blogosphere

Via the Slog: the cutest thing ever, truly, is two four-year-olds debating the pros and cons of a certain two Democrats. It’s like that old Daily Show segment in which inane things said by TV pundits would be reenacted by children, but this one is definitely sui generis.

The Yerushalmi (or Jerusalem Talmud, or Palestinian Talmud, though people don’t seem to be calling it that much these days), in Tractate Pesachim 68b, says:

האוכל מצה בערב הפסח כבא על ארוסתו בבית חמיווהבא

One who eats matzah on the eve of Passover [i.e. before the holiday has started] is like one who who has sex with his bride-to-be in the home of his future father-in-law.

Asher Ginsberg, alias Ahad Ha’am, is reputed to have said in response:

עשיתי שניהם ואינם דומים

I’ve done both, and they’re nothing alike.

Also, my good friend the Friar notes that Ahad Ha’am was an early blogger, griping about the state of things in the Holy Land decades before it was cool.

Hat-tip: DovBear

• From the Slog: “Log Cabin Republican: Fuck Gays Who Live in Other States!” (That’s not the good kind of “fuck”, either.)
• From the Arizona Republic, via Feministing: Arizona’s “Squaw Peak” to be officially renamed “Piestewa Peak” after Lori Piestewa, a Hopi soldier who was killed in combat in Iraq in March 2003.
• From the BBC: A new American liberal pro-peace Jewish lobby called J Street, a sort of liberal counterweight to the conservative-dominated AIPAC. It’s been high time for something like this for years; I’m glad it’s got off the ground with as much fanfare as it’s been getting.
• From my good friend Friar Yid: “They All Look Alike”. This appears to be the opinion of some Haredi Jews regarding non-Orthodox or secular Jews. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

The ever-reliable Lazer Brody has written a blurb about why pi is the coolest number ever. Hint: it has to do with God. And Toyrah:

Our Torah is sweeter than honey. Within it, you can find all the secrets of creation.

I’m going to share with you something that none of the math or geophysics professors in MIT or Cal Tech know, nor does anyone on the staff at NASA. Now hear this from your buddy Lazer:

I think there might be a reason they won’t tell you these things—but anyway, why make the facile assumption that nobody who works in science or engineering or mathematics is a Jew who takes this sort of stuff seriously?

Pi is the secret of creation. Kabbalah, our esoteric portion of Torah passed on to us by Rabbi Yitzchak Luria Ashkenazi (the famed “Arizal”) and his disciple Rabbi Chaim Vital, may their holy memories arouse mercy on us,

(Yes, he did actually write ‘arouse mercy on us’. I am not making this up.)

explains that Ain Sof, Hashem The Infinite, created the world by a process known as tzimtzum, or contraction, whereby Hashem had to designate a point in the middle of his Divine and all-encompassing light to make room for a physical universe. This process, super simplified, was done by hishtalshelut, a series of cocentric [sic] circles the correspond to each of the sefirot, the holy spheres that mainifest [sic] Hashem’s different attributes.

Okay, whatever. It’s the conclusion that our sage mathematician/kabbalist comes to immediately after this point that really blows my mind:

Therefore, nothing in creation is square. All of creation is round, from electrons and protons to the great galaxies.

Nothing is square? Everything is round? What about: squares, cubes, right angles, television sets, sofas, stereo speakers, pianos, and books (sorry, seforim), just to name a few things? Also, many galaxies have shapes other than circles. But if you’re intent on making a silly, poorly-informed point, I guess you can’t let little details like these stop you.

A magical number, the key to computing circles, diameters, and circumferences is Pi, or 3.14 with subsequent fractional digits to infinity.

The Holy Name that Hashem used and uses (for creation is renewed every single day) in the contraction process is שד”י, the Hebrew name Shaddai, which is made up of 3 letters, shin, dalet, and yud.

All Hebrew letters have a numerical value. Shin is 300, yud is 10, and dalet is 4. Together, the Holy Name of Shaddai equals 314. If we divide this number by 100, the number that signifies perfection - which only Hashem is - we get 3.14, or pi, the secret of creation.

All right, so if you add up the letters you get an approximation of pi times a hundred. So you have to divide by a hundred to get a meaningful result out of this. What’s the justification for doing this? You could come up with so many other than ‘it signifies perfection’. I will leave these as an exercise to the reader. But more important—and interestingly, from my point of view—is the fact that unless you believe in some form of the documentary hypothesis—which I presume Lazer does not—the name Shaddai leads you into all sorts of contradictions. For a terrific example, see Exodus 6.3 and Genesis 22:14, which seems to suggest that Abraham knew the name ‘Yahweh’ (translated as ‘the LORD’). Also, Shaddai seems to have been a Mesopotamian cult title of one of the Semitic chief gods El. For a useful point of comparison, see Psalm 82, which begins: ‘God (elohim) stands in the congregation of El‘ (god? El? could this mean the council of gods under El?). At any rate, this is quite a vexed issue, much more complicated that Lazer is making it.

However, these are but minor obstacles to the determined mind of our esteemed rabbi. If he wants to believe that pi is holy, mystical, and the secret to knowledge of creation, then by all means let him go ahead and believe it. The rest of us will keep on thinking that it’s pretty neat in its own right—or, if not, then at least an opportunity to hold a demonstration.

Bill Kristol, the New York Times‘ newly-resident conservative, wrote a boneheaded column in today’s paper in which he declares…well, it’s not important what he declared. The point is, it was completely wrong. His source was the right-wing website Newsmax.com, which is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a reliable source. Anyway, Kristol had to publish a correction, and the entire blogosphere has been abuzz with the news all day, so if you’re that curious, just search for it on Google. What’s interesting is that now the author of the piece on Newsmax.com, one Ronald Kessler, is trying to remove this incident from his Wikipedia page.

This kind of battle simply can’t be won: it’s become known as the Streisand effect, after Barbara Streisand tried to have an aerial photo of her house removed from the Internet and copies of the picture simply multiplied like tribbles all over cyberspace. The same thing happened not too long ago with the publication of the HD-DVD encryption key number on the Internet, the Church of Scientology’s efforts to remove a video of Tom Cruise speaking about Scientology, and a zillion other examples. You simply can’t remove this sort of thing from the Internet. It won’t work, it only makes people curious, and the Internet moves too fast for this sort of thing to be effective.

Happy Pi Day! Today’s date, expressed at M/DD, comes out to an approximation of the value of pi—3.14. And if you celebrate the day at 1:59:26 (and forgive the ‘p.m.’), then you’re doubly a geek. More interesting information and links can be found in the Wikipedia article, or in the LA Times Web Scout blog here.

Today’s date expressed in DDMMYYYY format (14032008) occurs 9,209,525 digits after the decimal point in the value of pi.

I am going to make pie for dessert tonight. It will be ten inches (25.4 cm) in diameter at its base, and therefore, my slide rule informs me, 31.4 inches (79.8 cm) in circumference, since circumference of a circle is its diameter times pi. It will be 78.5 square inches (about 506 square cm) in surface area at its base, since surface area of a circle is calculated by multiplying the square of its radius (half its diameter) by pi. But, you ask, how much pie is there really? This is a bit more complicated and involves trigonometry (gasp!).

To find the volume of our pie, we have to go back to our high school math and remember our geometry and trig. This calculation is a bit trickier since the pie’s edges are (mostly) slanted, making it a frustum of a cone. To calculate the volume, then, we simply subtract the volume of the smaller from the larger cone, leaving the volume of the pie as the difference. The formula for the volume of a cone is one third of its height (from the tip to the centre of the circle at the base), times the square of its base’s radius, times pi. However, we don’t know the height of the cones, since these cones are only imaginary (in the metaphysical, not the mathematical, sense). Visualize the cones, in cross-section, as a triangle. The radius of the base of the smaller triangle is 5.00 inches, and we can use a protractor to find out that the base angle is 70 degrees exactly. Trigonometry tells us that the ratio of the two legs of a right triangle is given by the tangent of the angle opposite, so taking the tangent of 70° and multiplying by 5.00 gives us the height, which is 13.74 inches. This means that the volume of the smaller cone is 359.71 cubic inches. Because angles cut by a transversal on the same side of the transversal and parallel lines are congruent, the angle of the base of the larger triangle (the top of the pie) is also 70°. My ruler shows that the depth of the pie tin is 2.5 inches, so assuming the pie rises and is baked properly, we can use 2.5 inches as the height of the frustum. Add it to 13.74 from the height of the smaller cone and we get a total height of 16.24 inches. We now find the tangent of 70° and divide the total height by it, since we want to find the length of the radius of the base of the triangle. This yields a radius of 5.9 inches across the top of the pie, which allows us to calculate a volume of 592 cubic inches for the larger cone. Subtract the volume of the smaller cone and we get a volume of 232 cubic inches, or about 3800 cubic centimetres.

I will post a picture of this insane amount of pie in all its tasty glory once the baking is complete. (Blueberry filling, I don’t think I mentioned yet.) Whee!

I’ve been horribly busy the last few days with a research project—it is done for the moment, however, so in the time in between now and when I can calm down enough to write a ‘real’ post, here’s a list of interesting tabs that have been open in my Firefox since a few days ago:

• Sometimes I think my viola-playing belongs in the Really Terrible Orchestra.
• Microsoft executives are not surprised to learn how awful Windows Vista really is.
• Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to be nominated for Vice President and current Clinton hench-person, believes that Obama has got this far only because he’s a black man.
• Some amusing British humour about the U.S. presidential election.
• Required reading: Daniel Gordis’s most recent dispatch regarding how Hayyim Nachman Bialik would be mortified by the State of Israel today.
• Iraq really didn’t have WMDs—can you friggin’ believe it?
• Chris Beam’s excellent insight that the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal is more likely to harm the Democratic Party than Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

Now I can close all those tabs, and Firefox can stop memory-leaking (ha). Hat-tips all round.

My good friend Friar Yid has an excellent post detailing a competition by Brandeis and the Bronfman philanthropies to find “the best proposal for a book that would transform the way Jews think about themselves and Judaism.” Sounds good, right? Except they settled on a book with a prescription of text study as the next best thing to save the Jewish People.

Text study. That is, studying the Torah and commentaries, the Mishnah, the Talmud, the Law Codes, and so forth and so on. Ad nauseam, really.

The Friar quotes me as saying, ‘The problem with [insert would-be revolutionary Jewish thinker here] is that they think text study is going to save the Jewish people. It won’t.’ Now, I don’t remember saying this in so many words, but it’s exactly the kind of thing I would say, because it’s true.

Repeat after me: Text study will not save Judaism.

By and large, nobody gives two hoots about anything said in, for example, the Talmud. When modern Jews are looking for guidance about an issue, be it ethical, moral, political, financial, whatever—the Jewish tradition is one of the last places they’ll look. To use the Talmudic jargon, la salqa da’atakh, it wouldn’t even come into your mind to consult the Talmud. When making these kinds of choices, people will follow the values of their society and their associates and friends, not their religious tradition’s. The Talmud, or any traditional Jewish text for that matter, is seen as so far removed in time and place from the modern world that most Jews simply don’t care. However, this is, of course, an oversimplification. The more Orthodox among us, and some of the more conservative among the Conservative branch, and possibly even some liberal Jews, genuinely believe in (a) the value of text study lishma, that is, ‘for its own sake’, and (b) the potential of such study to save the Jewish People. If you believe in the sanctity of the texts in question, or the potential to glean valuable life lessons from these texts, then I suppose (a) makes some sense. However, the vast majority of Jews cannot be arsed to care about texts. Texts are not going to save Judaism. Let me outline a couple of reasons why. There’s more than these three reasons, but I’ve already spent too long writing this essay:

1. Difficulty and inaccessibility. The Talmud is hard to read—it’s written in colloquial Aramaic with a highly technical and specialized jargon, for heaven’s sake, and the translations are uniformly awful. The commentaries are even more difficult. You have to be able to follow several different logical threads at the same time, the argumentation is very frequently obscure and arcane, and it’s not easy to figure out the function or purpose of much of what goes on in Jewish texts. Then, when you finally get through the difficulty of the text itself, you are still faced with the daunting task of making sense of the underlying argument, and in some cases this isn’t even possible.
2. Steep prerequisites. You can’t make head or tail of the Mishnah, much less the Gemarah (the two constituent parts of the Talmud) without a thorough grounding in the Torah. Not just the story-history bits of it, like Abraham sacrificing Isaac or Moses smashing the Tablets of the Law, but the Law itself, every precept, every nuance. You simply can’t approach any other text in Judaism without knowing the Torah. Then, the Talmud becomes the prerequisite for the commentaries, the Law Codes, the medieval philosophers, and everything else. It’s cumulative, and the learning curve is incredibly steep. They don’t call Jews ‘the people of the book’ for nothing.
3. Irrelevance. This applies both in time and in space. Much of the Talmud, and related writings, are about traditions thousands of years in the past, or places thousands of miles away, or both. Example: Deuteronomy 21.18–21 commands you to stone your son who is stubborn and rebellious (the so-called ben sorer umoreh). Do we do this anymore? Of course not. Did they even do it in the time of the Talmud? Of course not, and the Talmud itself basically admits as much: Chapter 8 of Tractate Sanhedrin (pages 68b and following) is obviously unhappy with this Torah law, so it institutes so many rules and regulations that it basically makes the ben sorer umoreh impossible to exist, thus legislating the Torah’s law out of existence. But the argumentation involved covers five pages of Talmud, concluding with ‘there never was one, and there never will be one’, but then Rabbi Jonathan says, ‘I saw one, and I sat on his grave.’ What the hell does this mean? And what relevance does the whole discussion have for our lives today, given that we are perfectly capable of coming to the conclusion that the Torah’s law is stupid on our own, without the help of the Talmud’s stipulation that to qualify as a stubborn and rebellious son, the boy in question must have drunk four log of Italian wine? Who the hell cares?

However, the assumption underlying not only this ’solution’ of text study, but the very question of ‘what will save the Jewish People’ in the first place, is that the Jewish People are, in some sense, fundamentally imperilled. I’m sorry, but it’s going to take more than scare-value stories about Americans’ willingness to change their religions, or the shocking levels of intermarriage, or what have you, to convince me that Judaism is in need of this kind of ’saving’. Another solution in search of a problem from the hallowed halls of academe. What a pity, when there are so many useful things we could be spending our time doing.

Our friendly cyber-neighbourhood rabbi Lazer Brody is at it again, it would appear. You may remember our unfortunately-named friend from an incident last month in which he told a woman experiencing homosexual urges that she could ‘lick the battle’ with her latent desires by, among other things, making sure to ritually wash her hands in the morning. Today, Rabbi Lazer is peddling a cure for cancer found in mushrooms, which somebody forwarded to him in the full-blown manner of an e-mail scam. The typography has been preserved exactly:

THERE WAS A MAN IN BORO PARK (BROOKLYN, NY) WHO WAS DIAGNOSED WITH PANCREATIC CANCER. HE ASKED FOR A FRUM DOCTOR, BUT HIS INSURANCE AFFORDED HIM WHAT THEY OFFERED JAPANESE DOCTOR. IT ENDED UP, THAT THIS DOCTOR WAS A GIFT FROM HEAVEN. THE DOCTOR WAS STRAIGHT WITH HIM AND TOLD HIM THAT THE MEDICAL PROFESSION COULD GIVE HIM 6 MONTHS OF LIFE, BUT IN HIS COUNTRY (JAPAN) THEY USED A PARTICULAR MUSHROOM WITH SUCCESS AND THAT HE COULD GIVE HIM SOME AND SHOW HIM HOW TO USE IT. 4 YEARS LATER HE IS THANK G-D DOING WELL. FOR THOSE WHO ARE INTERESTED, THE CURE IS BASED ON THE CONCEPT OF A PH BALANCED BODY, THERE IS THE OPINON THAT CANCER FEEDS IN AN ACID BASED BODY. THIS MUSHROOM IS VERY ALKALISING.

Amazing, isn’t it? If you only ‘balance’ the pH of your body, you can cure cancer! And guess what—doing this is, in fact, really easy, because all you have to do is eat this mushroom! There is a link to more information, helpfully provided, on a Hebrew-language website from Israel about the pseudo-medicine of reflexology. More nonsense can be found on a herbalism website, which again refers to the natural powers of this mushroom to balance your pH.

For his part, Lazer himself responds:

From what I understand from alternative-medical literature, cancer patients have too little L-Lactic acid (+) in their connective tissues. In theory, as long as L-Lactic acid (+) is predominantly present in tissue, cancer cannot develop. When there is a deficiency, the cellular respiration starts to fail and this leads to a build up of DL-Lactic acid (-) in the tissues.

Of course! The obvious problem, with cancer, is that they’re missing the right kind of acid in their connective tissues! Why did the medical establishment never think of this, and insist that they just go home and drink a tall glass of milk? (It could be mushroom milk, if you really want, I guess.) No need for all this expensive chemotherapy or anything debilitating. Besides, what do these doctors really know? All they have are fancy degrees from fancy medical schools. They don’t have the thousand-year traditional knowledge of Eastern medicine to back up their ’science’! (By the way, this particular orientalizing tradition among many Jews—especially among, but by no means limited to, Hadisim—is one worthy of a lengthier rant, but that’ll have to come at a later time.) Back to Lazer:

The Kombucha cultured fungus … is supposedly able to re-balance the blood pH and, in so doing, prevent disease conditions from occurring, and repair and relieve existing suffering. I need to learn more about this, but in the meanwhile, I sent out emails to all the Cancer patients who are in contact with me. This is certainly worth further investigation.

I don’t know anything about this subject, but I sent this nugget of information out to every cancer patient I know. This has all the trappings of an e-mail scam, doesn’t it? ‘I don’t know anything about Prince Omar, the deposed former president of Nigeria, but his story is just so compelling, I think I have to send it to everyone in my e-mail address book!’ Or, ‘I don’t know anything about these penile enlargement pills (or that they could be called “male enhancement supplements”), but the mere fact that someone somewhere says they work is enough to get me to forward it to my entire e-mail list!’ Or, ‘This eight-year-old girl who survived a catastrophic plane crash…’ you get the picture.

Seriously, how can seemingly intelligent people buy into this crap—and not only buy into it, but repost it without a second thought on their blogs, and more importantly, send it to all the cancer patients they know, thus proving, yet again, that (false) hope springs eternal? Pity the fool who buys into this miracle mushroom cure (and stops her chemo as a result), but no pity for the man who sells them the snake oil.

A big Beam blessing to Ruth from Crown Heights!

Just…no.

For the past day or two I’d been working on an essay about Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and his recent remarks that seemed to imply ‘that some aspects of Muslim Sharia law could become part of British law.’ Of course, as is so often the case, Dr. Williams said nothing of the sort, but made it very easy for various parties—notably the media, who love a good controversial headline—to misinterpret what he had said. The full text of what he actually said, if you can parse the highly technical and academic language, is up at the Archbishop’s website. I was going to go through the relevant bits and try to pick them part, but now that I’ve read today’s Language Log, I’ve discovered suddenly that everything I could think of had been written by Geoff Pullum, with at least twice as much erudition and snark as I could manage on a good day.

Pullum’s key opinion is that Dr. Williams is an unsuitable leader for the Anglican church because he cannot ‘do the demanding job of holding this figurehead position without causing his church to fall apart in social and political discord.’ He further points out that Dr. Williams also took a number of positions on homosexuality that caused dissension in various sizable wings of the church. ‘The people who say he lacks the leadership skills for his job are basically right,’ says Pullum:

Dr Williams is a gentle, learned, brilliant, scholarly man, and a bit of a public relations doofus. I hate to say it, but the calls for his resignation are not unjustified. He should be the holder of an endowed Professorship of Theology and Law at some top-ranking university. He should not be a prominent church administrator, and certainly not the Archbishop of Canterbury. Someone duller, more political, less original, and less intelligent must be found for that job.

Absolutely true, but I have a few caveats to add: First, would there really be no controversy if Dr. Williams were a professor somewhere, and not the Primate of all England? Just think of Ward Churchill and the media furor that surfaces whenever he opens his mouth. Furthermore, is it the case that religious leaders should not voice their political opinions? In other words, is it appropriate for a religious leader to use his religious pulpit as a political bully pulpit? (I have a very strong personal bias against this, but from a conceptual point of view I’m not sure what the answer is.)

But finally, this doesn’t address the underlying issue: to what extent should the secular state accommodate religious law? Back in 2004 there was a controversy in Ontario in which it was proposed to include shari’ah law in the Arbitration Act, which would make decisions rendered by shari’ah courts regarding private disputes legally binding. This had some Muslims, notably the Council on American-Islamic Relations Canada, worried that this would create a ’slippery slope’ and end up hurting Muslims more than it helped them. What do you do, for example, to prevent people—notably women—from being ‘coerced’ into using a system in which they might run the risk of unfair treatment? And what do you do when your religious law comes into conflict with established civil law? (And it is important to note that this is not just a Muslim concern; Jews, especially of the more Orthodox varieties, have many of the same problems with their own shadow court system, especially with the agunah problem).

Of course, there are no easy answers here: after all, this is one of the central post-Enlightenment questions in the Western world. But hopefully the current case of Dr. Williams can provide another data point and perspective in the current conversation, if we can get past the stupidity and sensationalism brought about by the media.

A couple of sources in the (Western) media are starting to pick up the story of Wei Wenhua, a blogger who was beaten to death in central China. Municipal inspectors—a sort of minor league city-level police force—were engaged in a confrontation with villagers over government waste-dumping in the vicinity. The confrontation turned violent, with inspectors beating villagers. Wei took out his mobile phone to use its camera to take pictures of the confrontation, whereupon fifty inspectors descended on him, beat him for five minutes, and rendered him unconscious. He was taken to hospital but pronounced dead on arrival.

CNN is reporting that twenty-four inspectors were detained and over a hundred others are under investigation, but it seems clear that even this swift response, obviously designed by the Chinese government to try to prevent civil unrest, is not having the desired effect. People around the world, but especially in Internet-restricted China, are using the Internet to express their outrage:

After the Web site sina.com published news of Wei’s beating, readers promptly expressed their outrage. In one day alone, more than 8,000 posted comments. Bloggers inside and outside China bluntly condemned the brutal killing.

“City inspectors are worse than the mafia,” wrote one Chinese blogger. “They are violent civil servants acting in the name of law enforcement.”

Another blogger asked, “Just who gave these city inspectors such absurd powers?”

It’s not exactly news that the Chinese government has an awful record when it comes to free speech on the internet, or an equally awful record on police and government treatment of its own citizens. The perspective article linked to above contains several examples of criticism from various ranks of people in China: from academics to bloggers to regular old folks, there seems to be a significant amount of resentment at this scandal. It won’t be a catalyst, and this event won’t be a significant trigger, for large-scale changes in governmental policy. But hopefully Wei Wenhua won’t be forgotten, and his cause will be taken up and championed by people both in China and in the rest of the world.

One of my favourite Jewish (specifically Breslover) wankers, the Rabbi Lazer Brody, keeps a blog, Emuna Outreach (emuna is Hebrew for ‘faith’—but for some reason it’s also called Lazer Beams, a pun that seems to be escaping me at the moment). On this blog he periodically answers questions from readers and offers his ‘expert’ advice on a wide variety of issues. Today, he has a new post answering a question from a woman who has been experiencing some homosexual urges. She is married and has a child but has been ’struggling’ with the feeling that she ‘would like to have a relationship with another woman’. Desperate, she writes to her web-based spiritual adviser Rabbi Brody, who gives several points of advice, including:

Talk to Hashem every single day in your own words, for no less than a half hour (preferably an hour), and spill your heart out to Him. Ask Hashem to help you overcome the lewd urges, which are nothing more than a stupid temptation fantasy from the “dark side”. This strategy completely disarms the Yetzer Hora (evil inclination).

Avoid any secular media, movies, TV, and even newspapers, and immerse yourself totally in kedusha [Sam: Hebrew for 'holiness'].

The same way that you don’t contemplate eating pork or cheeseburgers all day long, you don’t have to think about other women. This will be difficult for you at first, because your entire mission on this earth could very well be to lick the battle with homosexual or other lewd tendencies. [Sam: sic.]

Double-check yourself that your appearance outside the house is super-modest, and don’t try to attract anyone’s attention except your husband’s. For him, make yourself the most ravishing and appealing female in the world. If you don’t get back triple dividends on your investment, write me again and we’ll take it from there.

Be very careful about ritually washing your hands as soon as you open your eyes in the morning (”negel vasser“).

Rabbi Brody suggests that this should cure her of her homosexual urges within 40 days, and additionally suggests the recitation of several psalms, the motivations for some of which escape me (105? 150?). Two things upset me about this. First, none of these things, of course, are going to cure this poor woman from her obvious latent homosexuality. All that’s going to happen is that it’s going to get even more buried and only cause further mental torment. Time and time again, this is what happens with these ex-gay ’solutions’, particularly with the religious ones. Sublimating your homosexual urges into your newfound religious identity will only hurt in the long run.

What really irks me more, however, is the presumption with which Lazer Brody—a man with zero actual experience in human psychology, psychiatry, or medicine—dares to answer this question. His capacity as a rabbi should limit the scope of his expertise to spiritual matters, like ‘I’m having problems connecting with God’. Now, he and other believing Jews (and Christians and others, for that matter) maintain that this is a spiritual matter—the first thing he helpfully tells this woman is ‘Negative thoughts contaminate the soul’, and then goes on to laud her for bringing her problem to him, because ‘when you tell your problem to a rabbi that you trust, you in effect release the pressure of the problem (the lingering negative thought) on your soul, and create an opening for divine light to reach you’. What complete bullshit. This woman needs the assistance of a professional trained in psychological medicine, not a nutty Breslover rabbi who believes the solution to homosexuality is to stop watching television, recite Psalms, and make sure to wash your hands in the morning. If you don’t know the answer, there’s no shame in admitting it and referring the questioner instead to a person who does know. But if you’re an intellectually arrogant man with a god-based solution to everything, then this may well be beyond your capabilities.

If you go to the wrong source, you’re going to get the wrong answer. I just hope this woman doesn’t permanently damage herself by following Lazer Brody’s ‘advice’.