Zackary Sholem Berger's Blog, page 40

All God needs is love?

Jay Michaelson tries to explain why the Day of Judgment emphasizes disturbingly negative characteristics of the Almighty. His last paragraph is a mystical bridge too far for my taste.

Perhaps when balanced by other attributes (as it is in all sophisticated theology—rational, mystical and otherwise) the quality of judgment is an important one to bear in mind. But not when it is separated from the underlying truths that love can be felt to emanate from the very fabric of our awareness; that love, not judgment, is unconditional and present even amid great and inexplicable evil; that love ought to be our own aspiration, in imitation of the Divine. 

Love is indeed a necessary attribute of God, since unbalanced judgment is stern, unforgiving, and terrifying. These are theological truisms, as Michaelson himself points out, because much of life is stern, unforgiving, and terrifying. People do evil. We make mistakes.  Striving and judging are not abusive.

We need compassion* and strict judgment, yes.  But here Michaelson's love train goes off the rails. "Love can be felt to emanate from the very fabric of our awareness"? "[L]ove, not judgment, is unconditional and present even amid great and inexplicable evil" –

Such breathlessness illustrates why mysticism, indeed, much of theology, is inexpressibly annoying. Inexpressibly, because if you, Dear Reader, don't cry Hallelujah at hearing the vague tale of someone else's transcendental experience, it's too bad for you, Jack or Jill, please request a refund after the performance. So lay it out for my benighted soul. What is the "fabric of our awareness"? When does love emanate from it (Yom Kippur? lunchtime? happy hour?)?  Even in the small corner of the universe which the fabric of my awareness manages to brush against, I feel the absence of Divine love on many a dark day. When I do manage to make a connection when davening, I do not feel love. I am suffused by a complicated mixture of emotions which are too strange and precious to name. To call them Love is to peddle unicorn-and-rainbow stickers as the spitting image of the Almighty. 

Similarly, I do not find – in my experience – that God's "love…is unconditional and present even amid great and inexplicable evil." To make such a theological error is as obscene as citing Divine Judgment as the backdrop to the Holocaust, Godwin's Law or no. 

You are welcome to find whatever attribute of God speaks to your esthetic. Far be it from me to be the wet blanket which denies your personal experience of a universe in which love everywhere and always exists. But if you want us to understand your conception of God, you have to tell me where Love fits in a universe in which evil and hatred abound.

God is called compassionate, merciful, loving, judging, punishing, and rewarding. These terms are poor substitutes for any theological truth we may aspire to. No matter how attractive the abstraction, the mystic or rationalist must deal with the same theodicy that previous generations have torn hearts and parchment over. 

I'm not going to say "to Hell with love." I'm looking for that attribute in God just as much as the next religious person. But an empty paean leaves me frustrated and unconvinced.

*Compassion (rachamim), says Michaelson, is etymologically related to "rechem." Probably more relevant is the verb r-ch-m, meaning "to love." So instead of calling God the "Womb-like One," we could call God the Loving One. Less piquant, but more sensical – after all, my God has neither womb nor prostate.

Baltimore, books, and @baltimorebooks

The Baltimore Bibliophile, otherwise known as @baltimorebooks or Celeste Sollod (my wife), is starting up a book group which I highly recommend, and I would attend myself if I weren't with our kids then. She is also heading up a panel at the Baltimore Book Festival, which ditto. Read more about both here. 

Ten years

At the dentist that morning, asking, "Was anyone hurt?"

My doctoral adviser, sagely observing that bioterrorism should now be my chosen research specialty.

The walk from the East 20s to the 60s, together with my wife, on the chance that we should "get away" — to somewhere (anywhere). The procession was unhurried.

My strong intuition, in contradistinction to many thousands of others who streamed downtown to help, that I should stay as far away from the site as possible — that in fact there was something obscene in my going down there (for me, not necessarily for others).

The stupid things I said at shiva.

The posters at Bellevue in the rain. 

Elul and Euthyphro

In this week's and last week's parasha, as in much of Deuteronomy, moral oratory is front and center. How do we connect such language to God?

Our illustrious forbearer Plato famously discussed these issues in his dialogue Euthyphro. Socrates met Euthyphro near the courts where was awaiting trial; he had been accused of falsely educating his young followers. Euthyphro told Socrates that he was accusing his father – of murder. He explained the story: a hired man of theirs had killed another servant, and his father tied the murderer hand and foot, throwing him into a pit without any sustenance while he went to ask the local priest for his judgment on the matter. While he was gone, the hired man died – thus Euthyphro had come to accuse his father himself of murder.

At Socrates's surprise that a man would accuse his own father of murder, Euthyphro responded that he was knowledgeable in the ways of the gods. That is Socrates opening to start, in his faux-naive fashion, a dialogue into the meaning of "godly." Does this concept have a definition? Is something pious because it is loved by the gods, or is it loved by the gods because it is pious? If the former, we could conceivably be commanded to follow a decree of the gods (or God) even in the absence of moral good – an untenable situation to our moral intuition. If the latter, what need to we have of gods (or God)?

(Note that Euthyphro is a dialogue with many interesting parts, and the Wikipedia article is good. The parallels with the Jewish tradition are notable. One of Socrates' first critiques of Euthyphro's naive confidence in his own piety is this: the gods dispute among themselves, so how are we to know that there is a unitary definition of the pious? While we don't believe in many gods [albeit some believe in multiple emanations of the Godly] we do believe in multiple opinions. How can three rabbis and four opinions represent one Godly will?)

The Jewish response to this dilemma is to tack a sign marked Theodicy over the door labeled Philosophy. We don't need to navigate the Euthryphrian dilemma because we know God is good, merciful and compassionate.

But in Elul we land on the ram's horns of our own dilemma, called the Akedah. And how do we escape that? Surely, no matter how one understands the plain meaning of the tale, no good was decreed by God on that day – even if it was never meant for Isaac to be actually sacrificed and the entire task was meant as an ordeal.

One way to escape this dilemma, or to cop out of it, is to realize that Abraham was commanded to sacrifice as an individual. He had to confront the Divine will with his own will (perhaps in our day one must confront the Categorical Imperative). But we, as a community, do not have to confront such Divine dilemmas. We can proceed confident that God is good, that our relationships with each other and all other people must be founded on those Divine attributes we know to be good. 

Blow the Moon Down

Shofar, so

good. Shevarim

heals. Ring like

Hell to serve in

Heaven.

The teruah

Hurts. Your heroine,

Israel, calls down

the moon.

We already know

how to blow

ourselves down.

Now stand up and hear.

Strap-marks on our arms.

Jingling tekiahs

to our hidden rooms.

We mumble a psalm:

a year in our ears.

Anthropology and anthropology: two books of poetry

1.

Trapped in Montreal one winter night, John Ashbery, Ambrose Bierce, and Ethan Coen rented out the brain of Gabe Foreman to produce the pretty-witty A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People. It's cleverly alphabetical. Genres are parody-checked (a Coleridge with marginal annotations, a Mad Libs poem, and – fittingly enough for our Generation PowerPoint – a piechart divvying "Bad Apples" into Average Dudes, Jerks, Jerks, and Jerks). There is a narrator who occasionally allows himself the first person – he lives, it appears, in suburbia, is oft disappointed in love, and knows that we are going to die. Formalism allows for well-constructed complaints against the universe:

the fact that you got dumped

on your anniversary means nothing to the cops

kicking at your office door. Life is not that fair.

When hinge and lock implode, you're not there.

The pseudo-encyclopedic anthropology allows for surprising observations. Kleptomaniacs goes like this:

As long as you keep an open mind

about the thing you seek,

it's always in the first place you look.

It's in the second person, of course. The reader: you or me.

It's all worth reading. I laughed and thought, dipping my dipper into this shining well. It's a Kuriosenkammer with a host I hope to spend more time with. Strong feelings were not awoken. Who knows whose fault this is – maybe mine.

2.

Those who reinvent themselves as ethnopoets envy those with a culture that crouches in the guts from the very moment of birth. Ishion Hutchinson was born in Jamaica; his multi-layered, deeply textured Far District chronicles the voyages of a boy becoming poet and immigrant even before he leaves his home country. There is much to admire here and I'm not done with the book yet. In the first few pages, the jewel New World Frescoes is cut to a known pattern (I am sure Derek Walcott has been here before) but placed in a setting all its own.

To paint the great frescoes of the new world,

he uses the woods and the hills for saints,

local dirt unnamed by Adam, its faint,

fecund sex breeding yams; the holy word,

 

a mitred worm holing to the island's

sulphorous heart where aboriginal deities

sleep another century, worrying volcanologists

who study in mists the peaks of the Pitons.

His preoccupations are mirrored in these verses: the speaking, living, breathing-breeding genus loci, the foreboding divine. (To be honest, I don't think "study in mists the peaks of the Pitons" is too subtle here by any rate…)

3.

So there is Canadian anthropology of the wit (part of Foreman's charm is his north-of-the-border exotica – one poem is called Jumping the Queue) and Caribbean anthropology of the apotheosized volcano.  The comparison is unfair. But here they are, both books, in my bag. What else can I do but compare them?

 

 

Wanted: someone to remove my spleen

A mailing list I subscribe to sent out the latest in a number of requests that go like this: "My grandfather wrote a book, and I'm sure my family and many other people would love to hear how he [taught an ass to read Aleinu/survived his brother's wedding/asked his relatives for money/started a thriving underworld concern]. Would anyone like to help us in this project?"

Did you notice what didn't get mentioned there? Money. I don't translate for money any more, but let me point out that professional translators – including those who specialize in family letters or personal memoirs – do a better job than amateurs. If your grandfather expected anyone to read his memoirs at all, he would rather they be translated by someone who knows what they're doing. 

Similarly, if you want your carbenes synthesized, spleen removed, spacecraft designed, script read, or bread baked, you are better off going to a professional. They will probably not do this work for free.

Dracula, the undead, and Not in the Same Breath

Josh Lambert of Tablet kindly mentioned the book in his On the Bookshelf column, calling it a "varied, clever collection." My friend Marc Caplan also gets a mention for his comparative study of African and Yiddish literatures. Buy his book too. 

While I'm at it, let me mention a sterling work of post-war American Jewish poetry, whose commodious ottava rima encompasses baseball, minyan, shofar, sex, and Derek Jeter with wit and charm. I refer, of course, to So Late Into the Night by the inimitable Elinor Nauen.

Conservative Jewish social justice: what and why?

I got a flattering invitation the other day to participate in a conference in September at JTS on Conservative Judaism and social justice. The event, sponsored by the Rabbinical Assembly, was billed to me as "a meeting about the Theory of Change of Social Justice" (I'm not sure what this means, so in what follows I'll be addressing social justice, not theories of change).  I don't claim any special expertise, but apparently someone who has read this blog thought that I had opinions on the topic.  (That someone is R. Menachem Creditor, who I know only electronically.)

So as to participate in future conversations, I thought I'd better cook up such opinions, and fast. First come definitional questions on their dirty bare feet. What is social justice, and what does it mean for it to be Conservative? Do we first help the poor in our own families, other Jews, our own cities (Baltimore doesn't lack poor people to help), the most needy in the world, or those in the State of Israel? Should we be concerned with issues apart from the (re)distribution of resources? How do we identify those issues and how do we prioritize? Even harder: what does it mean to prioritize the issues in a (Conservative) Jewish way?

I don't have the answers. But one way to frame the questions is to understand that these are not primarily halachic questions. I am not a decisor or Torah scholar, but my intuition is that, if we were to try to identify uniquely Jewish priorities in social justice, we would run into the same difficulties as in health care and halachah. The problems are too big to align neatly with halachic precedent, and the guiding halachic principles too contradictory and non-specific to be of much help. Among other reasons, this is why being a liberal Jew is difficult. Our liberal values are the same as those of the society of which we are happily a part. We are not separatist enough to require careful identification of which liberal values are allowed to claim Jewish yichus. (I happen to think we need more cultural separatism – that's why I'm a Yiddishist – but no moral separatism.)

As a non-Conservative counterexample, take Uri L'Tzedek, the Orthodox social justice organization which I admire. I get their emails. Alongside the usual announcements for an activist non-profit (lectures to come, new hires, ongoing campaigns and upcoming demonstrations) are always endorsements by Orthodox figures, most often rabbis, generally Modern Orthodox, majority male, and always unimpeachable. This is of course good publicity, but also a sign that  U. L'Tz.'s existence is not without tension. Full-time busybodies patrol the boundaries of Orthodoxy (some even take it upon themselves to patrol Judaism as a whole!), and the organization must display its bona fides prominently.

Back to us, though. If we Conservative Jews want to somehow make our social justice Jewish, the way to go about it is theologically rather than halachically. (The general shape of this thought I owe to Richard Claman, who still davens at Town and Village Synagogue, where I used to go.) There is a liberal eschatology which is different from that of our fundamentalist coreligionists. We don't have a Rapture, and don't believe that our Christian, Muslim, or Hindu friends go downstairs while we hitch a ride on Elijah's chariot to the better place.

If we do believe in redemption, that our world is broken and in need of repair – but at the same time believe that all peoples contribute to that desired end, that should (I think) help us arrange our justice priorities accordingly.

I hope to closely follow the conversation as it takes shape, whether at JTS (difficult, because the conference will not be Web-casted – search me why) or elsewhere.

Next Thursday in NY

Looking forward to my Bolt Bus-powered excursion to New York next Thursday to appear at the Workmen's Circle bookstore. Check the Events tab above for more. Your recommendations for what I should read are most welcome.