judaism

If this isn’t modern asherah-worship, I don’t know what is.

Lazer Brody, our friendly neighbourhood chassidic nut, informs us—complete with video—about an intriguing custom that is apparently Jewish: saying blessings over fruit trees that are blossoming in the springtime. According to Rabbi Lazer, this is a great mitzvah because

According to Kabbala, this blessing is deeply significant, and helps correct the soul that is reincarnated within the tree. That soul is forever beholding [sic] to the person that makes the blessing, for he or she has done a great favor in helping that soul attain its tikkun, or correction.

You can’t make this shit up. (Actually, I guess you can.) I am stunned. Souls being reincarnated in trees?! This is the kind of thing the Kabbalah Center would come up with, and then sell twigs to unsuspecting celebrities and Angelenos for $150 a pop.

If this were not a Jewish ritual, and a Jewish (sort of) spiritual justification, Jews like Rabbi Lazer would instantly associate it with barbaric and misguided animism or spirit-worship or idolatry, just like the Bible condemns cultic worship involving the asherah. But since this one is sui generis Jewish, or something, it’s totally kosher and Kabbalistic and a beautiful and important mitzvah and a great way to “correct” reincarnated tree-souls.

If my spirit ever has to get reincarnated into a tree, I hope it’s one of those awesome bristlecone pines that live forever and are basically indestructible. Actually, what with the pine beetle going around these days, maybe not…

A manuscript has recently been discovered in (PKhit 4.187c verso) on which an old Klingon drinking song is written, which has now been confirmed to be the source of the modern song “Chad Gadya“. Chad Gadya, which tells the story of a chain of death and destruction that is finally stopped by the intervention of God, is traditionally sung at the end of the Passover seder by Jews, and many theories have been put forth about its origins. However, it is now known that the song is Klingon, which not only makes sense of the seemingly senseless violence but also tells the story of the foundation of the Klingon Empire, through Kahless the Unforgettable’s slaying of the tyrant Molor at the end of the song.

mach targh wa’, mach targh wa’,	One little targ, one little targ,
je’ta’bogh DarSeqmey cha’ vavwIj,	That my father bought for two darseks,
mach targh wa’, mach targh wa’.	One little targ, one little targ.

vaj tut tI’qa, ’ej targhvatlh Soppu’,	Then came a tika cat, and ate the targ,
je’ta’bogh DarSeqmey cha’ vavwIj,	That my father bought for two darseks,
mach targh wa’, mach targh wa’.	One little targ, one little targ.

vaj tut norgh, ’ej tI’qa’vatlh choppu’,	Then came a norg, and bit the tika cat,
targhvatlh Soppu’bogh,	That ate the targ,
je’ta’bogh DarSeqmey cha’ vavwIj,	That my father bought for two darseks,
mach targh wa’, mach targh wa’.	One little targ, one little targ.

vaj tut qeylIs, ’ej molar HoHchu’ta’,	Then came Kahless, and slew Molor,
Hur’Iqvatlh HoHpu’bogh,	Who slew the Hur’q,
tIghla’vatlh HoHpu’bogh,	Who killed the t’gla,
biQvatlh tlhutlhpu’bogh,	That drank the water,
qulvatlh roQpu’bogh,	That quenched the fire,
yanvatlh meQpu’bogh,	That burnt the sword,
norghvatlh qIppu’bogh,	That struck the norg,
tI’qa’vatlh choppu’bogh,	That bit the tika cat,
targhvatlh Soppu’bogh,	That ate the targ,
je’ta’bogh DarSeqmey cha’ vavwIj,	That my father bought for two darseks,
mach targh wa’, mach targh wa’.	One little targ, one little targ.

As reprinted here, the manuscript cuts off writing out all the repeats after the first two verses and skips right to the last verse. Some of the handwriting in the manuscript is difficult to make out; this transcription is as accurate as possible given the limitations of current understanding of Klingon papyrology and manuscript tradition. Errors in spelling or grammar should be put down to thousands of years of transmission—and the fact that this is a drinking song in the first place, designed to scan and sound euphonic.

At any rate, a great mystery of the cosmos can now be put to rest. A zissen Pesach, or as they say throughout the Klingon Empire, veb DIS veng wa’Dich Qo’noSDaq!—”Next year, in the First City of Kronos!

(Edited to add: Yes, this is an original translation of mine.)

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

This year, a monkey wrench appears to have been thrown into Israeli Jews’ strict, Torah-true observance of Passover. An Israeli court has ruled that a law that only prohibits the display of hametz in a public place does not also prohibit the sale of hametz. The ultra-Orthodox are up in arms, as are a few secular officials, but Asher Maoz’s opinion in Ha’aretz is spot on:

The ruling by Judge Bar-Asher is a reasoned judgment, and it conforms with the logic on which the law is based. The judge refused to accede to the argument of the defendants that the law should be struck down because it violates their fundamental rights and is not in keeping with the values of the State of Israel. She did not accept their argument that the law represents religious coercion. The only thing she did was examine the definition of the “public” place in which the display of leaven is prohibited. She concluded that the interior of a business is not considered a public place according to the legal code, and therefore displaying chametz there does not violate the law, whose intent is not to offend the sensibilities of observers of Torah and mitzvot.

These people will in any case not enter a store or restaurant where nonkosher products are sold and served, and as such they will not be exposed to chametz and their sensibilities will not be offended. On the other hand, as long as there is no law prohibiting selling and serving leavened products to those who want them, why prohibit their display inside a place of business that is permitted to sell them?

The Israeli Haredi establishment won’t be satisfied until every square inch of Israel is a theocracy, and the men in black hats have all the power. Like Iran, but Jewish. People should have the right to buy, sell, and eat what they want during Passover. Just because some three-thousand-year-old law says you shouldn’t eat hametz, that means everybody in the country must be prohibited from it? Passover is about freedom. This includes the freedom not to give a damn about old laws and customs.

Many people know that on Passover, many Jews refrain from the eating of hametz, which is defined as food made from any or all of the “five grains”: wheat, barley, oats, rye, and spelt, in which fermentation has taken place by means of water for over eighteen minutes. If you bake whatever it is you’re making before eighteen minutes of hydration, it won’t rise but will turn into matzah instead. This (so goes the story) is in memory of when the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt, and had to leave in a great big hurry after all those ten plagues, the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, and various special effects.

Jews are also prohibited from “deriving any benefit” from hametz during Passover, so a legal expedient has been invented: you can sell your hametz to a non-Jew. Essentially, you sell all of your hametz for some trivial amount, like $1, and the sales contract includes a clause that makes the hametz automatically revert to you if the non-Jew doesn’t come up with the rest of the money for the full value of the hametz. Since the hametz presumably remains in your kitchen somewhere, the “wink wink” nature of this contract is clear: it is a legal fiction designed to allow Jews to get around the Torah laws. (This is nothing new, by the way. Two examples: (1) The eruv, a kind of “boundary” created around a large area like a city to “enclose” it and thus make it one “domain” for purposes of carrying things within it on the Sabbath. (2) The Prozbul, a legal fiction wherein a debt can be “transferred” to a rabbinical court so it cannot be defaulted on during a Sabbatical year.)

Anyway, I’m glad for the judicial ruling that recognizes that if people—Jews—want to sell and buy hametz during Passover, they have every right to do so. This is victory for rationality, consideration, and tolerance, and against caving to the Haredim and surrendering personal choice to the theocracy that some Jews are intent on creating in Israel. People have rights, including the right not to observe old (and frankly, quite silly) traditions.

Let Israeli Jews who don’t want to eat hametz on Passover do what we do in the Diaspora: get really jealous at everybody they know who does eat hametz, and then have a massive pizza-and-pasta party after eight days of self-affliction. And if they happen to walk by a store selling cookies, cakes, breads, what have you—they should give thanks that they live in a country that allows people to buy, sell, and eat what they want when they want.

• 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.

A couple of interesting tabs I’ve had floating around in my browser for the past couple of days, to slake your thirst for the time being, but hopefully whet your appetite as regards the future—all right, I’m done:

• From Failed Messiah: Ashkenazic chief rabbi of Israel: Real Haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) don’t abuse children; child abuse is a problem only among ba’alei teshuvah (naturalized ultra-Orthodox Jews). Reason? Haredi children don’t call their teachers by their first names.
• From the Slog: University of Washington College Republicans are holding an odious and racist event on Tuesday: ‘Find an Illegal Immigrant Tag’. Stated purpose: ‘to send a a “clear statement that we need to get serious and crack down on illegal immigration and secure our borders.”’ Unstated purpose: to be huge white-privilege racist dicks.
• From The Province: A good summary of the problems surrounding this year’s Vaisakhi parade and festivities in Surrey, B.C. A what point does it stop being a family-friendly religious celebration and start being political, especially when you throw photographs of Sikh men who committed violent terrorist attacks against Indians in support of a Sikh homeland into the mix?
• Finally, from the Onion:
  
  

  

  Mead Releases New Grad-School-Ruled Notebook

  The pages, in addition to having extremely narrow ruling, will be triple-perforated and seven-hole-punched, to meet the modern grad student’s requirements. I’ve been wanting something like this for years.

I seriously have no idea why this story has been getting all sorts of press in Europe and virtually none in North America. It makes Eliot Spitzer’s recent sexual escapades look positively heartwarming. From the New York Times:

The tabloid newspaper that broke the story of Mr. Mosley’s Chelsea session, The News of the World, described it as “a depraved Nazi sadomasochistic orgy,” and said Mr. Mosley had paid the equivalent of $5,000 in cash for the five-hour session.

In a video the paper posted on the Internet but later removed, two of the women wore black-and-white striped robes in the style of prisoners’ uniforms. The video showed Mr. Mosley counting in German — “Eins! Zwei! Drei! Vier! Funf!” — as he used a leather strap to lash one of the women.

Okay, so he was caught on tape in a Nazi S/M orgy. Sounds bad, right? But wait. It gets creepier:

The video, which has been removed from the newspaper’s web site, also captures a prostitute commanding Mosley to strip before she inspects his head and genitals for lice, which the paper suggest was “mocking the humiliating ways Jews were treated by SS death camp guards in World War II.” Placed in chains, Mosley leans over a torture bench and whimpers as a dominatrix strikes him with a rod, saying “You’re going to be shown how we treat prisoners in our facility.” Later, when Mosley takes hold of a whip, he states that a blonde inmate “needs more of ze punishment.”

This guy plays both the concentration camp guard and the concentration camp prisoner in the same Nazi-fetish orgy. How sick is that? (And, I have to wonder, how unusual is it, from your run-of-the-mill BDSM point of view, to play both the ‘top’ and the ‘bottom’ characters during the same orgy? Multiply that by ‘Nazi’, and see what happens.) As a Jew, I am completely squicked out. As (I like to think) a mostly decent, rational human being, I am simply in a state of aporia.

Turns out that this Nazi-fetish thing didn’t come completely out of nowhere:

Mosley’s background ensures that he won’t get off that easily. His mother, Diana Mitford, was a celebrity British Nazi sympathizer in the prewar years, while his father, Sir Oswald Mosley, founded and led the British Union of Fascists — a guest of honor at their wedding in 1936, at the Berlin home of Joseph Goebbels, was none other than Adolf Hitler.

Also, Mosley is the president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, the governing body of things like the Grand Prix and Formula One racing. Which depends heavily on car-makers like BMW and Mercedes-Benz for support. Gee, I wonder what their reaction is, given these companies’ histories vis-à-vis Jews and the Holocaust. And how is the esteemed Mr. Mosley responding to this, er, incident? With an apology? Nah, see, you’re still thinking like a reasonable person. He’s employing a device that we Westerners have raised to an art form since Roman times: the lawsuit. From the NYT article:

Mr. Mosley has acknowledged participating in the session. But he has denied that the role-playing had a Nazi motif, and announced Friday that he had filed a lawsuit against the newspaper, claiming “unlimited damages” for invasion of privacy.

In a letter on Saturday to the head of Germany’s motoring federation, he renewed his insistence that the Chelsea session was a private matter, and added, in a reference to the F.I.A.’s role in promoting road safety around the world: “Had I been caught driving excessively fast on a public road or over the alcohol limit, I would have resigned the same day. As it is, the scandal paper obtained by illegal means pictures of something I did in private, which, although unacceptable to some people, was harmless and completely legal.”

The issue isn’t whether he should be prosecuted, because what he did was legal, though distasteful, as he rightly points out. However, in the YouTube era, privacy has been redefined: when the video of you beating women dressed as concentration camp victims—or whatever else it happens to be—goes onto the Internets, there’s simply nothing you can do about it. The issue is whether he should resign, which would be an expression of humility and an acknowledgement of wrongdoing. Unfortunately, I don’t think this guy is smart enough to put two and two together.

He has refused to resign his F.I.A. post, appealing to the federation’s global network of motoring organizations for support. But denunciations have cascaded from much of the racing world, from Jewish groups, and from F.I.A.-affiliated motoring organizations around the world, including the American Automobile Association, which said in a statement on Saturday that Mr. Mosley, as F.I.A. chief, needed to set “the highest standards of ethical behavior” if he was to represent millions of motorists worldwide. It added: “It would be in the best interest of all concerned if he were to step down.”

Perhaps more significantly, calls for his resignation have come from four major car companies, each of which owns or substantially controls grand prix racing teams: BMW, Daimler Benz, Honda and Toyota.

Ugh. I simply don’t know what to say, except why the heck isn’t this story getting more press in North America? Also, why hasn’t this guy resigned? Actually, the answer to that’s an easy one: shamelessness. But I’ll have to leave the solution to the grander problem as an exercise for the reader.

I am absolutely stunned by this story. It’s like something out of a deranged episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Oy Vey. Except much darker. From the Canadian Jewish News:

An Israeli woman with two children is fighting deportation from Canada, claiming that she fears returning to Israel because a rabbinical court there has granted custody of the children to their abusive father.

Last week, one day before she was to be removed from the country, Renata Makias won a temporary stay from a Federal Court judge pending a judicial review of her case.

Judge Sean Harrington wrote that Mrs. Makias and the children “face imminent peril on their return” to Israel because the rabbinical order makes clear the children must be handed over to their father, Yossef Makias, immediately. …

The rabbinical court decision is at odds with a Quebec Superior Court judgment granting Mrs. Makias custody of the children and apparently does not take into account the fact that Mr. Makias was charged in British Columbia with uttering threats of death and violence against his family and with breaching a restraining order. …

Mr. Makias was charged with uttering threats to cause death or bodily harm to his wife, but he was released on conditions that included a restraining order that forbade him from having any contact with his wife or their children. He did not respect those conditions and was convicted of breach of the order. …

Harrington wrote that he finds it “disturbing” that, despite Yossef’s record and the decisions of Canadian courts, that the Regional Rabbinical Court of Tel Aviv has ordered that the children be handed over to him “immediately and with no further delay,” quoting the rabbinical court.

Or, the couple’s son, testified that he was afraid to go back to Israel because his father beat him and his sister frequently and “always used to threaten to kill” them. “He would run after me with a hammer in his hands to hit me with it.”

The boy also stated that his father “almost killed my mom once by throwing a very heavy cup of glass and he would throw stuff at her like cellphones and plates.”

And the bet din (rabbinical court) of Tel Aviv, just like that, handed sole custody to this crazy maniac. And who is the head of this court? Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, noted corrupt fundraiser, homophobe, and Haredi schmuck. He seems to be taking a hands-off approach to this ridiculous case that went through a court under his jurisdiction. I quote the always excellent commentary of Shmarya Rosenberg:

Rabbi Lau was the first haredi to become chief rabbi. He presides over the rabbinical court in question. From what I know of him, I don’t think Rabbi Lau likes this decision. But Rabbi Lau will never buck his haredi masters, and it is those masters who are responsible for much of the agunah crisis and for horrible cases like this.

There is a darkness in Zion and it is destroying us.

(The agunah crisis has to do with women who are not granted a religious divorce (get) by their husbands and therefore not able to remarry under Jewish law. Liberal strains of Judaism—and even some left-leaning Orthodox strands—allow a rabbinical court to issue a get in the husband’s absence to ameliorate this problem. However, these women are still screwed over in traditional circles of Judaic jurisprudence.)

This is the kind of shit they don’t tell you about in Jewish schools when brainwashing teaching you to vote Likud love Israel. Canada must grant this woman and her family asylum immediately. Any legal recourse to a civil lawsuit in Israel would be futile, since the law grants a high degree of autonomy and privilege to religious courts in such matters. The ‘darkness in Zion’ is indeed a destructive one—but not only is it destroying us, certain of us are bringing it on the rest.

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.

In an op-ed in today’s LA Times, Aaron Miller takes a stab at explaining why large segments of the American Jewish population seem to have it in for Barack Obama—or anybody else who can even be remotely connected with criticism of Israel:

Don’t get me wrong. Jews—and yes, I am one of them—worry for a living. Their history compels them to and to be always vigilant. Yet in America, where they have achieved a level of security, acceptance and power unparalleled in their history, their existential worries paradoxically seem to have grown even greater. When Jimmy Carter writes a book—a bad book, incidentally—comparing Zionism to apartheid, many American Jews go crazy. When two university professors, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, write another bad book—about what they call “the Israel lobby”—many Jews react as if the sky is falling.

Essentially, what’s going on is a severe overreaction to any perceived threats against Israel. Israel is equated with the Jewish people both there and in the Diaspora. Never mind that the ultra-Orthodox elements in Israel, which have de facto control over the country’s civil life, hate—to the point of considering Not Jewish—liberal Jews, or even Orthodox Jews who don’t wear the right hat. (In case you missed it, Gershom Gorenberg had an excellent piece in last Sunday’s NY Times Magazine demonstrating the extent of this ultra-Orthodox control and craziness when it comes to ‘proving’ your Jewishness for the purpose of marriage in or immigration to Israel.) Back to Miller:

This “us versus them” mentality still runs deep, and it is particularly harmful when it comes to the Arab-Israeli issue. That conflict is not some kind of morality play in which the forces of evil do battle against the forces of light. It is a conflict in which both sides have legitimate needs and requirements and do both good and bad things in pursuit of them.

This point, unfortunately, is correct in its essence. However, as we’ve learned time and time again, nuance simply doesn’t sell. And if your message is at all nuanced—not 100% rah-rah Israel, all Arabs are terrorists, etc.—then you are, by definition, an enemy not only of Israel but of the Jewish people. How pathetic is the discourse, how sad is the conversation? There is neither discourse nor conversation, because the attitude is ‘us versus them’—nuance equals betrayal.

The odious John Hagee, supporter of John McCain, has added yet another stupid set of assertions to the racist and ridiculous things he’s done lately, like organizing a ’slave sale’ and calling the Catholic Church ‘the great whore’. Now, I know it’s unfair to hold candidates accountable for every last thing said and done by their supporters, as people are doing with Louis Farrakhan’s endorsement of Barack Obama, but the difference here is that Obama has repudiated Farrakhan while McCain appears to be sticking by Hagee and his endorsement. (There’s a serious double standard with how the media are handling both of these cases, but what else is new.)

And now, Hagee apparently believes that Jews are responsible for their own suffering and persecution:

“It was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews, God’s chosen people, to their covenantal responsibility to serve only the one true God, Jehovah, that gave rise to the opposition and persecution that they experienced beginning in Canaan and continuing to this very day. …

How utterly repulsive, insulting, and heartbreaking to God for His chosen people to credit idols with bringing blessings He had showered upon the chosen people. Their own rebellion had birthed the seed of anti-Semitism that would arise and bring destruction to them for centuries to come … it rises from the judgment of God upon his rebellious chosen people.”

That was me, sorry. My personal rebelliousness and disobedience brought on God’s wrath, and made Him send John Hagee and Louis Farrakhan to earth to let me know just how bad I was for eating a California roll with real crab that one time, or for driving to Seattle yesterday on the Sabbath. My bad.

This is not a new idea, theologically speaking—the Bible provides this justification over and over when bad things happen to the Jewish people, notably in the Book of Lamentations (check out 1.8, 3.39–47, and 5.16–18 for some typical examples). However, nobody except religious nuts and douchebags takes this ‘line of reasoning’ seriously. Kingdoms and countries are always getting sacked by other kingdoms and countries. This is the human race we’re talking about, people. What a douchebag, this religious nut Hagee.

(Hat-tip: AMERICAblog.)

Update: Josh Marshall has video and analysis of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Tex.) both totally blowing it on McCain and Hagee on television today.

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.

The fourteenth-century B.C.E. Baal Cycle is one of the most important extra-Biblical sources for West Semitic religion in ancient times, and it ends with really terrific fight scene. The protagonist Baal (Master) has already fought and defeated Yamm (the Sea) and built his temple/palace on Mount Zaphon after getting permission from the head god, El. He is is forced to die by Mot (Death), but subsequently rises from the underworld, fights with Mot, and defeats him. (N.B.: This is mōt with a long o, not like Mr. Mot.) Baal and Mot fight until Shapsh (the Sun) breaks up the fight and tells Mot he cannot hope to win against Baal, whereupon Mot concedes defeat. (Actually, this isn’t the best fight scene in the story, but Anat’s fight with Mot will have to wait for another day.)

Text is from KTU 1.6 (tablet 6 col. 6), transcription from SBL (Parker et al., eds.), 1997, 162–163, with a few emendations and suppositions.

[].bn.ilm.mt.	And Mot, the divine, said:
p[h]n.aḫym.ytn.bʿl.spuy.	‘See, Baal surrendered my brothers as my food,
bnm.umy.klyy.	The sons of my mother for my devouring!’
yṯb.ʿm.bʿl.șpn.	He turns to Baal atop Mount Zaphon,
yšu.gh.wyșḥ.	And with raised voice, he bellows:
aḫym.ytnt.bʿl.spuy.	‘Baal! You surrendered my brothers as my food,
knm.umy.kl.yy.	The sons of my mother for my devouring!’
ytʿn.kgmrm.	They face each other down like two hippos—
mt.ʿz.bʿl.ʿz.	Mot the fierce, Baal the fierce.
yngḥn.krumm.	They gore each other like twin buffalo—
mt.ʿz.bʿl.ʿz.	Mot the fierce, Baal the fierce.
ynṯkn.bṯnm.	They bite each other like twin snakes—
mt.ʿz.bʿl.ʿz.	Mot the fierce, Baal the fierce.
ymṣḫn.klsmm.	They claw at each other like charging beasts—
mt.ql.bʿl.ql.	Mot falls. Baal falls.
ʿln.špš.tṣḥ.lmt.	High above, Shapsh proclaims to Mot:
šmʿ.mʿ.lbn.ilm.mt.	‘Listen up, Mot, the divine:
ik.tmt[ḫ]s.ʿm.aliyn.bʿl.	How can you compete against mightiest Baal?
ik.al.yšm[ʿ]k[.ṯ]r.il.abk.	How will your father, El the bull, hear you?
l.ysʿ.alt.ṯbtk.	Surely he will take away your throne’s foundation,
lyhpk.ksa.mlkk.	Surely he will overturn the seat of your kingship,
lyṯbr.ḫṭ.mṯpṭk.	Surely he will break the staff of your dominion.’
yru.bnilm.<.m>t.	Mot the divine is terrified,
ṯtʿ.y.dd.il.ǵzr[.]	The favourite of El, the hero, is afraid.
yʿr.mt.bqlh.	Mot trembles at her voice,
y[šu.gh.wyṣḥ].	He raises his voice and says in response:
bʿl.yṯṯbn[.lksi.]mlkh.	‘Let Baal take his seat on the royal throne,
l[nḫt.lkḥṯ.]drkth[.]	On the resting place, the seat of his rule.’

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.

Well, I guess this is one example of progress, or something: the newly-redesigned (again) Iraqi flag is finally being flown in the northern Kurdish region. The new flag has removed the three stars, which represented Iraq’s hope (decades ago) eventually to join Egypt and Syria in a United Arab Republic (whence the two stars that are still on Syria’s flag). It also features Kufic script to write ‘Allahu Akbar’ (God is great), a neutral replacement for Saddam Hussein’s own handwriting.

Say what you will about the new Iraqi flag; it’s a damn sight better than the awful proposed white-and-blue striped flag, designed by the Iraqi Governing Council (remember, the government set up during the U.S. occupation?) which looked eerily similar to the flag of Israel. If I remember correctly, people didn’t know that the two blue stripes were supposed to represent the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, or that the gold stripe was somehow standing for the Kurds, or that a flag with no black or green or red was supposed to be an Arab flag.

Nota bene: the two blue stripes on Israel’s flag do not represent the ‘Zionist dream’ of a Jewish homeland ‘from the Nile to the Euphrates’. The stripes are modelled after the tallit, the traditional Jewish prayer shawl. Although, I suppose, if the proposed Iraqi flag had gone through, at least one blue stripe on some flag somewhere would have represented the Euphrates River…sigh.

The origins of many traditions—especially religions ones—are shrouded in mystery, like the prohibition against eating kitniyos on Passover among Ashkenazic Jews or my family’s practise of tearing the challah at the Sabbath table and passing it round from person to person, round and round the table, thus getting everyone’s germs on everybody else’s holy bread. But there’s one tradition we have of which I do actually know the origin: at the conclusion of the Sabbath, we say havdalah over hard liquor and then extinguish the candle in it, thus setting it on fire. (This is totally kosher, by the way. You don’t have to use wine for havdalah; as long as you make sure to recite the shehakol blessing over it, you can use anything you want other than water.) At any rate, this started when I was spending Shabbos with some people—I don’t remember who they were—and they did this, and I thought, gosh, that was so pretty and fun, we should do it next week when I’m back home! And we did.

Here’s this week’s flaming liquor signalling an end to this Shabbos. (I ran out of vodka last week, so I’ve switched to Canadian whiskey—Crown Royal, if you’re curious—until I can be bothered to go over to the liquor store.) A good week, everybody!

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.

The Shalom Hartman Institue in Jerusalem is going to begin ordaining women as rabbis, reports the Jerusalem Post, in an article which would have you believe that this is the biggest development in Orthodox Judaism’s relationship to its women since the banning of Indian sheitels. ‘A major change in gender roles within modern Orthodoxy,’ the article prints in the first sentence. Big news! Stop the presses! Women can learn, become scholars, and impart their knowledge to others! And they can now style themselves ‘rabbis’ with the permission of an Orthodox institution!

Except it’s not really a big deal, of course. Slate’s Samantha Shapiro has an excellent article in which she explains several crucial things that, in their breathless desire to sensationalize this event, the Jerusalem Post either buried or omitted:

• The Shalom Hartman Institute isn’t really Orthodox, or even Modern Orthodox. Even the original article subliminally acknowledges this, in a quote from the founder, Rabbi David Hartman, himself: ‘[The Shalom] Hartman [Institue] has been multi-denominational for the last 12 years. We make no distinctions between men and women here. Our latest decision is a natural evolution of our existing policy.’ Now, Rabbi Hartman was ordained as an Orthodox rabbi, but the institution itself does not ‘belong’ to the Orthodox ‘movement’, insofar as such a movement exists.
• Orthodox women have been ordained before. An excellent example is Mimi Feigelson, who was granted semicha (ordination) by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. Feigelson somewhat enigmatically uses the title Reb, which in Yiddish has the connotation of ‘Mister’—nothing specifically rabbinic, but everything specifically masculine—and kept her ordination secret for many years until it was revealed in a newspaper. She’s just one example: there are several other women who have been ordained in the Orthodox tradition as Orthodox rabbis, so the Hartman Institute’s decision to start doing this isn’t exactly new.
• All denominations of Judaism except for the Orthodox flavour have ordained women for at least twenty-five years.
• There have been other Orthodox institutions that educate women to be spiritual and religious consultants on various matters, such as family law and ritual purity. Nishmat is one such institution; yet it does not call its graduates ‘rabbis’ and tacitly seems to acknowledge that any religious opinion or ruling rendered by a woman will always need a nod from a qualified male to render it fully valid and worthwhile.
• This development isn’t going to have, in my estimation, any significant impact on either Orthodoxy in general or women’s roles within Orthodox Judaism in particular. Even if we count the Hartman Institute within the boundaries of Modern Orthodoxy, it was already quite far to the ‘left’ of that label, and this decision may well push it beyond the pale for other M.O.s, to say nothing of farther-right-wingers in the Orthodox ‘movement’ or the Haredi world. Also, many of the kinds of people that the Hartman Institute already reaches, in religious and dogmatic terms, are already likely to accept women as rabbis and therefore put themselves out of this ‘movement’ as well, thus effectively (a) making Hartman’s decision to do this essentially preaching to the choir, and (b) causing Hartman to secede even further from Orthodoxy.

Naturally, this has been gathering some significant responses in the Jewish word, much of which I believe has to do with the ’sales’ of this event as hugely significant both for women and for Orthodox Judaism. Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, for instance, was quoted extensively in the Jerusalem Post article to the effect that the Hartman Institute is already beyond the pale because Orthodox Jews are studying together with non-Orthodox Jews, who ‘do not have a fear of God’, to say nothing of women studying together with men. He also takes the (somewhat baffling) position that women should not have the title ‘rabbi’ yet still ought to be respected by the hoi polloi, just as male rabbis are:

“I think it is degrading to tell a woman that she won’t be respected and appreciated unless she adopts a man’s title,” Aviner said. “Throughout the generations there were always scholarly women who were highly respected. Jewish law dictates that a man must stand before a learned woman just as he must stand out of respect for a learned man.”

Though I personally welcome this news, I have to doubt its general effect, just as Shapiro does in her article. If Aviner’s reaction is any indication, those women who do receive their ordination from the Shalom Hartman Institute will be shunned in the Orthodox world, and this ‘big news’ will end up striking no blows for the acceptance of women in that world, which is a real shanda in today’s world.

There is a silly tradition among some Jews of reciting Exodus 16.4–36 on the Tuesday before the Saturday on which the Torah portion containing this chapter is read publicly in the synagogue worship service. I’m sorry for starting with such a confusing sentence, but it’s the best way I could render ‘the Tuesday before parshas B’shallach‘. See, every week Jews read a different passage from the Torah, completing the whole cycle in a year, and this week the reading is from the middle of—never mind.

Anyway, this particular chapter relates the story of how God sent manna to the Israelites in the desert. Reciting it on this particular day is supposed to be a segulah for a good livelihood and good sustenance. (A segulah is a ritual object or action that has some kind of magical mystical power: nine times out of ten it suffices to substitute the word ’superstition’.) This chapter is known as Parashat Ha-Man, or in proper Ashkenazic Yiddishy Yeshivish Hebrew, Parshas Ha-Mon, which means ‘the section about manna’. Some people seem to recite it every day—the Yerushalmi maintains that if you do, you will never go hungry—but there is a particularly special segulah on this day to say it. What narishkeit.

You can find the complete text in Hebrew here, along with the traditional before- and after-texts, along with the late antique Aramaic translation of Onkelos, for whatever that’s worth. It also seems to be on pages 181c–181f of my ArtScroll prayer book. Since the text is only available in Hebrew (except for ArtScroll’s awful translations), I will translate the silliest parts of this superstition for your reading and deriding pleasure below. My snide comments are in italics and parentheses. For a translation of Exodus 16.4–36, please consult a quality translation. But seriously, if you’re skipping work to spend more time in shul to make sure to recite this section with extra devotion, expecting that God above will make His bounty to fall out of the sky and onto your family’s dinner plates, then you might be in for a bit of a surprise when your paycheck gets docked for the missed work.

Parshas Ha-Mon

It is said in the sources that he who recites Parashat Ha-Man every day will not lack a livelihood, and beforehand he should recite ‘May it be Your will…’. He may recite Parashat Ha-Man even on the Sabbath; only the prayers for livelihood should not be recited on the Sabbath. (Because it doesn’t count as a prayer for livelihood if you don’t say that’s what you’re doing! How’s God going to know the difference?)

May it be Your will, Lord our God, God of our ancestors, that You provide a livelihood for all Your people, the House of Israel, as well as my livelihood and the livelihood of the people in my household besides, in comfort and not in trouble, in honour and not in disgrace, in permission and not in prohibition, so that we will be able to perform Your worship services and study Your Torah, just as You provided sustenance to our ancestors in the wilderness, in a barren and desert land. (Because it totally worked out for the Israelites in the desert, didn’t it, when God sent sustenance and those sorry ingrates rebelled. I’m sure He had some good method for dealing with that, didn’t He. Oh wait, yeah, in the very next chapter, there is no water for the people, and they go nuts. Good planning there, God.)

(Exodus 16.4–36 is read here. Seriously, go read it. If you do, you’ll find that the food in your refrigerator has suddenly doubled. Or at least it will seem to have doubled if you dig deep enough inside.)

Reuters is reporting that David Ahenakew, the former chief of the Canadian Assembly of First Nations, will get a new trial for promoting hate speech. In 2002, Ahenakew compared Jews to a ‘disease’ which he blamed for starting the Second World War, and said that Hitler was justified when he ‘fried up six million of those guys’ because if he hadn’t, ‘Jews would have owned the goddamned world.’ Ahenakew was stripped of his Order of Canada and fined a thousand dollars. But today, the Saskatchewan Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that Ahenakew’s trial did not concern itself with whether Ahenakew ‘intended to promote hatred’, which in this context means that Ahenakew could get away with it because the comments were uttered during a heated exchange with a newspaper reporter. I simply don’t see how that’s a defence for this sort of thing: not being able to control your outbursts does not excuse them when they are uttered.

In my last post I came down rather strongly on the side of free speech, and in this post I am endorsing the punishment of a hate speech targeted against ethnic groups. La kashya—there is no contradiction. The previous post is about protecting the essence of free speech exactly by holding people responsible for what they say, not by holding others responsible in their place. In this case, it would be as if the Saskatoon StarPhoenix were being sued for hate speech when they had merely printed what someone said to them in an interview. The point is that if democracy and free speech are concepts that are to have any meaning, people must be held responsible for their own speech, not others’.

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’.

Happy last night of Hanukkah!

‘One for each night, they shed a sweet light…’

(Click for full-size image.)

The famous Hanukkah hymn “Ma’oz Tzur”, or “Rock of Ages” in the best-known English version, is pretty much like any other hymn: thanks, God, because You did such great things for us by killing all our enemies, which is why we’re (a) still alive and (b) able to sing this song to you. Unfortunately, not that many people know how the actual text of the hymn translates into English, so I will translate some of the lyrics to Ma’oz Tzur here:

Mighty rock of my salvation, it is pleasing to praise You,	מָעוֹז צוּר יְשׁוּעָתִי לְךָ נָאֶה לְשַׁבֵּחַ,
Restore the house of my prayer and there we shall sacrifice a thanksgiving-offering,	תִּכּוֹן בֵּית תְּפִלָּתִי וְשָׁם תּוֹדָה נְזַבֵּחַ,
At that time, You will be ready to slaughter the blaspheming enemy,	לְעֵת תָּכִין מַטְבֵּחַ מִצָּר הַמְנַבֵּחַ,
Then I shall finish, with a praising song, the dedication of the altar.	אָז אֶגְמֹר בְּשִׁיר מִזְמוֹר חֲנֻכַּת הַמִּזְבֵּחַ.

Innocuous enough, right, at least by the standards of some other hymns? Let’s skip down to the final verse—

Let Your holy arm be shown and bring near the final salvation,	חֲשׁוֹף זְרוֹע קָדְשֶׁךָ וְקָרֵב קֵץ הַיְשׁוּעָה,
Avenge the vengeance of your servant’s blood from the evil people,	נְקוֹם נִקְמַת דַּם עֲבָדֶיךָ מֵאֻמָּה הָרְשָׁאָה,
For salvation has been delayed for us, and there is no end to evil’s days,	כִּי אָרְכָה לָּנוּ הַיְשׁוּעָה וְאֵין קֵץ לִיְמֵי הָרָעָה,
Cast Edom down to the darkest darkness, and establish seven shepherds for us.	דְּחֵה אַדְמֹן בְּצֵל צַלְמֹן הָקֵם לָנוּ רוֹעִים שִׁבְעָה.

ArtScroll helpfully provides you with the following comment:

This final stanza is generally regarded to be a later addition [about 1500] by a different author. The initial letters of the first three words for the acrostic חֲזַק, be strong. Since it contains a strong plea for Divine vengeance against Israel’s foes, this stanza was subject to much censorship by Christian authorities. Accordingly some siddurim have replaced certain stiches with others less offensive to the censors.

Whereas we, in our holy desire to remain as close to the original text as possible, have left in the original version of a forged last verse! Never mind that it’s bad poetry, or that it is genuinely offensive to anyone with modern sensibilities, or that after five previous verses of singing out the awful melody to the rest of Ma’oz Tzur you feel like giant cotton balls have been shoved down your ear canals. Look how extra-pious we are by leaving it in!

The Red One [what I have translated 'Edom' —S] refers to Esau/Edom, whose descendants brought the current exile. The seven shepherds (Micah 5:4) who will conquer Israel’s oppressors are David, Adam, Seth, Methusaleh, Abraham, Jacob, and Moses (Succah 52b).

That’s right—Isaac, Joseph, Solomon, Gideon, Ehud—you can all just go back home, because you’re clearly worthless. Come on in, Seth! Methuselah, you sure your 969-year-old self is up to this? What about your rib-cage, Adam? Okay, then, you can come too.

I guess what this reminds me most of is the last verse of ‘Il Canto degli Italiani’, the Italian national anthem. National anthems—especially older ones, like you would find in some parts of Europe—have this undeniable tendency to romanticise bloodthirstiness, especially against traditional enemies of the state. The last verse of the Italian anthem goes:

Son giunchi che piegano le spade vendute,	They are feeble reeds, the mercenaries’ swords,
Già l’Aquila d’Austria le penne ha perdute.	The Austrian Eagle has lost its plumes.
Il sangue d’Italia, il sangue Polacco,	The blood of Italy, the Polish blood,
Bevé, col cosacco, ma il cor le bruciò.	Was drunk, with the Cossack’s, but it burnt her heart.

Now, of course, nobody sings this last verse of the Italian anthem anymore, but it’s still on the books. Many Jews, however, not knowing any better, do sing the last verse of Ma’oz Tzur, which praises more or less the exact same kinds of things. Ruthless destruction of one’s enemies is sanctioned because they’ve done wrong to you. Of course this offends our modern sensibilities, as well it should, but that’s not the point I want to make: the point is that when we can recognise that this is what’s going on, we should stop singing these kinds of hymns—or change them; it’s not as if they’re Torah revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai—instead of continuing with this nonsense.

Psalms 120 through 134 each begin שִׁיר הַמַּעֲלוֹת (shir ha-ma’alot, ‘A song of ascents’). However Psalm 121 begins שִׁיר לַמַּעֲלוֹת (shir la-ma’alot, ‘A song to ascents’)—a troubling variant that should have alarm bells going off in the minds of the manuscript-oriented. Were this small prepositional variation correct, it would be quite interesting, but what a shame it’s probably nothing more than a scribal error.

The Hebrew text that reads ‘to ascents’ for the beginning of Psalm 121 is the Masoretic Text and its manuscript tradition, and it is the reading that has filtered down to us today. But the Septuagint (LXX Ps 120) reads Ὠδὴ τῶν ἀναβαθμῶν (ōdē tōn anabathmōn, ‘A song of ascents’)—the very same formula used to begin the entire sequence of Psalms 120 through 134 in the Septuagint (translating the Hebrew construct state by the Greek genitive), without altering it as the Masoretic Text does. The apparatus to the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, the best Hebrew edition of the Masoretic Text ever compiled, notes rather cryptically, Q nonn Mss ‘הַמּ ut 122,1 etc, which essentially translates into ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls and some other manuscripts of the Masoretic Text read ‘of ascents’, like Psalm 122 verse 1 and the rest’. But it doesn’t tell you which Dead Sea Scroll—you have to look in more specific reference sources, which will tell you that 11QPs^a, one of the scrolls discovered in the eleventh cave at Qumrān, in its Psalter, uses the reading ‘of ascents’, in keeping with the pattern of the surrounding psalms.

Much has been made of this one letter’s difference in traditional and modern commentaries and in Jewish homiletics. I will provide but two small but representative examples. The ArtScroll Siddur, commenting on this psalm, says (emphases original), ‘This song differs from all others in this series because it is not called שִׁיר הַמַּעֲלוֹת, a song of ascents; but is dedicated לַמַּעֲלוֹת, to the ascents. It describes the means whereby Israel finds the strength to attain godly heights and ascend to His glori