Moving, moving, moving
If you see this posting, it’s a sign that I have sucessfully migrated this blog from my old Fedora 4 virtual server at OpenHosting to my new Debian Etch virtual server at Linode. (The OpenHosting guys have given me great service, but I’m tired of learning how many Linux software packages that I need are unavailable as RPMs.)
As far as I can tell, the only glitch in the migration process was that a whole bunch of ” and ם characters were somehow corrupted. (Hell, to paraphrase Sartre, is other character sets.) But I think that’s fixed now.
Dept. of poorly named consumer goods
This country needs more children’s toys that help our young ones respect and empathize with people who have severe mobility impairments. I am disappointed to report that the Dora the Explorer Lil’ Quad is not such a toy.
Another way the Internet brings people together
There’s a song by the Bobs called Naming the Band, in which the narrator, an aspiring heavy-metal musician, laments that “names with meaning and attitude aren’t easy to find”. Well, now they are.
via Hacker News
Paranoia in full flour
The Boston Police Department, which took such heroic efforts to save our city from illuminated cartoon characters, has some competition:
NEW HAVEN, Conn. – Two people who sprinkled flour in a parking lot to mark a trail for their offbeat running club inadvertently caused a bioterrorism scare and now face a felony charge.
The sprinkled powder forced hundreds to evacuate an IKEA furniture store Thursday….
Mayoral spokeswoman Jessica Mayorga said the city plans to seek restitution from the Salchows, who are due in court Sept. 14.
“You see powder connected by arrows and chalk, you never know,” she said. “It could be a terrorist, it could be something more serious. We’re thankful it wasn’t, but there were a lot of resources that went into figuring that out.”
Remember, citizens, if it’s not an American flag, it’s probably a bomb.
Gender and shopping
The second part of the Boston Globe’s series on a Somerville doctor who got a male-to-female sex change begins thusly:
At age 52, Deborah Bershel made her first trip to the mall. It lasted nine hours. It was July 2006, and there was barely a rack of clothes in the Burlington Mall that she didn’t comb through. The next day she headed to the Natick Mall and logged another five hours shopping. She was making up for lost time. In each store, her approach was usually the same. She’d march up to a salesclerk and explain, “I’m a transsexual, so I’m new to this.” Then she’d ask her particular question, whether it be which cut of jeans would cover the top of her panties or which type of fabrics wouldn’t cling to her arms. “I have questions that no 50-year-old woman should have,” she said.
My wife inferred from this anecdote that Bershel had no female friends, because otherwise, she would be asking those friends for advice, not sales clerks. Women, she said, shop in groups as a social activity; men shop for the purpose of getting something. (The standard “all generalizations are false” disclaimer applies.)
I suggested that she put that observation in her LJ, but she asked me to put it here, since it connects with my previous comments regarding transwomen and platonic female friendship.
Bar sinister
Ha`aretz, covering the eviction of some Jewish families from an illegal settlement in Hebron, quoted Gershon Bar-Kochba, one of the residents who tried to resist eviction. The name also appeared in this New York Times article from 1989: “Gershon Bar Kochba, a seminary student from Hebron, was suspected of leading a group who opened fire on Palestinians in Hebron…” And this article on the Hebron Jewish community’s Web site laments that Gershon Bar-Kochba had to post a 25,000-shekel1 bond in order to bail out a 14-year-old settler, while Arab suspects were routinely released on their own recognizance2.
OK, this guy appears to be something of a macher in Hebron. What astounds me is that he carries the name of the leader of the last Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire. That revolt was thoroughly crushed by the Romans, after which all the remaining Jews were exiled from Judea, the province was renamed “Syria Palestina”, many Jewish practices (such as Torah study and Shabbat) were prohibited, and many rabbis were martyred. What kind of yeshiva bocher treats a guy like this as a role model? Does he learn from some Bizzarro-Talmud in which it says that God destroyed our Temple and exiled us from our homeland because we were insufficiently ruthless to our enemies?
via ongoing
1 Approximately US$6,000.
2 The article presented this as one example of how the Israeli government was treating Jewish settlers in Hebron more harshly than the Arabs. I mentioned this to my wife, and she said, “Well, they should. God Himself does.” After all, she went on, the Moslems only have the seven Noachide commandments to observe, while we have 613…of course, we can’t observe all of them today…and one of the reason we can’t observe all of them today is the misguided zealotry of Jews like the original Bar-Kochba.
Denial is not just where Moses got the frogs
Several folks on my LJ friends list have mentioned this charming piece, in which Noah Feldman, a Maimonides School alumnus, reflects on his school experience and the “Modern Orthodox” community surrounding it. I put scare quotes around “Modern Orthodox” because while he attributes certain attitudes to people he calls “Modern Orthodox”, and perhaps those people would call themselves “Modern Orthodox”, he does not mention the long string of Jewish thinkers, starting with Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch זצ״ל, who defined Modern Orthodox Judaism. Feldman refers to Senator Joe Lieberman; he refers to Rabbi Moshe Feinstein זצ״ל; he refers to Yigal Amir and Baruch Goldstein. But he never cites the life or works of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik זצ״ל, the pre-eminent Modern Orthodox philosopher of the 20th century, who founded of the Maimonides School and who was still alive while Feldman was a student there. That should tell you something about the lens through which Feldman sees the Orthodox world.
Feldman seems to believe that the most authentic expressions of Judaism are the most illiberal ones. Now, if I believed that, I would either join the charedi world, or I would never set foot in a synagogue again. But Feldman is married to a non-Jewish woman and takes his children to hear the Book of Esther read on Purim. “Isn’t everyone’s life a mass of contradictions?” he says.
The “Modern Orthodox” community offends Feldman because instead of letting us all bask in postmodern “I am large, I contain multitudes” playfulness, it tries to resolve the contradictions. At Maimonides, learning the theory of evolution is OK, but marrying a non-Jew is not OK. The Maimonides approach is certainly open to critique. Different schools of Jewish thought (charedi Orthodox, classical Reform, etc.) can argue for different approaches to being a Jew in the 21st century. But Feldman does not have a school of thought; he has emotions that he treats as entitlements. It is not enough for him to marry a non-Jew and continue to feel connected with his Jewish upbringing; he wants his Orthodox alma mater to endorse his marriage. And so he does not argue; he insinuates that there is something false about Modern Orthodoxy, that instead of teaching Jews a way of engaging with the modern world, it teaches Jews to disguise themselves for the sake of getting along in that world.
Feh.
It’s bad enough that the most reactionary elements of the Jewish world have appointed themselves the final arbiters of my religion and have declared that my own community’s practice is, at best, Frumkeit Lite. But why do people with no interest in accepting “the yoke of the commandments” give the reactionaries the same license?
0.2 score years ago...
Hey, look, it’s my fourth blogiversary!
According to my clever parsing of my HTTP logs, roughly 200 people (well, roughly 200 distinct IP addresses that are unlikely to belong to bots) read this blog directly over the Web; LiveJournal reports that 40 users are subscribed to its syndication feed over there; a smattering of other people might be reading this through other syndication services.
So who are y’all? Pull up some virtual chairs, introduce yourselves, advertise your own blogs. See, I even made the comment box bigger, so you can get comfortable.
Who is this God person anyway?
Thanks to Michael and Nomi, Jen and I got to see the PBS four-hour special on the Mormons. It was a fascinating documentary, but I found one omission curious: there was almost nothing about the church’s theology.
Compared with most other sects that call themselves Christian, the Mormons have (at least) two striking differences in their conception of the divine. One is that they see God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost as three separate individuals, rather than three persons sharing a single divine essence. Another is that the belief ח״ו that God was once a person and that a good Mormon may get his (or her?) own world to rule as a god in the afterlife: former LDS president Lorenzo Snow summarized this principle by saying “As man is God once was, and as God is man may become”. (Cf. D&C 132:20.) In other words, Mormons are polytheists.
The documentary only refers to this belief elliptically and in passing, but I think it sheds an important light on the Mormon persecutions of the early nineteenth century (which precede Mormon polygamy by at least a decade). A number of other American Christian sects (e.g., the churches of Christ, the Disciples of Christ, and the Seventh-Day Adventists) were also inspired by the “Second Great Awakening” of 1800–1830, but they did not get such a violent reaction from the mainstream. Even the Oneida Community, whose doctrine of “complex marriage” made Mormon polygamy look downright prudish, did not face the same degree of persecution.
I was reminded of Devil’s Playground, a documentary on the Amish that I saw a while back, because in that film, too, the doctrinal differences between the Amish and other Christian sects were glossed over. One of the Amish boys interviewed mentioned in passing that attending a Baptist church service was one of the “bad” things that Amish teenagers might indulge in during their rumspringa. One of the girls eventually decided not to join the Amish church and decided to go to college instead—to a sectarian Christian college. But these subjects’ thoughts on the difference between the Amish faith and other forms of Christianity were not explored any further.
Back when I was doing my bachelor’s thesis, one of my advisors—Lisa Rofel, an anthropology professor—warned me that I had to make sure to describe my subjects from “the native’s point of view”. In that respect, I fear that both of these documentaries fell a little short. To truly understand an exotic religious group (or interactions between several exotic religious groups), it helps to understand the aspects of their beliefs and practices that are most important to them, and not simply the ones that are most important to the stereotypical liberal documentary-watcher.
Converting the unfaithful: a primer
Once upon a time when I was an undergraduate, I wrote a series of articles for the school paper (I, II, III, IV) about the Boston Church of Christ (BCC), a religious cult that had spread like dandelions across local campuses. Two key points of their doctrine were that the only real Christians were the ones baptized into their network of churches, and that the quality of a Christian’s relationship with God is directly proportional to his or her success at making converts. Motivated by those beliefs, organized in an Amway-style pyramid system, and using some high-pressure sales tactics, the church racked up exponential growth for about ten years, until attrition caught up with them.
One of the folks I interviewed for the series was a dean and a Christian pastor, who said that the BCC’s approach to making converts was all wrong. The early Christians, he said, attracted people by example. Flavius would see that Marcellus was good to his family, honest in business, etc., etc., and also hear that Marcellus worshipped some strange new god called “Jesus”; thus, Flavius became interested in Christianity. Imagine that—converting other people to your religion by your own exemplary behavior. What a tedious chore! You can’t just spend a few hours a week lecturing the heathen about how you are right and they are wrong, rattling off the talking points that you have carefully memorized in response to their well-meaning but ignorant questions. You have to earn respect from the people around you, and hope that respect for you as a person will lead to respect for your faith.
But, friends and neighbors, I am here to testify that the dean’s strategy actually works. I am an Orthodox Jew today, in part, because of some of the Orthodox and frum-Conservative folks I met: people I liked, people I respected, people whom I identified with. And none of those folks were stumping for Chabad, Aish ha-Torah, or any other “bring non-Orthodox Jews to frumkeit” organization.
By contrast, let me present a case study in how not to proselytize:
U.S. Navy veteran David Miller said that when he checked into the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Iowa City, he didn’t realize he would get a hard sell for Christian fundamentalism along with treatment for his kidney stones.
Miller, 46, an Orthodox Jew, said he was repeatedly proselytized by hospital chaplains and staff in attempts to convert him to Christianity during three hospitalizations over the past two years.
He said he went hungry each time because the hospital wouldn’t serve him kosher food, and the staff refused to contact his rabbi, who could have brought him something to eat.
...
Over the past two years, Miller said, he has been asked over and over by the Iowa City VA medical center’s staff within its offices, clinics and wards, “You mean you don’t believe that Jesus is the Messiah?” and “Is it just Orthodox Jews who deny Jesus?” He said one staffer told him, “I don’t understand; how can you not believe in Jesus; he’s the Messiah of the Jews, too, you know.”
If any of the Christians who made these comments think they were bringing Miller closer to their religion, they are deluding themselves. At best, they were annoying busybodies, like folks who lecture overweight strangers about what to eat. At worst, they were showing one another their loyalty to the “Christian” tribe by harrassing someone who was not a member. (And if Miller’s case ever turns into a lawsuit, we are sure to hear other members of this tribe wail and gnash their teeth about how they are being “persecuted”.)
It is not my place, of course, to tell those Christians how to interpret the tenets of their own religion. I’d just like to encourage my fellow frummies to hold themselves to a higher standard. If it’s too much work to act in a way that conspicuously brings credit to your religion, at least try not to make it look bad, OK?
via .common sense
