The Education Controversy

As usual, I come rather late to this discussion, but that never stopped me before.

Here's the thing. It's not the sexism or close-mindedness of this decision that offends me. (Incidentally, it's probably more the latter than the former- they aren't all that crazy about higher education for men either.) Every community has every right to make decisions for themselves as a community, and I, as an outsider, have every right to keep my mouth shut and let them. So the fact that I find this decision theologically offensive, practically idiotic, and a personally annoying is not, strictly speaking relevant. And fairness obliges me to recognize that the decision was almost certainly motivated by noble and worthwhile, if misplaced, concerns and that all the people involved are almost certainly good, well-meaning people. And if it pains me to see the girls with whom I went to high school- good, brilliant, talented girls- believing that education and indeed most forms of thought are b'dieved, if not assur, still the respect I have for them as people and my theoretical faith in the whole tolerance thing obligates me to accept their decision, instead of dismissing them as brainwashed.

No, what makes me most angry about this decision is not what they are doing to their women, but what they are doing to my religion. See, my religion is a beautiful one. It loves and respects knowledge, idolizes truth, and considers women equally valuable human beings. It is full of strong, educated women and plenty of people who explore all areas of knowledge without getting hysterical or paranoid that they might ever hear a drop of a philosophy that does not perfectly match their own. And what these people are doing is not simply to themselves but to my religion. My religion has been hijacked by their close-mindedness and taken to strange and ugly countries that I and most of the other passengers had not interest in visiting.

Because that's what they're doing when they come out with these things- they are reshaping my religion into a new, more extremist form. And of course, we can oppose them, but it will require effort to get it back into its old form, effort that ought not be wasted on a giant game of tug-of-war just to keep my religion within the realms of sane. When they do these things, not only in the name of my religion, but claiming to be its only legitimate expression, they decide the course of my religion, in the eyes of a sadly large part of the world and even the Orthodox community.

And I don't like the face. Because my religion is not that. Is better than that. Does not deserve to become that.

The Barak Convention

Writing this post in the half hour before I have to run to class. So don't except editing or proofreading or any of that fancy-shmany stuff. I just got back from a panel on religion and law that's part of a three day convention celebrating Chief Justice Aharon Barak's retirement (an unfortunate choice of phrasing, I know, but theirs, not mine).

And I have to say- and I preface this with the usual disclaimer that I am in no way an expert on Israeli law, judicial practice, or anything else really- but I have to say that the judicial mindset in this country drives me flipping crazy.

First, a story, or rather a fragment of a memory. I must have been ten or eleven, and my father was telling me about some famous Supreme Court decision or other. He asked me something about how you could derive that Congress has the power to make such and such a law, and I remember answering, "I don't see how you can get that. I want it to be able to and all, but I just don't see how you can get it into the law."

This approach, to my personal disappointment, is becoming less and less popular in America, but in Israel it seems to already be entirely dead. One of the panelists this morning ended her analysis of Israeli family law by saying, "The system needs to be changed. And if the legislature fails to do so, then the court must do it themselves."

What the heck? I mean, what? But that seems more or less to be the Israeli approach. Certainly the approach of Barak himself. Our classes, and certainly our analysis of Barak's decisions, spend a heck of a lot more time on public policy and balance of interests and so on and so forth than the actual law.

And you know what? It's totally fine with me if law professors want to think that way. After all, it's part of their job to approach law ex ante as well as post facto, to analyze what law should be and why it is or isn't and how it got there and where they wish it should go.

But that's not the job for a judge. A judge, in my rather old-fashioned opinion, ought to interpret the law. His first and foremost concern should be what the law actually says. I know this sounds like basic strict-interpretationalist ranting, but it's a concept that so frequently seems to get swept under the carpet amid the philosophy and cost-benefit analyses and whatnot.

And it's not that the judges actually ignore the law. It's just that... it seems almost like an afterthought, the tool through which you can force your personal theory of life onto the populace. The technicality through which your ginormous vision of a brave new world can come into being.

There seems to be to be an infuriatingly elitist/paternalistic attitude on the part of the court. And I can see how there would be. I mean, here you are, a bunch of the smartest people in the country- and you know it- with the best knowledge of how law ought to work and why. In a position to do basically whatever pops into your head, with full knowledge that you're appointed for life by a bunch of other judges that think just like you. Is it really reasonable to expect you to choose to bind yourself with the flimsy threads of the laws that the legislature- a bunch of feuding, illogical politicians- decided to create for you? Is it really reasonable to ask you to refrain from doing what you know would be wiser, more just, all around a better idea, just because the bickering children in the Knesset weren't able to come to the right conclusion? Is it reasonable to expect you to be subservient?

Well, of course, my answer would be yes. That is, after all, your job. As a judge and all. But it's a hard thing to ask, and harder still from people who come from academia and are used to thinking about law as it should be. And even harder when, technically speaking, you haven't got any official sort of document or system that defines what they should or should not do. And, of course, even harder to expect, when you happen to believe that it's your duty to shape the country as it ought to be, law or no law.

And the saddest thing is that you barely see the legislature fighting back. Yes, every here and there they mumble something or clear something up, but in general, they have a frankly annoying tendancy to write laws that just throw up their hands and ask the court to ride in on their white charger and save the day by making up anything that chances to come into their heads.

Now, I don't know what the Knesset meant by the basic law of "The Dignity of Man and his Freedom", but they had to have noticed that the court was taking it and running with it, turning it not only into a constitution, but into a constitution that says practically nothing specific, leaving huge gaping holes in terms of just about everything, that, conveniently enough, get to be filled by none other than the court itself. Now, if I were a legislature who saw that sort of thing happening- and considering the fact that it's just an ordinary law that needs ordinary majority to amend- I would have run back and stuck in a paragraph telling the court to chill.

But the Knesset didn't. I don't know why. Maybe they like having the court solve all their problems, and maybe they have accepted the vision of the court as arbitor of justice and so forth. Maybe they're just tired of a losing battle against the court, and maybe they just have better things to do with their time. I really couldn't say.

But what's created is the very worst, most arbitrary, most well-meaning, and most annoying sort of plurocracy out there. With judges- unelected, unconnected with the popular will, and frankly, not omniscient- holding almost absolute power to shape the society. To turn things like "reasonable man" and "good faith" into towering monsters that level carefully worded laws and guidelines and build in their place beautiful castles in the air where everyone is sweet and lovely and run around singing happy songs of getting-alongness.

And there's a reason why we don't like the idea of absolute power in the hands of an unelected, elite few. And it's not that we might not 100% believe that they are brilliant and well-meaning. But they aren't perfect and they aren't the popular will and they aren't the right way for a country to shape its legal system. And even if they choose, at times, to restrain themselves, and even if the country and legislature choose, at times, to ignore them, it's not the way a democratic society ought to work and it's not the way a system should be. And it really, really annoys me sometimes.

Just Wondering

I've actually been wondering this ever since I read Descartes (I adore how pretentious that sounds). So for the whole intellectualism/skepticism/agnosticism whatnot, one must eliminate all a priori assumptions, no? But how does one get by with eliminating the assumption that the human intellect is in any way useful at discovering the truth? I mean, why should we possibly assume that that which seems logical to us has any correlation with reality? And if the answer is that it has seemed in the past to do so, then we just get circular because 1)why should we assume that 'past performance gaurantees future results' and 2) how do we know that the reality that was previously conceived actually meant anything?

Meaning that: how is it possible to eliminate one enormous a priori assumption when making any attempt to understand anything?

Legal Codes

I haven't posted in a bit for a very good reason, and the very good reason was not that I was overwhelmingly busy with work, because I wasn't really, but because I did not feel like doing so. Didn't have much anything to say. I'm starting to think that I'm over this whole blog fad thing, but I hope that is not true, firstly because it's so cool to be able to say that you have a blog and secondly, because it's so darn useful when you find that you have something to say. As is the case now.

There are certain complaints about Judaism that are nothing short of classic. This post, for example, raises the always popular 'how can G-d fall for loopholes' question, not to mention the 'why does G-d care about details' one and the 'why should we listen to law made up by people thousands of years ago with no sense of modern values and whatnot' (which can be applied to Torah, Talmud, or later Poskim depending on the questioner).

All lovely questioners and fodder for as many mussar/kiruv shmoozes as they are for disenchanted ex-yeshiva rants. But I think that the questions stem from a view of Judaism that is simply skewed.

Judaism- by which I mean the halachic system- is a legal code. Not a set of morals or a philosophy book or a self-help book. Legal. And as such, it is going to have certain traits that are inherent in any legal code.

Conservativism, for example. Any legal code is inherently conservative, based on precedent and resisting any changes. That's what makes it a binding general social set of norms and not just 'what I woke up and felt like doing this morning'. So, yeah, it's going to be based on things that may not be strictly relevant today. Deal with it. And, if the system of law is any good, you have plenty of ways of dealing with it perfectly well. In such cases that legislation is out of the picture, interpretation, application, and enforcement give the legal system plenty of leeway to avoid gross injustices. Except in such cases as the law specifically demands the gross injustice and then you're already dealing with a different problem- that you think that the legal code is messed up and immoral, not that its contemporary application is unfit.

Loopholes, for another example. Almost all systems of law are deontological and not simply teleological. They care about the means and not the ends. An example from this book, which may well be responsible for my going into law. Let us assume that we feel that, when given a choice between hitting and killing 5 pedestrians and hitting and killing one, it is preferable to kill the one. Does it then follow that you are entitled to kill somebody and divvy out his organs in order to save 5 other lives? Most people would say no. And that's because we care about how you get to an endpoint, not just where you end up. Thus, loopholes. A loophole doesn't negate the intelligence or legitimacy of a system of law, because if it did, there wouldn't be any systems of law at all. And loopholes don't just mean that the lawmaker didn't happen to think of the case and therefore was too foolish to plug it up. If the lawmaker wanted to prevent the consequence, he is perfectly capable of making a law to demand the consequence he wants. Any system of law that chooses to base itself of forbidding certain specific behaviors is going to be riddled with loopholes. Get used to it.

And guess what? Legal codes aren't necessary moral. As one of my professors pointed out, the Talmud doesn't talk about right and wrong. It never stops and ponders 'How does G-d feel about the issue', nor does it phrase its arguments in terms of 'What does G-d want us to do?' On the rare occasions that G-d does express an opinion in the Talmud, He is shouted down (Tanur Achnai). The Talmud starts with the necessary initial assumption that 1) obedience to the law is moral and/or desirable and 2) that interpretation of the law is included within the law itself. And from that point forward, it's all about the law. As a living, breathing, evolving, convoluted, contradictory, frustrating, manipulatable entity all of its own.

And that's the way it has to be for the halacha to be the unbelievably awesome thing that it is. Because when you keep referring back to feelings and morality, you aren't inside a legal process any more. And when you aren't inside the legal process, you have cheated yourself of the opportunity to be a part of the creation of G-d's will. To create truth and morality within the structure mandated for humans to be able to participate in the whole thing. That's the crazy cool thing about halacha- it is simultaneously a supremely human legal system, with humans working away about applying and interpreting and inventing and whatnot, and at the same time, the legitimate expression of G-d's will.

Why would somebody choose to go off and mull about truth when he's being offered the chance to create it? Why would you choose to mumble about the dead rigidity of the law when there's a perfectly good structure that lives it? Why would you prefer to cling to your private morality when you have the ability to make it G-d's as well?

An Actual Rant

Often, I allege that a post is going to be a rant and then it ends up being a semi-coherent philosophical argument. This is not one of those cases. This is an actual real, true rant, motivated by nothing beyond rage, frustration, and the joy of having an internet connection. This story of that internet, in fact, is the motivation for this rant.

Once upon a time, there were two roommates who decided to get internet for their dorm room. So they went to the Bezek booth at the Bar Ilan orientation fair, for it was Bezek who could provide them with a phone line that was enabled for internetness. And the Bezek people sold them internet and a phone line and a router and some other confusing things, and much money was spent and there was much rejoicing.

Then a week passed and all of the girls' friends had gotten the Bezek man to come and connect their internet, but the Bezek man did not come to these girls. And so one of the girls began to call Bezek, often several times daily, and this is the litany of the calls, as best as they can be remembered at the moment:

Call 1: Bezek tells the girl that it has never heard of her. Her ID number does not match anything on their computers and that it is impossible to look her up by name.

Call 2 (2 hours later): Bezek tells the girl that it has still never heard of her, neither by her correct ID number, nor by the one that she finds mistakenly written on one of the forms. Is she sure she does not have the order number? Considering that she was never given an order number, she is.

Call 3 (10 minutes later): Bezek tells the girl that they have still not heard of her, but now agrees to look her up by name. Upon doing so, they discover that she really does exist, but there is no order for internet. When questioned, they explain that it takes several days to process the order for a phone line, after which they can begin to process the order for internet. They do not know when the order for the phone line will be processed. Try again in a couple of days.

Call 4 (the next day): Bezek still has not gotten the order for the phone line processed, but they assure the girl that once it is, the internet can be processed quickly. There will be no need to have the Bezek man come around to the room. Are they sure that everyone will be done automatically? You bet they are.

Call 5 (a couple of days later): The girl wonders when she will receive internet. Bezek informs her that her order has just been processed and that in around a week and a half, the Bezek man will come around and adjust the line. Bezek man? asks the girl. Week and a half? asks the girl. Bezek says yes, that is when his schedule is free, and really it has nothing to do with the processes back at their end of customer service. Have a nice day!

Call 6 (a few minutes later): Bezek repeats its statement that the Bezek man will come in a week and a half, except that it decides that there is a vacancy some 5 or 6 days earlier. The only catch is that apparently the Bezek man prefers not to cramp his style by narrowing down his time of coming to less than three hours, all during a time when both the girl and her roommate have class. Not looking a gift horse in the mouth, the girl asks for the earlier time slot. Class will be dealt with when it comes.

Call 7-9 (Over a few days) Girl confirms the coming of the Bezek man because there has been created in her a deep and abiding distrust of anything that Bezek tells her.

Call 10 (From the technician) Since the girl and roommate have gone to a great deal of effort to figure out how, when, and which of them will miss classes at every particular moment, they are somewhat surprised, but gratified when the technician calls offering them their choice of time slot.

Call 11 (To the internet service provider, a whole different company. Later the same day) Internet service is ordered. After a 4 hour wait, the girl may call up their technical support and access the internet.

Call 12 (Four hours later): Tech support encounters a problem with the modem, purchased from Bezek, which means that the girl should turn to Bezek tech support.

Call 13 (A few minutes later): Bezek tech support would love to help, but it seems that there is no record of internet being ordered for this number. Is the girl certain it wasn't ordered for a different number? Tech support is terribly sorry, but this is a problem that must be dealt with by customer service, who are no longer working but will be glad to help the girl tomorrow.

Call 14 (The next day): Bezek customer service does have the girl down as having internet. They would be glad to connect her to technical support, who will be able to help her connect.

Call 15 (30 minutes later, but actually just spent on hold): Bezek technical support does see that there is an order for internet, but that they don't see any modem ordered for this line. Is the girl entirely sure that she bought the modem from Bezek? Other than the word Bezek written repeatedly on the box and the fact that she purchased it from a Bezek fair, the girl has no reason to assume so. Well, technical support can't deal with the issue, so it sends her back to customer service.

Call 16 (After 20 minutes on hold): No, there is no modem on this line. Perhaps it was for another line? Did the girl inform the person from whom she bought the line that she has purchased a modem? Is the girl sure that it's a Bezek modem? After these and similar inane questions, Bezek asks the girl to come into some Bezek store somewhere and prove that the modem came from Bezek. The girl declines and launches into a very minor hissy fit. Bezek fiddles on their computers and sends the girl back to technical support, with promises that the modem thing will not interfere.

Call 17 (Tech support, 20 minutes later): Internet is successfully installed.

And the twist end of the story is that a mere 6 hours later, when the girl was in the midst of her rejoicing at the existingness of her internet, she goes to class to discover that her law faculty has managed to lose her first, four-page long, much labored-over paper. Perhaps the girl forgot to hand it in? She could call the secretary's office, or possibly the TA...

And so another saga begins...

The Evolution Debate

I had an interesting argument about evolution with a friend of mine a couple of days ago. Principally interesting because I think that she was shocked by the relatively left-wingedness of my position. I think that because I wear skirts and, until recently, socks, she is under the impression that I am far more Beis Yaakov than I am. But I have always been more of an intellectual rebel than a behavioral one.

Anyhoo, not the point of this post. The point is that in the middle of the discussion, I got set off on one of my favorite rants, so set off, in fact, that I am still fuming enough to be motivated to actually post several days later. It goes like this:

I do not care if you do not believe in evolution. I do not care if you hold that it's a crime to believe in it. I do not even, intellectually speaking, care if you think that I am evil for believing in it. But please, please do not come to me with three hand-picked, heavily ellipsed scientists, your layman's understanding of advanced scientific theories and some moth-ridden arguments that you heard at a kiruv shabbaton and try to tell me that your opposition to evolution is scientifically based.

I mean, honestly. If I hear the phrase 'evolution is only a theory' one more time, I think I am going to break something. Something expensive. And to save myself time in the comments, yes, I know that evolution is only a theory. Not unlike gravity. And yet I don't go throwing myself off of buildings because I don't buy into the gravity myth. True, evolution has never been proven. It is almost impossible to prove it absolutely, especially when one of the opposite arguments is that an Omnipotent and Omniscient Being has purposely planted misleading evidence that would lead us to believe in evolution. But it has repeatedly failed to be mislead and produced more and more evidence that supports the conclusion that it is true.

Look, I'm not claiming to be an expert scientist and I can hardly argue against more knowledgable people who do not believe that evolution is scientifically supported. But nor is it possible to deny, with intellectual honesty, the fact that an overwhelming of expert scientists do believe that it is accurate. And even if you can find one or two who do doubt the theory- for whatever ideological or scientific reasons of their own- please do not attempt to deny the fact that they are the majority.

Which is not to say that you have to believe in evolution. If you believe that the Bible account is literally true, then by all means, you have every right to go with far less likely or provable, but nonetheless logical explanations, which ever ones you find. If, on the other hand, you believe that evolution is inherently illogical and unscientific, maybe, just maybe, you should ask yourself what factors are motivating that opinion and why, exactly, a whole bunch of perfectly intelligent scientists haven't seemed to catch on?

By the same token, I think that it would be intellectually dishonest for me to pretend that my evolution-influenced reading of B'reishit is the most obvious p'shat that would leap to the eye, or that my willingness to read the Torah as metaphorical or inexact is necessarily most in keeping with the most conservative (small c) religious opinions. I, personally, am fond of the whole Big Bang/Evolution picture of creation not only for scientific reasons, but also because it seems to me to paint a more cogent and more awesome God than pure ex nihilo understandings. But that's my personal opinion, and I attempt, in the spirit of intellectual honesty, to be aware of all of the factors that motivate that decision and not to pretend that the decisions I make are a synthesis of all possible factors rather than a mediation between them.

Of course, true intellectual honesty means that I am also aware of the fact that I am probably not really completely intellectually honest even with myself, but at that point, we start to get into eddying circles of self-knowledge, and then I get a head-ache. So we shall stop here.

Legal Question

Interesting theoretical question given in our law orientation class today. Actually, it was handed out as some professor's study on law and psychology. The question:

You own a cereal factory on a small lake. You have the opportunity to produce a new kind of cereal. The only problem is that this requires dumping a chemical into the lake. The only damages from this chemical will be that it will raise the production costs for another cereal factory, that is on the small lake. There are no health or environmental issues. You know that if you do dump this chemicals, the other factory will sue you and win. However, your profits will exceed the amount that the court will award the other side. Is the decision to produce the new cereal a) moral, b) legal, c) good business practice, d) good for you personally?


Within our small orientation group, people intuitively had radically different answers. So I'd love to get a poll of the audience. And once I get...five responses, I'll post my thoughts. Okay? Awesome! It'll be like a contest! Whoever actually responds gets a... special present. Or something. Or, quite possibly, nothing.


UPDATE: Yay! Responses! Okay, everybody wins my undying gratitude. It's not much, but it's easily transferable over internation boundaries, and also it's cheap.

My intuitive position, although I may be starting to rethink it, was this:

Legal: Well, obviously not, considering that you would lose your lawsuit.

Worth doing: Depends on how much you think that the bad PR would damage you.

Moral: Here comes the interesting bit. Really, who are you harming? The other cereal company is getting compensated for all the damage that you do it, plus, most likely, all of their legal fees and a decent amount of punitary fees (I hope that's the right word. I have fort he first time encountered the phenomena that I can describe something in Hebrew better than English. Whee!). The only reason, in fact, that they wouldn't simply agree to take the money in the first place and walk away satisfies is that they're also a cereal compnay and thus have a vested interest in your lack of success. But that's always going to be a 'damage' to them, even if you wouldn't have had to dump anything. So the question is really is it moral to break the law in order to get what you really would be able to get legally, if it wasn't for extenuating circumstances?

And I think that my automatic answer is sure. The other cereal company comes out no farther behind on the deal than the rest of your competition, and probably somewhat ahead. You have not hurt anybody in any way, and have benefited yourself. Why should there be a moral problem? The only potential answer that I can see is that there is a benefit towards keeping the law even when it is neither beneficial nor ensures morality, just so that people won't go around breaking it.

But is the purpose of the law really to ensure blind obedience when it benefits nobody (at kleast, nobody with a legal right to benefit. The fact that it makes your competition happy isn't really their legal right. It's just a happy side benefit of their having chosen the same lake as you.) ? Or maybe it's simply to give a sufficient disincentive towards doing behavior it would prefer that you didn't?And once it's done it's best to disincent and it's still worthwhile for you, maybe it's perfectly okay to go ahead with it. I feel like, in some twisted way, this is the same logicas a conscientious objector- the job of the law is to provide as much disincentive as it thinks the action deserves, leaving the individual to weigh his own personal costs and beneifts. So basically, I think that the action is perfectly moral, and, should the bad publicity not outweigh the profit, there's no reason taht you shouldn't go ahead with it.

Kohelet

Hey. First, my apologies. I know that I have totally neglected my blog for several weeks now. There were, of course, mitigating factors- my family was in the Holy Land, I was in my sister's apartment, and also, I didn't really feel like it. And, unfortunately, the blog is not going to be terribly busy in the next couple of weeks, because Law School Orientation starts Sunday. That's right-this Sunday. As in "the day that would be Simchat Torah for me if I was still a chutznik." Yeah. And Heavens only know whether or not I have a dorm room... So anyway, I'm going to be a bit busy, so we'll have to see what happens.

And now on to the post. This post, as perhaps you would be able to tell even without the lengthy introduction/disclaimer (but where would be the fun in that?) is spawned more from desperation to get back to posting than actual inspiration, so I'm sorry if it degenerates into yet another dull, angsty rant about my high school experience. Here goes:

We learnt Kohelet in twelfth grade. The first thing that my teacher announced as an introduction to the subject was that Kohelet was not a depressing book. The life that it degrades as pointless is a life dedicated to pursuing physical pleasures, while a life devoted to spirituality is not pointless, but beautiful. This interpretation was supported by translating hevel as 'ephemeral' and reading a lot of passages as not really questioning the afterlife or the soul or things like that.

Fine. It's a legitimate track, and certainly there is a thread in Kohelet attacking hedonism. But I think that this interpretation misses the thing that makes Kohelet so cool. The Talmud says that the chachamim wanted to ban (or hide, or bury) Kohelet because a) it contradicted itself and b) it contained things that leaned towards minut (heresy). The Talmud never goes back and says "but really, it didn't and that was all a misinterpretation." Never says "and then other chachamim came along and said it didn't." It says that they included it a) because the beginning and end are words of Torah and b) because every heretic statement was later contradicted by an acceptable one.

In other words- Kohelet should not- cannot- be read as a single, unified book. It is an ongoing internal debate, the kind that just about every thinking person is going to have. All those angsty, going-off-the-derech questions- they're all in there. Kohelet, as a book, is devoted to that angst, that questioning, that depression, that struggle.

And the fact that it's in Tanach means that the struggle is acceptably in Judaism. And not just if you figure everything out and end up happy and calm, with all your questions answered. Because even with the last couple of p'sukim, Kohelet doesn't have any answers. Never comes to the conclusion that there is an afterlife, or that life is just, or that anything has any point at all. The only vague conclusion that I saw was that that you shouldn't spend all of your life trying to figure out the big questions- if you always watch the clouds, you never plant; more books is more trouble and so forth. Which is hardly a conclusion, but more of angsty frustration at your own angsty frustration.

Anyway, the point is this: teaching Kohelet as just another happy, reasoned book that teaches you to devote yourself to holiness is robbing it of its most basic lesson: It's okay to struggle. Maybe even mandatory to struggle. It's okay to question, to contradict, even to despair. And even someone who loves G-d enough to write Shir Hashirim, who is wise enough for Mishlei, even he can wrestle with the biggest questions. And lose. And keep on fighting.

Just a link

I know, I know, I owe a real post. Accept instead this link to Mike's interesting post on anti-Bible rhetoric and rape.

Wave of Rock

I know, I know, two posts in a day, this is crazy talk. But it looks like I have a bit of time 'til the roommates are ready to leave the computer lab so here goes.

I watched School of Rock yesterday. A cute movie, all in all, and really there is no good reason that it should have gotten me all deep and philosophizing.

But. The one thought that kept popping into my head throughout the film was how uncannily well this movie went with The Wave. No, really. A charismatic teacher sweeps into class with a whole new movement, overturning the way that the school has been run and the values that the kids have been taught, and sweeping everyone along with his ambitious ideals and plans for the future. The movement not only unites the class, but it gives social standing and confidence to students who were the losers beforehand.

A stretch? Perhaps. But it would be startlingly easy to write "The Wave of Rock", in either of two equally valid forms.

1) Dewey Finn comes to the elementary school, bringing with him the gospel of rock. All the children quickly embrace his idea and devote themselves to the project of creating an awesome band. Except for Mary, a quiet girl who enjoys learning actual information and looks askance at the anarchy inherent in Dewey's rock-centric rhetoric. As time goes by, she notices more and more hostility on the part of her classmates towards those they see as representing or supporting 'the Man'. When she tries to pull out the band, she becomes a class pariah, rejected by her peers, singled out in class, and pressured to rejoin the project. The movie ends with either Dewey unveiling the fact that it was all a test, or a camera shot over the crowds of children, dressed alike in School of Rock t-shirts, chanting Dewey's name in unison, with ominous music in the background.

2) Burt Ross has a crazy new idea for his class- a new order of discipline that will unite the students and maybe even change the world into a better place. At first, the kids are dubious, but quickly they get into the idea. Ross forms them into a cadre, giving them each special jobs and encouraging self-confidence in every member of the group. The movie ends with a triumphant rally. The camera zooms over the jubilant crowds, singling out the faces of kids who especially benefited from the movement- friends who met or became closer through their involvement, the loser who is now a valued member of the class, and so forth.


Weird, I know. But I guess it just proves the power that the storyteller has. And the general tendency to ignore the fact that nonconformity can and does often contain its own homogeneous brainwashing.

Visit from an Authoress

Today, an authoress came to visit our Ulpan and tell us all about what it's like to be an authoress. The speech, frankly, was insanely dull. The women subscribes to a more mushy-gushy style of thought than I could ever tolerate, the speech was an hour and a half long, and to top it off, she was deliberately lowering her level of speech so as to adapt to our limited vocabularies.

She did, however, say one thing that caught my attention- that she likes to write because she can create a world in which she is like G-d, where she can decide who lives and who dies, who is happy and who miserable. That she likes it because the real world seems cruel, chaotic, and arbitrary, and writing lets her create a world that is governed by rhyme and reason and so forth.

My G-d, what a ghastly thought. I know how I govern the world of my stories. I kill characters because it seems the thing to do, because I want to see how they react, because it makes for a more interesting plot. Once I killed a fairly major character because I liked the effect of his blood on the snow.

And it's not like I don't like my characters. I can create a character with whom I identify strongly, bring him up from a child with endearing little character traits, put him through school, give him a family and a mode of thinking and children and aspirations and who knows what and kill him simply because I have thought of an interesting way to phrase the scene. Or bump off one of his children just because I think he would cope with it entertainingly. Or inflict and remove a wound as my whim takes me, depending on whether at that moment I think he'd be better with a scar. And even as I do it, I feel bad for the poor thing, really I do. I mean, he has one lousy life.

Miri says that it's just me. She says that she never kills or tortures a character just for the fun of it. But then, she adds that she will give them troubles just because it seems the thing to do, or because the story needs it, or because it's the thing to do.

I don't know. I think I would prefer for the world to run entirely by chance than for it to be run like a story, with G-d dropping tragedies down on us just because we suffer so darn interestingly.

Or maybe it is simply that- that we have to suffer because otherwise there is no story. Because you can't have a book or a life without conflict. And maybe better authors planning more ordered books have better motives than my arbitrary, capricious ones. But even so- of all the images of G-d that I have ever attempted to conceive, the one of Him sitting at a writing desk, notebook open before Him, is probably the one that appeals to me the least.

My Rules of Intellectualism

or: The Five Principles that I wish I had Known in High School when I was Busy Picking Silly Debates that Got Nowhere and Accomplished Nothing and Acheived Absolutely No Clarity and were Really Just There to Keep Me from Going Out of My Mind from Boredom.

1) Shut up. No, really. Just close the mouth. That's better. No, you can't talk yet. Just hush...that's better.

You don't always have to be fighting, to be picking your next argument, to be analyzing and counteranalyzing for weaknesses and talking points. Just listen. What are they saying? No, really, explain it to me. Can you formulate their argument? Can you flowchart it? Can you chop it and dice it and toss in a couple of its implications and a handful of its premises?

Let them finish. Your question on the first sentence shouldn't be an excuse to stop listening to the rest of it. Especially when it's not really a question, but a snarky attack at some flaw in their reasoning.

2) Be clear. Focus, as Michael Medved would say, like a laser beam. You don't need to go into the whole windup, with rant and example and clever turn of phrase. If there's nothing that you disagree about enough to be able to simply swoop in on a discrepancy, then do you really disagree or are you just arguing out of principle?

Stop talking past each other, orating at each other, tripping each other into little vicious circular tangents of semantics or nitpicking. Find the core difference- the b'mai ka mafligei- and fight about that. That ought to be quite enough.

3) Boil down. Alright, you've got the actual point of disagreement. Is that based on something else? A premise you don't share? An assumption that you're not willing to make, or that you think is obvious? Almost every argument falls back to one or more other arguments. Get as far back on the Hydra's neck as you can.

Bickering about the rule about knee socks? Isn't it really a debate about the importance of mandating religious standards versus personal independence? Or maybe it's a fight about religious tolerance versus believing in only one legitimate path? Or maybe, just maybe, it's really just you not wanting to have to go buy new socks? Boil it down, redefine.

4) Pick and choose. You can't fight everything that you and your co-debater disagree about in one setting. Stick to your topic and its immediate premises. The person who supports knee-socks may also be against your learning Talmud, but you don't have to start duking out everything about every belief. If it's directly relevant, than there you are. But don't bring it in just because it's always irked you and you really want a chance to get into it. There will be other chances. There are always more chances.

5) Know when to stop. Sometimes, there's nothing left to fight about. You've boiled things down to a premise so basic, an logical jump so obvious or (for the other person) so ridiculous, a difference of opinions that are so firmly held that you're never going to get anywhere. Ever. Maybe, possibly, if the other person isn't quite as smart as you, you can trap them, puzzle them, or race beyond them, but you will never convince them.

Or maybe you've boiled your differences down to something that really isn't that big a deal at all. You would do X 49% of the time, I'd do it 50%. You are slightly less in favor of Y. I value Z a bit more than W, but they very rarely come into conflict.

It's okay to stop. I mean, yes, it means you might just have to find something else to do with the last five minute of your recess, but that's okay too. And another twelve hours of point and counterpoint, jab and foil, nitpicking and example aren't really going to do anything. You don't have to 'agree to disagree', but it's okay just to agree to stop arguing and talk about the weather.


The only other point that I would have is more a rule of morality than of debate, but I would still like to mention it, because it's important. Obvious, but important. Don't debate people that you dislike, and don't dislike the people you debate. Arguing should be a way of connection, not an excuse to vent all your dislike of an idea/principle/system/theory onto the head of the perfectly lovely person that happens to be supporting it. And if you don't like the person you're fighting, you're going to be associating their flaws to their position and vice versa, making it difficult to have a really intelligent debate and virtually impossible to ever accomplish anything in your argument

Awesome Rant

Okay- I don't have time to post my reactions to this, but go read it, yell at it, agree with it, all that good stuff.

More Female Stuff

So, I was really hoping to be able to move off of the whole female subject. Today, however, a random friend started reading my blog. While reading this post, he came upon the line where I cunningly avoid getting into the whole mess about my thoughts about female rabbis and decided that I couldn't just leave it like that. So here goes.

Firstly, I understand why women were originally not intended to be halachic decisors. Back when being a Rabbi was really being a Rabbi, when you had to know just about everything to be able to make halachic decisions and being a Rabbi meant being the leader of the community, it really makes some sort of sense. I mean, look. In a normal society 99.9% of people aren't going to be the intellectual elites. The .1% that are, will have to be 1)the absolute best at the whole learning thing, 2) able to free themselves from other time committments and 3)willingly supported by the community. A woman might well be able to pull off 1), is practically speaking very unlikely to get 2) and would rarely get 3). There were always a few crazies (yes, Bruria, I know), but it wasn't easy.

Nor should it necessarily be so. I am willing to accept innate differences in the natures and missions of men and women. Not very PC, but there you go. And I am certainly willing to go with the notion that any reasonably ordered society needs some sort of division of labor and different roles for the different people, as befits their particular needs and characters. Can I say for certain that women would be less suited to roles of academia and/or leadership? No. But I do not think that it is a coincidence that almost all human societies have evolved into this form, nor do I think that it is a coincidence that G-d set up our system this way. I happen to have my own theories as to why this is the case, which have to do with the fact that women have less of an innate predilection towards jerkiness, but I am not in love with these theories, certainly not enough to fight for them. The point is, for whatever reason, it makes sense for a society to not have everybody running around being all metaphysical and so forth and it makes sense that the very small percentage of people who are going to be that way should be male, if only because they are naturally more seperable from certain vital activities. (translation: women biologically have the babies, something that is not very conducive for them running off and learning for years without the burden of their family).

Now, that all applies to the time when S'micha was real, something that is no longer the case. Now s'micha simply means that you knew enough to pass some sort of an exam, has no halachic significance in terms of actual "s'micha" and simply functions as permission for you to make halachic decisions, something that many people with 'Rabbi' in front of their names prefer not to do anyway. So, from a halachic perspective, I don't really see any problem with creating a title/role for women with the equivolent function of saying 'We officially acknowledge that you know a lot of Torah'.

Do I want to become one of those? No, not really. And this is for two reasons. Firstly, because I don't really see the point. I mean, if I know a ton, so wonderful, I'll be clever. Do I need some title testifying to that? Shmuel the tanna never got S'micha. Nor, for that matter, did D'vorah Han'via or Chulda or Esther or in fact, anyone that the Torah chooses to tell us about. A title might be convenient for determining, say, qualifications for being a female Gemara teacher, but I don't know if it's worth the whole communal rift and so forth. And secondly, because I am conservative. I prefer not to be on the fore-front of movements, even ones that I would have no problem with joining when they are older. Is it cowardice? Yes, probably. But it is also a general distrust of movements like this that are usually inspired by motives that I don't like- ego, resentment and so forth. Of course, that's often what it takes to get a movement started, but that doesn't mean that I want to be a part of that. The world may need its angry people who start things like that, but they still make me nervous and I would prefer to jump onto the bandwagon once I am confident that it's not evil or anything like that. Again, it may simply be cowardice and a distaste for conflicts, but there you go.

Spirituality

I have started to notice a vague correlation between my posting and the number of hits that I get. Which is enough to inspire me to post even my musings are not really sufficiently fleshed out for this forum.

And on the subject of inspiration...I have come to the conclusion that I don't really believe in spirituality. What does that mean? Not that I don't believe in holiness or closeness to G-d. Not that I don't believe in moments that make you feel all warm and inspired. Not even that such moments don't have their religious uses.

But here's the deal- I don't believe in this whole spiritualization of Judaism. I went to a speech on kabbala where the speaker was listing things that can be spiritual- singing, dancing, meditation- and mitzvot. Which treats spirituality as the goal and mitzvot as a helpful means of getting there. I don't believe that. Spirituality- by which I mean a feeling of closeness to G-d - is all very well and good, but that's not the point.

The point of human existance, according to Judaism, is to serve G-d, emulate, and become close to G-d by obeying His commandments. Zeh hu. Warm mushy-gushy feeling does not appear on the list. (I am not referring to kavana, which is part of the mitzva and involves the intellect- intention and awareness- rather than the emotions.)

Of course, a feeling of inspiration is often quite useful, given that humans aren't all that good at the self-discipline thing and often need emotions to inspire them towards the correct actions.
But the emotion there works as a means to an end. And of course, somebody who is genuinely close to G-d may have a feeling of being so and thus feel spiritual. However, the spiritual feeling is simply a symptom, side-benefit, or result of the genuine closeness.

What's the nafka mina? If Person A goes and climbs a mountain and communes with the stars and recites poetry and gets the biggest spiritual high in the world and Person B spends six hours making food packages for needy families or checking a mountain of lettuce for bugs or building a sukkah and feels nothing, Person B has acquired more holiness. Now, if Person A's communion then inspires them to do useful things, then he can get as much or more holiness as Person B. And of course, it would be nice if Person B felt close to G-d, because 1) it will make it more likely that she will do these good things in the future, because humans crave that sense of closeness and 2) because her actions really are meritorious and a proper understanding of the world would involve being aware of that fact and it's good to understand the world properly.

BUT the spiritual high itself means nothing. It's not holiness, it's not sacredness, it sure as heck isn't righteousness. It's an emotional massage. It's a feel-good pill of warm fuzzies, whether it comes from your lovely mountaintop, or a Kabbalat Shabbat with songs and dances, or a group meditation. Sure, it feels nice. Sure, it makes you feel holy. But that's not the point. Your feelings- they may be totally off-base, they may be an accurate representation of reality, they may be a useful tool for gauging growth- but they're not the point.

Wheeee!

Yippee! After weeks of struggling with beaurocracy, red tape, time difference, and so forth, I finally have a schedule for my classes for the coming year. I am taking classes in contract law, criminal law, and tort law (as best I can translate them), and one on different systems of justice. I also have a class on sects of Judaism in the Second Temple Era, picked more or less at random from among the Jewish class requirements.

Doesn't seem like so much, does it? I mean, I have only 22 hours of class a week. I feel as if I either have forgotten to sign up for some kind of class, or else they're really going easy on us in the first semester. Already, my second semester is much busier. But all of the free time is tempting me to maybe apply for a minor.... maybe in Talmud or something?....I shall have to think on this...

Talmud

Well. It's a fascinating discussion, although I must confess that I started spacing out before reading all of it. But the general debate is one in which I have participated bajillions of times. First, to establish my own credentials- I am a female who learns Gemara. Not on-and-off, not in a class, not if it comes up in some properly tanach/mussar setting, but on my own, for fun, doing Daf Yomi, searching for chavrutot. Because I absolutely adore it. And feel that it makes me love G-d and Torah and holiness and sharpens my mind and so on and so forth.

So, what does that mean? Well, for one thing, it means that I don't feel that it's forbidden for women to learn Talmud. Which is at odds with the philosophy of my high school, it should live and be well. (I had one teacher who preferred to bring in sheets with a passage from the Talmud written out, rather than bring in a photocopy of the page, because she preferred that we not get familiar with the format of a daf of gemara. Yeah.) Of course, I have never heard any really good halachic reasons or sources for it to be forbidden, or even frowned upon, but then, if you started giving girls solid halachic reasons, that would sort of destroy the whole point, wouldn't it?

Darn. I am sounding bitter, aren't I? I'm trying not to be bitter here. Because really, from what I know of girls, 95% of them are not suited for learning Gemara. Whether this is natural or acquired through environment would make an interesting discussion, but it lacks, I believe, a nafka mina (useful difference) for this particular case. I am actually pretty much in agreement with the statement that females, as a whole, do not think as logically, factually, or analytically as men. I am willing to believe that they (well, 'we', I suppose. Distancing myself is cheating, isn't it?) are collectively worse at math and science, quite probably at Talmud as well.

Well. And where does that leave me? Shrug. As an anamoly, I guess. One that some people find disturbing and others love to rally around as if I were representative of some far larger trend. Really. When I tell friends that I am doing the daf, there are only three possible reactions, depending on their hashkafic leanings and gender: 1) The sideways glance at another Bais Yaakov friend, with the little amused shrug, translated into "Oh, that Tobie. She's a bit...you know, but it's not nice to start fights about people's beliefs" 2) The MO "right on, girl! you're fighting for all of us! Carry the banner proudly!" that makes me want to roll my eyes and/or run shrieking, 3) the (usually male) patronizing smile that says "A girl who thinks that she learns gemara. Adorable!". Well, actually, there are a few people who just kind of accept it, and those are cool and good people, but they are few and far between.

The point is...there was a point, back there somewhere. Ah, yes. The point is, I think that the gemara argument often presents a false choice: Women can't learn gemara vs. women should all learn gemara. I happen to fall in the middle- the desire and/or ability to learn gemara is rare among females. Those that can, should. Those that can't, they should live and be well.

And just because I learn gemara doesn't mean I want to be a rabbi. Possibly, if I were male, I would become a rabbi. But I'm not and I prefer to think that this was not just an oversight on the part of G-d. And the fact that I won't be a rabbi doesn't really bother me, since I happen to believe that women shouldn't be rabbis, both because the majority may not be able to handle the torah-knowledge requirements and for a variety of other reasons that are really too complicated to get into now.

But the point is, insofar as there is a point, that just because I'm a gemara-learning female doesn't describe my entire hashkafa or personality or anything. It's just something that I do, because I can and I think that I should.

Live Blogging

And speaking of group psychology, fascinating dynamic going on in the computer lab as I type this. One group of Frenchies are not only loudly talking to one another in the otherwise silent lab, but one dude is playing this really annoying, percussiony music out loud (quite loud) instead of using his headphones. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one annoyed by this- people keep clenching their headphones tighter, sighing, or casting the group glances, but nobody has the guts to say anything. I keep planning to, and even planning out the sentences in Hebrew in my head, but it just never seems to happen. I wish that somebody else would say something, which is probably just what everyone else is wishing. But honestly, how jerky can you get? They even left the music blaring when they went outside to do something.

UPDATE: Urg. I may have accidentally done something. As I left the lab, thinking I was done and all, I gave the music player a somewhat severe look. Or rather, I just kind of looked at him hard, thinking that he wouldn't be looking at me and then I could feel smug and admonishing without having to have any moral courage at all. Only he looked back, and then I couldn't look away without feeling stupid, so I ended up giving him a rather long severe look before I left the room. And then I realized I hadn't checked my e-mail so I came back in to check it and I'm not sure what that might have been construed to mean, but anyways, he's stopped playing the music and has at least once given me a possibly severe, possibly guilty look (I can't really tell). What the lesson of this story might be, I wish I knew.

Where to live?

I spent shabbat in Nof Ayalon, a small yishuv affiliated with/attatched to the hesder yeshiva Sha'alvim. In many ways, it's quite the idyllic small town, straight out of a 50's sitcom, with its special Orthodox twist- children wandering the streets in gangs, making up their own fun as they go along; the streets flooding in a single sudden gush when the shul lets out; neighbors whose homes you will wander in and out of; stands where you can hitch a ride without having to worry.

I can't decide whether I could possibly live in a place like that. On one hand, I feel as if it's the sort of childhood that I ought to give my future kids, in terms of innocence and camraderie and nurturing environment and so forth. And certainly, it would place me firmly in a religious setting of my own, where there would be plenty of opportunities and inspiration for shiurim, chesed, and the other sorts of activities that work best in a communal setting.

But even for the single shabbat, I found that it stifled me. Like living there would crush my illusions of individuality. How can you feel like a person when everyone you know goes to the same shul and has the same interests and everyone's kids go to the same school and the same s'nif and have the same beliefs. You come out of shul with everyone else and walk home to your identical shabbat table with the same divrei torah sent home by the same teachers and your children rush off to the same pe'ulot as you clear your identical table and go to take your identical nap.

And it's not just a matter of not feeling unique. It's the very fact of all the homogeneity. What would it be like to spend your entire life among people whose ideology completely coincides with your own? Can what you do even be called thinking after a while, or is it just the communal brain swinging into the obvious, universal conclusion? Never to have your ideas challenged, never to have to accomodate another point of view- couldn't it make your personal conscience shrivel up and die entirely? And even if you were fine, what would it do to your children to never have to struggle with anything they ever thought, to have every idea implanted and reinforced by the fact that everyone they know thinks the same?

I guess the reason that I'm so worried about this is because of last year's anti-disengagement activism, which was so unanimous in certain groups that it seemed nothing short of indoctrination. I mean, does anybody know of a B'nei Akiva kid who supported disengagement? Is such a thing possible? What, I wonder, would have happened to a kid who happened to think that disengagement was a good idea? Would they have been ostracized, pressured, ignored? Or are their minds so thoroughly homogeneous that it would have been impossible for any of them to have thought such a thing? I know that it sounds patronizing to assume that they didn't all just happen to reach the same conclusion, but I don't think that the argument was so one-sided that no reasonable person could have reached a decision opposed to the concensus. And so I get kind of scared when I go to places like this yishuv, where everybody agrees and is friendly and nice and small town and religious (but not the wrong kind of religious) and holds the right views and so forth. Maybe people need constant friction in order to really think, let alone grow.

The Matzav

It wasn't until my second day in Israel that I heard anyone talking about 'the matzav'. (By the way, bit of digression, but there's so emblematically Israeli about that term. Not the war, or the terror, or the problems, but just 'the situation'. As in 'this is the situation that we have to deal with.') And even then it was just Ulpan announcements about the security arrangements, to allay all of us nervous Americans. On Shabbat, there was some talk about the war, the ceasefire, and so forth, but it was mixed in with talk of the craziness of American politics and so forth.

There is no fear. The 'situation' comes up when we are discussing my sister's plans for a summer camp for evacuated families from the north, or discussing why my roommate had to relocate from University of Haifa. There is concern for those that are in danger and sadness over those who are killed, and worry about the whole situation and what is going to be for the country, but I have felt none of the sudden panic that gripped me back in America. As I knew it would be. First of all, because things are insanely safe here in Jerusalem, but also because here is the right place. I am doing what I want to be doing, and I am where I should be.

And that is enough.