israel, no one way of thinking has a monopoly on Judaism. And that is allowing me to begin to redefine Judaism on my terms once again. And the most important of that process for me is God. One teacher of mine argues that the entire structure of Judaism relies on there being a God, and that the Torah is the word God. The key, my teacher says, is defining God so that the Torah has to be the word of God. However, since the Torah is not easy to understand, it is definitely possible that things that seem clear in the Torah are not so clear afterall. The difference between this understanding and traditional understandings though, is that in my teacher's understanding, if something that the Torah says seems clearly in conflict with our moral values, then my teacher believes that we are understanding the Torah wrong, whereas many traditional thinkers would say that our moral values are slightly off. The most important part of this system is the ability to still let the Torah speak to you even when it means that it's in conflict with traditional interpretations. The key, of course, is to recognize that Judaism allows for disagreement, and find a way to disagree within Judaism's own system (Rabbi Joel Roth, another faculty member at my yeshiva, and a top thinker within Conservative Judaism, has made this argument his raison d'etre).
But thinking about my right to do this has revealed a real paradox to me. It seems that the Torah is given so much weight in traditional Judaism that the Torah becomes completely distant. Because our system includes 2000 years of commentary building one on the next, each older text takes precedence over a younger text. As a result, if the Mishna understands the law to be one way, the Gemara cannot directly contradict it. If a thinker of the 16th century disagrees with a 10th century thinker, he has to show how that 10th century thinker contradicts himself or is contradicted by a contemporary source or an older source. As a result, modern interpretations of what the words of the Torah say takes a major back seat to what previous commentators say the Torah means. So if I came in and could show convincingly that "Thou shalt not murder" is based on a Canaanite concept of murder that referred specifically to honor killings, and it was confirmed by numerous historical texts, that interpretation would be meaningless because it would undo 2000 years of Jewish tradition from the Tanaim (Mishnaic Rabbis) onwards. The words of the Torah are so holy that we can never undo them, but we certainly can never revert back to them and undo the way they have been understood, even if they seem to have been understood incorrectly. I'm not sure what to do with that yet, but I think the challenge now is to find a way that the words of the Torah can still speak to us while recognizing that sometimes the way they spoke to previous generations is problematic in our day, even if it spoke to Jews that way for close to 2000 years.
A final thought, on schwarma. Last night I went to a talk on ethical slaughter and kashrut. The Rabbi argued very convincingly that there exist kosher slaughter methods today that are more ethical than the methods currently employed. There seem to be a number of problems in kosher slaughterhouses with cruelty to animals, mistreatment of workers, and the desensitizing of mass slaughter of animals. It made me really question why I eat meat so often since these issues do bother me. I wondered if I should become a vegetarian, or at least restrict eating meat to Shabbat. I thought about this for all of 5 minutes, until I talked to Rabbi Romm, the Rabbi who coordinated the talk. After the talk, he told me and my friends Mike and Ari all about the amazing mixed grill they had at the restaurant across the street. And suddenly I had a craving for schwarma again. I don't know what this says about my morals, but at least I still consider myself lucky to live above my favorite Schwarma place in the country.
If no one posts any comments. See, when no one comments, I assume no one is reading the blog, so what's the point of writing it? I already know what I think, and I've never really been one to keep a journal (GAL not withstanding). So nu? Respond!
So lately, there have been a few things on my mind of a pretty heady nature. Being at Yeshiva has done pretty much exactly what I was hoping, but I'm pretty surprised about how it happened. Around this time 2 years ago, I was probably at the peak of religiosity and observance. Then, over time, it sort of stopped making sense to me. I couldn't believe in a God responsible for everything that I saw wrong with Judaism. That is to say, the way that Jews around me envisioned God seemed totally foreign to me, and I had trouble thinking of God as a force that compelled me to buy into Judaism. I stopped davening, I grew a very cynical attitude toward mitzvot (though I remained observance), and I no longer wanted to be a Rabbi. I figured I was having all of these problems because of how intellectualized Judaism became to me at Harvard (people there overanalyze things a lot), and I assumed that I needed to return to a more emotional/spiritual community to learn to love Judaism again.
Two months ago, I decided that I loved the Yeshiva intellectually, but that it was even more difficult to be spiritual there than it was at Harvard. I pretty much reserved myself to being a hiloni Jew, albeit one who still kept mitzvot. It seemed sad that Judaism as a meaningful part of my life seemed a part of my past, but I just could not bring myself to find meaning it any more.
Thankfully, the Yeshiva has some of the smartest teachers and thinkers from whom I have ever learned. And apparently, since Judaism was ruined for me intellectually, I needed it to be rebuilt for me intellectually as well.
What changed for me could essentially be summed up in a short interchange between two members of the Yeshiva faculty discussing politics. The first, a teacher who believes that the Third Temple should be built in its right time (though not at the expense of doing anything to the holy sites currently there), stated that though he usually votes for Meretz, he was considering voting for Peretz in this election. The other, a rabbi who spends his days studying and teaching Talmud, encouraging students to develop a serious relationship with Tefilla, and has been learning at Yeshivot for the better part of his life (until recently, Orthodox yeshivot), responded by saying that he usually votes for Meretz as well. What impressed me about this was not that I recognized fellow liberals in Jerusalem--when I had become all but convinced that all liberals live in Tel Aviv--but that it was possible for two people with deep commitments to traditional Jewish lifestyles to affiliate with a party that seems at times to be the antithesis to the religious parties (Shinui notwithstanding).
I had come to think that as hard as I tried to find alternate meanings and values in Judaism when my values conflicted with traditional understandings of Judaism, that in the end Judaism had limited room for the kind of radical understanding that I sometimes see into Judaism. But knowing that traditional Jews could vote for Meretz--Jews with far greater knowledge of Judaism than I--proved to me that even in Israel, no one way of thinking has a monopoly on Judaism. And that is allowing me to begin to redefine Judaism on my terms once again. And the most important of that process for me is God. One teacher of mine argues that the entire structure of Judaism relies on there being a God, and that the Torah is the word God. The key, my teacher says, is defining God so that the Torah has to be the word of God. However, since the Torah is not easy to understand, it is definitely possible that things that seem clear in the Torah are not so clear afterall. The difference between this understanding and traditional understandings though, is that in my teacher's understanding, if something that the Torah says seems clearly in conflict with our moral values, then my teacher believes that we are understanding the Torah wrong, whereas many traditional thinkers would say that our moral values are slightly off. The most important part of this system is the ability to still let the Torah speak to you even when it means that it's in conflict with traditional interpretations. The key, of course, is to recognize that Judaism allows for disagreement, and find a way to disagree within Judaism's own system (Rabbi Joel Roth, another faculty member at my yeshiva, and a top thinker within Conservative Judaism, has made this argument his raison d'etre).
But thinking about my right to do this has revealed a real paradox to me. It seems that the Torah is given so much weight in traditional Judaism that the Torah becomes completely distant. Because our system includes 2000 years of commentary building one on the next, each older text takes precedence over a younger text. As a result, if the Mishna understands the law to be one way, the Gemara cannot directly contradict it. If a thinker of the 16th century disagrees with a 10th century thinker, he has to show how that 10th century thinker contradicts himself or is contradicted by a contemporary source or an older source. As a result, modern interpretations of what the words of the Torah say takes a major back seat to what previous commentators say the Torah means. So if I came in and could show convincingly that "Thou shalt not murder" is based on a Canaanite concept of murder that referred specifically to honor killings, and it was confirmed by numerous historical texts, that interpretation would be meaningless because it would undo 2000 years of Jewish tradition from the Tanaim (Mishnaic Rabbis) onwards. The words of the Torah are so holy that we can never undo them, but we certainly can never revert back to them and undo the way they have been understood, even if they seem to have been understood incorrectly. I'm not sure what to do with that yet, but I think the challenge now is to find a way that the words of the Torah can still speak to us while recognizing that sometimes the way they spoke to previous generations is problematic in our day, even if it spoke to Jews that way for close to 2000 years.
A final thought, on schwarma. Last night I went to a talk on ethical slaughter and kashrut. The Rabbi argued very convincingly that there exist kosher slaughter methods today that are more ethical than the methods currently employed. There seem to be a number of problems in kosher slaughterhouses with cruelty to animals, mistreatment of workers, and the desensitizing of mass slaughter of animals. It made me really question why I eat meat so often since these issues do bother me. I wondered if I should become a vegetarian, or at least restrict eating meat to Shabbat. I thought about this for all of 5 minutes, until I talked to Rabbi Romm, the Rabbi who coordinated the talk. After the talk, he told me and my friends Mike and Ari all about the amazing mixed grill they had at the restaurant across the street. And suddenly I had a craving for schwarma again. I don't know what this says about my morals, but at least I still consider myself lucky to live above my favorite Schwarma place in the country.
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