(Hat-tip: LW.)

Fortunately, Lazer has several helpful suggestions: First, make sure to pray to God. It helps if you’re both separate when you do this—and ideally, you should abandon him in the desert for this purpose:

You may find this odd, but have you and your husband ever asked Hashem for a baby? If you were here, I’d take your husband out to the desert, give him a canteen of water, and leave him on a hilltop for an hour to yell his heart out to Hashem. Since you’re not here, go with your husband to a deserted stretch of beach on Long Island Sound, take separate directions, and cry your eyes out, praying in your own words - in English - and beg Hashem for what you want. Hanna, the prophet Samuel’s mother, did the same thing. So did Isaac and Rebecca. Repeat this as much as possible.

They did it in English? Seems improbable, but whatever. Seriously, though, I’ve heard that prayer does terrific things. Really. Taking time to yell your heart out to an ancient sky-god—time that you could be spending doing things more likely to produce a child, like having sex or visiting a fertility clinic—is really a worthwhile investment.

Try to eat as naturally as possible. Your husband should eat figs, garlic, and warm eggs. You both should eat red or blue grapes as well.

Red or blue grapes? You mean we can’t have both, even if we want them? And no green or yellow grapes? Shit, this regimen simply couldn’t work for me—personally, I can’t get off unless I’ve had plenty of grapes of all different types beforehand. Also, figs, garlic, and warm eggs? Really? I know that the fig is often a traditional fertility symbol, especially in Mediterranean cultures, and eggs too, of course, but garlic? At least they’re ensuring that their child won’t be a vampire. And what the heck does he mean by “warm” eggs? Like, raw eggs that you left out overnight to raise to room temperature? Or eggs that you warmed by cooking, say, scrambling or making an omelette? (Possibly a garlic/fig/grape omelette?) The former seems unhealthy and unhygenic, and the latter seems, well, not as “natural” as Lazer seems to be going for.

If you’re not pregnant within the next 60 days after taking the above advice, don’t despair: Rebbe Nachman of Breslev writes that living in Israel is conducive to childbearing and to peace in the home. I would therefore suggest that you seriously consider moving to Israel. If that’s out of the question, I would suggest two alternatives - one, give regular charity to a worthy cause in Israel, and that way you are in effect a shareholder in Israel, and second, fill your house with Torah-oriented books printed in Israel.

Because if you’ve waited this long, you can wait another 60 days, but if you still aren’t successful, you can move to Israel! Or at least, buy lots of Israeli Jewish schwag. It doesn’t matter if you read these books or learn anything from them; the important thing is that you buy them. Becoming a “shareholder in Israel”—which essentially means spending money that you could be spending on medical assistance—is absolutely guaranteed to make your husband’s little swimmers faster and stronger and your own reproductive organs healthier and more productive.

And lest the commercialism and “buy my book” attitude that makes Lazer as entertaining as he truly is be forgotten, despair not—he doesn’t disappoint:

Another good ploy that has helped loads of people is by spreading emuna CDs all over the place. Either way, with Hashem’s loving grace, I pray that you’ll be parents within the next 12 months.

If all the above things—trips to the desert, eating unusual foods, and giving half your income to Israel—don’t dehydrate or bankrupt you or give you salmonella, you still have an ace in the hole: buying my CDs! At least Lazer has the grace (or is it a Freudian slip?) to note that this is, at its base, a “ploy”. Or something. But at any rate, he does seem to recognize that all this might not work: “Either way … I pray that you’ll be parents within the next 12 months” is not his usual ringing, clarion guarantee of success.

The truth of the matter is that fertility problems are an extremely complicated and not completely understood area of modern medicine. But none of what Lazer Brody suggests will really do anything to help on the medical end. As per usual, he does a terrible disservice to the people involved by dispensing this kind of quack “advice”. A real shame too, because he is in a position of being able to give genuinely helpful advice that might actually lead to help in solving this couple’s fertility problems. Eating warm eggs isn’t going to do that.

(N.B. I am back from the road trip, the last several days of which were spent without Internet. I’m going through all the photos and will post them, as well as individual entries for each day of the trip, as soon as I’m able. Hopefully later today.)

Please check out what John Scalzi has to say about this issue:

Make no mistake that supporters of the “California Marriage Protection Act” will be voting to destroy existing marriages. Every single person who says they support this initiative should be made to understand that is what they are going to do, and be made to acknowledge that fact. Every person who is on the fence about the initiative should be made to understand that this will be the consequence. Same-sex marriage is not some theoretical construct in California; it exists. And while no marriages will end if the “California Marriage Protection Act” fails, many marriages will end if it passes.

It does not profit anyone to ignore this reality, nor to ignore the shameful irony of claiming this act somehow “protects” marriage. It doesn’t. So don’t.

California didn’t end when gay marriages became legal. The sky didn’t blow up and the earth didn’t split open and devour those whom God found out of His favour. Teh Geighs aren’t destroying the world. Don’t let this proposition destroy their right to love.

Senator Lieberman stated his belief, in a letter sent today, that all videos mentioning or featuring these groups should be removed from YouTube — even legal nonviolent or non-hate speech videos. While we respect and understand his views, YouTube encourages free speech and defends everyone’s right to express unpopular points of view. We believe that YouTube is a richer and more relevant platform for users precisely because it hosts a diverse range of views, and rather than stifle debate we allow our users to view all acceptable content and make up their own minds. Of course, users are always free to express their disagreement with a particular video on the site, by leaving comments or their own response video. That debate is healthy.

Good on Google for not letting themselves get bullied by Joe Lieberman, and for striking a blow for free speech and open debate. How did Lieberman turn into a despicable douchebag?

Hat-tip: Think Progress

That these outrageous comments and beliefs are still confined to a small corner of the online world and haven’t been getting the kind of press that Barack Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright has been enjoying, I can only attribute to (a) the so-called liberal media’s ongoing love affair with McCain and (b) the incredible wealth and power of Hagee’s ministry and media empire.

Money quote: “How did [the Holocaust] happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, ‘My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.’ Today Israel is back in the land … They are physically alive but they’re not spiritually alive.”

Full transcript and video (YouTube video of audio recording of sermon) after the jump.

Again he said unto me, “Prophesy unto these bones, and say unto them: O you dry bones, hear the word of the Lord!” And he spoke to them and they stood and they became an exceeding great army—meaning they physically came to life.

Now how is God going to bring them back to the land? The answer is fishers and hunters.

The answer is given in Jeremiah 16, verse 15 and following. God says in Jeremiah 16: “Behold I will bring them (the Jewish people) again unto their land that I gave unto their fathers”—that would be Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—”Behold I will send for many fishers and after will I send for many hunters. And they the hunters shall hunt them”—that will be the Jews—”from every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks.”

If that doesn’t describe what Hitler did in the Holocaust… you can’t see that.

So think about this—I will send fishers and I will send hunters. A fisher is someone who entices you with a bait. How many of you know who Theodore Herzl was? How many of you don’t have a clue who he was? Woo! Sweet God!

Theodore Herzl is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew that at the turn of the 19th century said, “This land is our land, God wants us to live there.” So he went to the Jews of Europe and said, “I want you to come and join me in the land of Israel.” So few went, Herzl went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the Holocaust.

Then God sent a hunter. A hunter is someone who comes with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter.

And the Bible says—Jeremiah righty?—”They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and out of the holes of the rocks.” Meaning: there’s no place to hide.

And that will be offensive to some people. Well, dear heart, be offended: I didn’t write it. Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, “My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.”

Today Israel is back in the land and they are at Ezekiel 37 and 8. They are physically alive but they’re not spiritually alive.

Now how is God going to cause the Jewish people to come spiritually alive and say, “The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, He is God”?

Via Bruce Wilson at The Revealer

Link to download the QuickTime .mov of the amusing incident is here (3 MB).

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

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.

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.

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!

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.