Blogosphere word salad

I think I mean I want I should I shouldn't I should've I say I maintain I feel I did I am I wrote I made I wonder I guess I think

My diary my soapbox my column my gallery my community my fifteen minutes my novel my confessional

Hear me validate me agree with me love me visit me censure me help me understand me convince me explain to me obey me admire me love me enjoy me laugh with me enlighten me pity me argue with me talk to me forgive me accept me love me hear me

Edit: This really seems to keep happening, which probably means that it behooves me to clarify before posting random experimental writing. This is not about me. Really not. Not in a "but secretly it is" sort of way. This is....an attempt to dissect, analyze, boil down this crazy phenomenon that is "the blogosphere", the crazy elusive charm that so many people seem to see in it and all the different reasons that different people enjoy it and what is it exactly and....well now that it's explained it's really kind of dull.

Thought Experiment

or The Random Thoughts Currently Bumping around my Head

I once heard somebody asked the classic question 'Can G-d make a rock that He cannot lift?', to which he gave the very interesting answer, "No. G-d can do everything except that He cannot not be G-d." Well, I like the answer insofar as it goes, but it leaves two interesting holes: A) Then there is something G-d can't do and B) then G-d does not really have free will. Which I suppose are not killer questions, because face it, we can't hope to understand even the concept of infinitude, so what do we know?

But here is an alternative train of thought: What if G-d thought of a scenario in which He could be not G-d- not infinite, that is? And what if that thought experiment is the world?

No, really. Listen. For G-d to be truly infinite, He must contain even the possibility of non-infinitude- He must be able to create a situation in which He cannot lift the rock. And from that quality of G-d's infinitude, He can create matter, space, time-crazy ideas really for a Being that is not bound in any of them.

So G-d creates/thinks of (I'm not sure there's a difference for Him) a universe in which He isn't infinite. If that universe is this one, it happens in two ways: 1) He makes a set of rules that He agrees to play by- but these rules probably aren't all that binding and choosing not to do something isn't the same as inability and 2) He creates flakes of Himself that are bound up by finity. By which I mean man.

Thus the universe is simply the forum in which G-d binds Himself up in non-omni-ness. Which would seem to deprive the whole thing of a sense of purpose. Unless- here's where B comes in. G-d in His infinite sense cannot have free will because He just is by virtue of being. And stuff. But G-d given limitations can then have the choice to choose whether or not to be divine. The universe- and specifically man- then becomes a place for man to choose to be divine, and all the rest of it is just thrown in to give man both true free will and a place to wander about being finite without being dead and stuff. A place in which G-d asks "What if I could choose not to be G-d?" and sees what happens.

Okay, it's a little random, and it may very well be stupid and/or heretical. But there you go.

The Strike

Meanwhile, in Tobie's world, the strike continues. I must confess, I really don't get the strike. The person in charge of my school's student organization sent around an e-mail trying to explain it and it just seemed like an odd mixture of "secretly, we are making great strides" and "we aren't making any promises- who knows what will be tomorrow?"

Background: All the university students in this beautiful country are on strike. It's been three weeks now- I haven't had class since before Pesach. And Heavens only know when I will next. We're striking because the government wants to cut the subsidies that it gives to college education, thus raising our tuition, and also because the committee to discuss the whole thing is headed by people we don't like or have already said they don't like us or something like that.

Now, I have yet to talk to a single person who thinks that the strike is a good idea. I mean, for starters, we're the customers. Customers don't strike, and they certainly don't continue to pay for a product while refusing to actually use it. For seconders, you don't stop going to university to protest the government. Governments are fought with rallies and- crazy but it just might work- voting. I just somehow can't see ministers and officials crumbling to their knees sobbing, "please, please don't continue to refuse to become educated! I can't bear it any longer! Noooooooooooooo....." and so forth. I mean, the only real threat that we have in our arsenal is that we will all fail out of university and ten years down the road the country won't have an educated workforce and oh, boy, won't you all be sorry then.

Not that we're even turning to that doomsday weapon just yet. We won't go to classes, but tests, assignments, and projects are all still go. Because a strike is a strike, but we wouldn't actually want to jeopardize anything.

Which leaves aside the whole question of whether I even think the goal is worthy. Now, granted I don't pay my own tuition- it's one of those new immigrant perks- but maybe that makes me objective enough to see that maybe university students are not on the top ten list of people who most need to be subsidized. Most countries have something called student loans, under which you internalize all the costs of your education, thus enabling you to decide whether or not it's really worthwhile for you to get a college diploma, instead of simply earning one because it's cheap for you. The student leaders talk about how lack of subsidies will lead to everyone deciding not to go to school and so on and so forth, but it seems as if most countries seem to work things out decently well, and it's not like Israel has too few citizens looking only for high-educated, white-collar work.

Which is still not the main objection to the strike. The fact is, I'm bored out of my brains, not getting the education I came to this place for, not able to do anything actually fun since nobody knows when the strike will end, and probably about to get stuck with an extra week or two of classes or a frenzied month of make-up classes crammed into every hole in the schedule. Got to love socialism.

Oh...right...

I forgot...it's still Yom Ha'atzma'ut for you people and I should prolly leave you with something more inspiring than the below...ramble. But...I got nothing...you can all go read this again, I still think it's pretty.

Dream come true

This was going to be turned into some vague sort of poem, but nothing poetic was really happening in my brain, despite the plethora of bus rides which usually serve as the best forum for creativity, plus my relatives (not to mention any names) have a habit of mocking my poetry, so I'm going to be terribly dull and actually say things out in prose. It may still become a poem some day, depending on how long this silly strike keeps going and thus how bored I shall end up becoming. Also, extra disclaimer, reading this back, I don't think it worked at all. But there is a point hidden there in the pomposity which I kind of like, although I don't think it came through at all. Anyhoo, enough with the typically long introduction, here goes:

Israel has problems. Really quite a lot of them. And not just the big exciting 'look, everybody wants to kill us' problems, not that those aren't fun too, but also all of those standard little typical problems, like corruption, and social rifts, and a weird little semi-socialism thing going, and a judicial system that makes me want to pull my hair out, and more beaurocracy than should be capable of fitting in one itty-bitty country, and all sorts of other wacky fun.

She's also got a shortage of good answers. To all those fun little problems and all of those big exciting ones, like how to not get destroyed or blown up or nuked or out of control.

And this all tends to depress people. Most particularly people who come all tra-la-la starry-eyed Zionist. I had a bit of a head-start in the cynical, unidealistic thing, but even so, it's a bit daunting. But here's the thing.

It's been all very well and fun to have a dream going for a couple thousand years, all about how cool it's going to be when you get back to Israel and/or have autonomy. And you get to build yourself awfully pretty visions of the utopia that it's all going to be. And in the dream, it can be. Because in the dream, everybody's sweet and friendly and wants to join hands and do folk dances between the fields of grain, unless the dreamer is more religious, in which case the dancing will be strictly seperate and with a nice mechitza. In dreams, there isn't real dirt or real stairs and nobody needs to figure out how exactly you're going to clean up after the party. In dreams, things just work out and everybody goes home a winner.

And the best part of the whole dream sequence when it concerns Israel is that even if those practical problems started forcing themselves on your attention- 'but how will we fit everyone?' 'what about a balance of power?' 'can you have a theocracy without getting all evil?'- you can foist them all off onto Mashiach. It'll be different then. The rules won't apply. People really will be warm fuzzy blankets of niceness. Monarchy works when you have a G-d-guaranteed benevolent monarch. We won't have to have an economy when bounty will drip off all the trees. And so on.

Well, and maybe it will be like that at some point. I've never really been clear on what's going to happen and when thing and tend towards the 'we'll find out when it happens, won't we?' But it's not like that now.

I know that there are some people who are holding out for the dream- who won't accept the reality because face it, it's a really long way from perfect. But I have to say, and maybe it's just me, I kind of prefer the model in which G-d says, "Okay, people, here's a chunk of land. Go figure things out,' to the one in which a savior comes galloping in on his white donkey to save the day. Kind of like the idea that the country is just bumbling along in its blessedly silly and confused little way, trying to figure things out and perhaps not always doing the best job in the world. Kind of like that there are problems, because that's what you get when dreams come true. We could have an ideal country, but only so long as we stay asleep, waiting for someone else to give it to us.

And illusions are nice and fun and so forth. But I think that I'm kind of fond of disillusionment.

Saying of the Day

Until I have time to write a real post, here's a self-quote for the day:

Angst is like hormones. It's an unavoidable part of being human- certainly of being a teenager- but there's no point in wallowing in the stuff.

Disillusioned Novels

Miri and I were discussing A Complicated Kindness- a novel that we both just finished reading and both really enjoyed (the former hardly a coincidence- it was recommended by a common friend and also there aren't all that many books around the dorms, so any book that she gets her hands on will be mine pretty soon). It's really a very good book, of the angsty disillusioned rebellious intellectual teenager sort, but the girl has more of a right to be angsty, disillusioned and rebellious than the average teenager, so you had to forgive her for it. We were wondering whether it's possible to write a good novel about a community without it being a scathingly disillusioned and bitter indictment. That is, whether one could write a book about the Jewish community that would both be decent and not a 'look at me, I'm airing dirty laundry and exposing the corroded infrastructure of the so-called moral authority' sort of thing.

Here's my theory. Every good novel- community specific or not- must be disillusioned. Because illusions simply don't work in a novel. Those that share the illusion will be bored and unchallenged; those that don't will think that you're a naive idiot and be entirely unable to relate to you or your little narrative. In fact, a possible definition of the greatness of a novel could be having the fewest illusions possible. If a novel is measured by how much it resembles reality or by how much it reveals about the world and the human condition, then it can't really afford to have any illusions at all.

But the thing is this. These illusions aren't just the ones that sneering black-bereted intellectuals like to be disillusioned with, like the morality of authority figures, the efficacy of the system, or the perfection and happiness of everybody in the community. A real novel can't afford to have illusions like that the sneering intellectuals have any answers, that everybody is miserable, that there's no truth or beauty or love or honesty in the system. Illusions like that the author is better or wiser or more honest than everybody else. A good novel has to be painfully truthful, but I don't know that truth is necessarily bitter or angsty.

"Religious Views"

So now I'm getting so desperate that I'm stealing my own random notes off of facebook, except that this is the first note that I've made on facebook because I am pretty convinced that facebook is an agent of the devil (or of Sociability, a monster almost as fearsome.)


So I bet you've been wandering around facebook, looking at various things, and thinking to yourself, by golly! I wish there was somebody, somewhere who could analyze it far past the point to which it has meaning! Well, wish no more!

So, I was thinking about this category "religious views". First of all, it reminds me of the distinction my professor drew between religions that focus on theology and those that focus on practice. For Christians, he said, everything is about doctrine- you're Christian if you believe x,y, and z. Maybe a lapsed Christian or a bad Christian, but you're not outside of the faith.
Judaism, according to his theory at least, puts much more emphasis on practice; you ask whether somebody is shomer shabbat and shomer this more than their beliefs. The whole idea of having a list of beliefs didn't come around until the Rambam, and there were plenty of people who have made it into the halachic tradition who disagreed with several of the big 13.
I'm not so sure that we really are more into practice than belief nowadays. We seem to have plenty of fights about doctrine, but usually only when it affects practice. The problem is that it's hard to construct a "would you prefer your daughter to marry" question because it's hard to think of somebody who would have all the beliefs without the practices.

Secondly, I have to wonder about the phrasing "religious views". Which views, exactly, are religious in nature? Only the metaphysical ones? Do views about the nature of truth or whatnot fall into my "religious views" or are they more philosophical in nature? What about my views about my religion?
Or is "religious views" just code for "religion", except that religion seems to demand a sort of conformity, picking your choice off a drop-menu sort of thing, while religious views is open and multi-cultural? And if so, why do those different connotations exist?
I think that one difference between the terms is that religious views invites you to define your own religious views, not fitting into other people's boxes. But religion, for almost all of us, really is boxes. Especially on facebook, where the identification serves to place you in everyone's community. "Religious views" lets everybody who's uncomplicated enough to fit into a box, to pick the box, without thinking or majorly over-analyzing things, the complicated people to have a chance to be witty and deep and open-but-at-the-same-time-

showing-how-complicated-you-truly-are.
So I suppose it's really a win-win all around.
And I'm not sure what the point of this note was.

Pesach Rant

My roommate has pointed that I have a bitter and/or cynical rant for just about every holiday (including Tisha B'Av, Tu B'Shvat, Succot, and even Rosh Chodesh, sorta). This, combined with the fact that the theme of almost all of them is "nobody but me really gets the point" probably makes me a bad person, but what can you do?

Anyway, Pesach rant. I sort of lost steam in that long introduction, but here goes.

I think it's a shame how Sippur Yitziat Mitzrayim has evolved. I mean, the root of the mitzva is to tell the story. You know, once upon a time, Ten-Commandments\Prince-of-Egypt style, with details and characters and maybe even voices. Not, I'm afraid, to tell brilliant vortlach about how the haggada is written or who the four sons represent or why everyone was staying up all night that night. Just tell the story.

I know that it seems a little immature, but then again, the haggada sort of acknowledges the issue when it says "Even if we are all old and learned and brilliant and clever, we still have to tell the story. As much as possible." I've been to seven or eight shiurim that analyze with elegance and flair how the mitzva of sippur relates to reliving and how it's all so important and so forth, but I have never been to a seder that actually focuses on the story telling. Instead, the haggada is plowed through, with varying degrees of interpretation. As if the point was to reach the p'shat of the haggada.

Not that anything can really be done about the subject. Because once we have a haggada, we've sorta got to use it. Although really, there's only one section that claims to be mandatory.

The only real hope is children. (There are 3 buzzwords that one is supposed to use in every argument for Israel: hope, future, and children, in any combination that seems convenient. 2 out of 3 is not bad to use on a subject like this.) Because when you have kids, they actually want to know what's going on and you actually have to tell the story to them, and there you go. But the older the population gets, the more sophisticated everyone feels that they have to be.

I don't know, really. I've never run a seder and I think that I would probably run it just the way that everybody else does, but my ideal seder- as it conglomerates in my head just now- would have minimal emphasis on the haggada and a whole lot on a really good story-teller, telling a really good story complete with visual aids and so forth.

A Cautionary Tale for Dorm Life

"The Girl Who Cried Engagement"

Once upon a time, there was a girl who screamed all the time in the hallways. One day, she passed an exam and started screaming and jumping up and down and squealing in the hallways, and everybody rushed out to see if she was engaged. But she wasn't. And then another day a song she liked was playing on her music list and she started squealing and jumping up and down with all her friends in the hallways, and everyone rushed out to see if she was engaged. But she wasn't. And then another day she discovered some other terribly exciting thing, and she started squealing and jumping up and down with all her friends in the hallways, and everyone rushed out to see if she was engaged. But she wasn't.

Ending I:
And then one day she got engaged and nobody cared.

Ending II:
And then one day her hair caught on fire and nobody could tell.

And Crusade Part II

(Revenge of the Crusade)

You know how sometimes you get yourself all psyched for some big, superhero, music-swelling, no-holds-barred sort of conflict and then everything ends up working out so nicely that you just feel silly, like having the door opened just as you come charging with your battering ram?

I was afraid that was going to happen with my crusade- that is, that after all that sound and fury and build-up, it would end up being a simple question of beaurocracy, easily solved by some secretary. So the adventures of the morning were not untinged with relief. Adventures as follows. Omitted, but important to note is that every step of this process is carried out in terror and unidentified guilt and wobbling knees and so forth. G-d did not give me the backbone of a revolutionary (although it would doubtless make a lovely conversation piece):

I am directed from bored secretary to bored secretary to the secretariat of the law faculty, who already knows me terribly well because I pop in there every couple of days with one problem or another, most of them relating to my having changed ID number mid-semester and the issues that spring therefrom. Visiting the secreteriat is always a bit daunting of an experience; they are calm and confident and give swift instructions in Hebrew, and they know all of your grades and like to make oblique references to them. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Hey, I'm having a bit of a problem with my Mishpat Ivri class. See, I want to switch into a higher level-
Law Department Secretary: Oh, yes, we've heard. You're in the middle level. That's the highest level you can get into.
Me: But...I'd like to switch up.
LDS: You can't.
Me: Because I'm a girl?
LDS: It's not a question of being a girl. It's the department rules- it's all based on your previous education.
Me: I know, but see, I've done a year of post high-school learning. There are boys in that level who only-
LDS: It's not a possibility.
Me: I see...is there somebody I can talk to?
LDS: No. It's over. There's nothing you can do.
Me: But...
LDS: But nothing. No girl has ever been in the highest level and none ever will be.
Me: Okay...but it doesn't really seem fair...
LDS: That's the way it is. Those are the rules.
Me: But the class is really not on my level...
LDS: So you'll get an easy A. You're getting good grades, Tobie, that's what's really important.
Me: Um....thanks [leaves office highly flumoxed, on verge of tears, having no clue what to do next]

So then I go downstairs and out of the building, a little shell-shocked by the burst of utterly confident finality. But it seems too quick, so I go back upstairs to attempt to appeal to the Dean. While standing outside of the Dean's secretary's office, waiting for her to finish chatting with another secretary, a nice lady, passing by, asks me what I would like, hears my situation, and, with limited sympathy for my cause but a lot of niceness, tells me that the thing to do is to write a letter to some committee or other and give it in at the law faculty's secretariat. It probably won't work, she tells me, but I'll feel better if I've done everything I could. (Yes, that is really the way that things work in this country. Most of human knowledge, and all of it that relates to beaurocracy is attained through random nice ladies in hallways. They are the Israeli equivalent of gurus on mountaintops.)

So I go home and write a nice little letter and then print it out and give it in, full of terror and so forth because the letter is being given to the same LDS who earlier told me the whole "no girl has ever gotten that class" line, which, by the by, sounds like I'm making it up for the purposes of making my crusade more crusade-y, which is just what I thought when she said it. But she is sweet and friendly and the terror is wholly unjustified.

Then I go back home and start making plans about what I should do when and until my request is rejected. Together with my dream team of advisors (my roommate, a sympathetic boy from Law, the random people he consulted, the random other people I consulted), the general consensus is that I should turn to the vice-dean, one of my first semester professors and all-around nice guy. He is out of his office in the morning, so I settle into my room, full of schemes and worry and a general sense of despair at ever having this ridiculous thing sorted out.

Which is why the 2:30 phone call came as such an utter and complete shock. It was the LDS, calling to tell me that the committee had decided to approve my request, giving me the number to call to change my registration, and congratulating me on my success. I know- battering ram\door thing at its best, but in a good way. I could not shake off the nagging feeling that the whole thing was some odd sort of prank- is there really a committee that works within three hours from submission? they actually let me in without any letters of recommendation or even transcripts? no impassioned arguments, debates, anything? It's all a little too good to be true. But nonetheless, my registration is changed, my official schedule marks the class, and I guess I am good to go. (Yay!)

My Crusade

I prefer not to tell stories from my personal life, mostly because they're terribly dull. But I'm going to make an exception, because I currently find myself embroiled in just the sort of practical decision that I have previously hoped would remain academic and feared it would not. Well, it didn't.

A story:

Once upon a time, there was a girl who went to Bar Ilan law school. All the students in law school had to take a class in Hebrew Law, for which they were classified according to background and/or level. There were three classes: A class for chilonim, a class for religious students, and a class for graduates of "yeshiva gevohah" (basically, post-high school yeshiva). The girl, through cleric whatnot, was placed in the lowest level, but the people in the law secretariat promised her that she could switch levels when the proper time came, all on her own, without the filing of papers and so forth. And the girl was very happy.

Now, just to clarify, this girl was very into the learning of Gemara, and she had not only done a year of post-high school learning, but also had been involved in all sorts of various crazy Beit Medrash programs and learned Daf Yomi and so on and so forth, and so she decided that she was going to transfer herself into the highest level. She knew that the level would be largely male, but this was not a particularly novel experience for the girl and she figured it would be worth it.

Time passed and the girl tried to switch levels. But the nice people at the class-registering place told her that she could not go into the highest level. "That level is only boys," they said. "Is it forbidden for girls to join," asked the girl a little annoyedly, "or is it just that there aren't any currently there?" "'No, no, no girls," said the people, "you see it's really just for boys who have gone to hesder yeshiva." "But I am positive," said the girl, "that I am capable of keeping up. I have male friends who are in the class who only did one year of post-high school learning. Is there some test I can take? Is there somebody to whom I can talk? Are you sure this is totally impossible?" "I will check," said the nice registration people, "and then I will call you back." And a little while, they did call back. "Yes, yes," they said, "we have checked and it is totally, absolutely, and categorically forbidden for girls to be in this class. So sorry."

And thus was born the crusade. Now, let me say. The girl is not in the mood for a crusade. She has neither time nor energy. Nor a desire to become the sort of crazy feminist that she enjoyed mocking in her more contemptuous youth. She isn't dying to be a Rosa Parks, nor yet a suffragette. She really, really doesn't have the will to play beaurocratic tag with every department in the law faculty. But the girl has three reasons for really wanting to switch classes.

1) Her Americanly liberal principles are just a tad offended by the idea that the boys get their own special higher level class, while all religious girls are thrown into the same group, regardless of level, background, or ability.

2) The level that she is in is really stupid. Maybe it was just the first one, since it was all introductory-like, but she isn't crazy about the professor, the material seems to be on a low level and taught slowly (what there was of it) and her classmates....well... Most of the girls are ulpanistiot (the term isn't really translatable). She is increasingly discovering that the average religious zionist, well-educated, intelligent, choosing-to-go-to-secular-college Israel girl has religious opinions so conservative and...traditional that they would put the girl's former Beis Yaakov classmates to shame. The example that she loves to quote: The professor mentioned that the Code of Hammurabi (sp?) was written before the Bible. One girl raises her hand and says, "But the Torah was written before the world was created!" Everybody is crocheting kippot and mumbling shocked mumbles of "kefirah!" and "Nu! Really!" and so forth. There are all of 12 boys in the 60+ person class, and at least 4 are ex-religious. Perhaps the higher level won't actually be any better, but it ought to be more challenging, and will at least theoretically have a more educated group of students. (And if it isn't harder, why exactly won't they let her in it?) Plus, her current schedule gives her 9 consecutive hours of class, and she really just can't take it, although this probably isn't one of the reasons she should most publicize.

3) She is more than a little bit of a dafkanik.

The good news is that many of her classmates, including some of the boys in the higher level, are very supportive and helping the girl be slightly less of a chicken. The bad news is that absolutely nobody was in their offices today, nor will they probably be so at any point before the first class on Sunday morning. So the next couple of days (that is, after the weekend) are going to be spent running around to various departments and secretaries trying to find who exactly is in charge of this decision, convince them of her right to switch or, failing that, find who's over their heads that she can whine about sexism to. It's all, I'm afraid, a bit of a pain.

Boxes within Boxes

Do you ever worry that you're terribly unoriginal and will always be so? And as hard as you try and as much as you twist and turn and wriggle to break out of molds, you just throw yourself more and more into other molds?

There are 6 billion people on this planet. Telling someone that they're one in a million means that there are a thousand people just like them in China.

You think that your writing style is an original blend of geekiness and craziness and meta-ness, and then you read another blogger who does it all much the same, only about actual interesting topics instead of random thoughts.

Everyone's a type and the most annoying type of all is the intellectual type. The type who thinks that it's so clever and so self aware that it could never be a type. And you look at others of the type, at parties and shabbat tables and colleges, and you wonder "Am I really that much of a type?" But of course, you aren't. You're the one exception.

What is the obsession with not being a type? Is your personality so little inherently justified that it needs uniqueness for it to be valid? Are you afraid that you don't count if you don't create a type of your own? Or is it simply ego?



Second person is a cheap way out.

Random Poem

The style is totally stolen from this poem of Miri's, except that hers is rather better.


well, Faith and Reason are getting divorced
and the custody battle is going to court
and Truth’s afraid he'll have to pick who he loves more

well, Reason says they just chose different routes
and Faith says it’s about his brother Doubt
and the filthy places that the two hang out
and he says she doesn’t know what she’s talking about
and would you listen to the junk he has to hear her spout?

and he’s getting bitter and starting to mope
and she comes home blind drunk on hope
and Truth watches it snowball down the slippery slope

and they fight at night, both high on pride
and Truth sits and stares, his bright eyes wide,
looking lost and lonely like someone died
hands clenched in fists at his skinny sides.

Greatness

There's a story about some Gadol (I'm afraid I don't recall the name) who used to be a bit of wild kid. One day, when he came home from school, he heard his parents talking in the kitchen, reaching a decision that it wasn't worthwhile to send his to school anymore, considering his behavior, so they would apprentice him to a blacksmith. The boy rushed into the room and begged for one more chance, and of course, behaved himself from then on and became a Gadol. His first sefer, he throws a huge seudah and tells this story, finishing by saying "Now imagine I would have become a blacksmith. I would have been a good person, said tehillim, been conscientious, and so on and so forth. Eventually, I would have died and gone up to Heaven, and they would have said, 'So, where's that sefer?' 'Sefer?Um....I'm a blacksmith...' 'Yes, sefer. You know, that you wrote while running your yeshiva?' 'Yeshiva? Um...remember the bit about blacksmith? How on earth do you expect me to have written a sefer or had a yeshiva?'"

Lovely story, no? And told so very Tales from the Maggid-esquely as well. I find it absolutely terrifying. Because I'm never going to be particularly great, by any standards of greatness. Mediocre, sure. Not bad, certainly. Quite decent, I can aspire to. But great? And that's generally okay. 99.9% of people are neither capable of achieving true greatness nor expected to have done so. But what if one wakes up dead one morning and suddenly discovers that they were supposed to have been that .1%?

And the vision is especially scary because it's close to my personal picture of the whole hell thing- realizing what you are as compared to what you should be and feeling really, really stupid. Eternally.

I just finished reading a book a biography of John and Abigail Adams (Those Who Love) and it's pretty darn intimidating stuff. Because the people who made the country, despite by and large all being related or neighbors, were not really born into anything. It was a strict sort of meritocracy- if you were smart enough or stubborn enough or cunning enough and had just a bit of luck, you could make history. And there were no garauntees. One of John Adams' sons became president; another drank himself into an early and bankrupt grave, while a third became a solid, if dull, contract lawyer. You can say that that's about talents and so forth, but it's also about their decisions and will. What if greatness is just a decision that we make? What if it's one I'm not making? I know that it's all angsty and twenty and junk, but that doesn't make it any less worrisome.

My brother has demanded a link

...and so here it is. I hope he's happy now

Miscellaneous

So I haven't posted in ages and ages, what with finals and apathy and all (and I really have to stop apologizing at the beginning of each post), and even now I don't really have a firm topic to supply a post, so it's just going to be dribs and drabs.

• The word miscellaneous doesn't look like it's spelled correctly no matter what letter you put instead of the first 'e'. The current spelling was verified by dictionary.com, but I still don't like the looks of it
• Humor doesn't make sense. I think that I've decided that humor really just boils down to incongruity- a juxtaposition of sense and nonsense. But why does that make us happy? Is it just an activity like getting a foot massage that one finds pleasurable and therefore makes us happy? Or is humor inherently happifying? Freud has some theory that it all has to do with sneaking past inhibitions, but his theory didn't make sense and is based on patently false notions, like children not finding things funny. Even babies find a silly face hilarious, as soon as they have the notion of face down pat. So I don't buy Freud. The more convincing theory is that identifying incongruity helps re-establish our grasp of how reality should be- "Ha! I know that that is silliness, thus proving that I know how things ought to be. Ha ha!"- but that one feels a little bit off as well. So I'm still pondering.
• And speaking of funny, we put up the most beautiful art display on the wall above my bed. It consists of alternating black and white sheets of construction paper with the captions, respectively: "Three Generals at Antietam at Midnight", "The Light at the End of the Tunnel", "View from Inside a Black Hole", "Haydn Mountain Pass in a Blizzard", "Close-up of a Black Panther", "Your Mind on Drugs", and "Non-starry Light", and every time I look at it, it makes me happy.
• Dribs and drabs is a funny phrase too.
  
• And on to more philosophical thoughts (inspired by the way by the new House episode, never say that tv is an entire waste of time.) So two of the characters had this whole discussion about how if you believe in afterlife, this world is meaningless, and if you don't everything is meaningless. Baloney. (and yes, that's the spelling of bologna that I prefer.) Absolute baloney. Whether you believe in an afterlife or not, this world is everything we have to work with. What we do in this world is... a fact, a concrete creation that is and thus- especially if time is an illusion- always is. It exists as a solid chunk of isness sitting about in the universe. And it is only what we make it. Our actions are important because they exist, not because of their consequences or rewards. The reward for a mitzva, in a very real sense, is the mitzva itself. And doing something changes you, not in kabbablistic or psychological or spiritual ways, although I'm sure that's going on too, but because after you do something, you become a person who has done it. And that's all there is to that. And afterlife, in my mind, is nothing more than sitting around and being that person that you have made yourself, sitting around forever and actually seeing what you are. And this is all the heaven that we can hope for and all the hell that we could possibly dread.
  
• And furthermore, the episode got into the whole good things happening to bad people thing, which is a gigantic sugya of its own, but all I have to say at the moment is who gives a darn why? Sitting about pondering why changes nothing, doesn't make the world a better place. I read a really nice shiur on vbm.com a couple years ago about how Job and Ruth have similar stories- people faced with awful tragedy- but the difference is that one sat about having philosophical ponderings and one went off and tried to help other people and to get through the day and to deal with the situation at hand. And one of them was eventually told by G-d "Give it up, this really isn't going anywhere" and one of them got to be the ancestor of David and Mashiach and all that good stuff. Of course, thank G-d, I have never dealt with real personal tragedy, making this bullet point not only presumptious, but also callous, but then again, many of the people who question the whole evil thing do it purely philosophically as well.
  
• And lastly, I am apparently not only funny, but also somewhat terrifying when tired.
  

Peace unto you all and maybe eventually there will be a real post.

Female Rabbis

First, can I just say that I hate female issues. I mean, I hate the fact that female issues are the big issues out there, that they're the ones that everyone discusses and so forth. It forces me to define myself primarily as a female and it gets the heck on my nerves.

But nonetheless, just one more post about the whole thing. (I can quit any time. Honestly, I can...) I've been rethinking my whole reticence in this post. I mean, everything I said still pertains, and I still hate the idea of being at the forefront of anything, but I am increasingly leaning towards my legal code theory more- that the religion is inherently flexible and formed by those who practice it- so that I sort of have the duty to "be the change I want to see." And all of the anger and rantiness that Miri expresses here are getting to me more and more. Just to clarify- I still don't want to be a rabbi, as such, but my support for those who do is growing, as is my annoyance at those who don't want them to be.

But in this particular case- as decisions may actually have impact on my daily life and practice in some degree- I would really appreciate it if as many readers as possible could attack my position as much as possible- because I think the best way for me to decide if I agree with the whole thing is to have to defend it, redefine it, reconsider it, and so forth, and for once it would be fun to do so without having already committed myself to a certain opinion and a certain manner of defending it. So please do comment- I'm counting on y'all.

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.