the state of "yiddishkeit" yesterday

anyway, it appears to be (you can download it from here) from one of the increasingly odd sub-groups of the breslover sect of hasidim, who you may have seen in the recent tv documentary partying at their annual jamboree at the sect founder’s tomb in the town of uman in the ukraine. they are regarded as somewhat odd even by other hasidim (in a kind of sufi high-on-G!D hippy kind of way) but they are rather obsessed with the kabbalistic aspects of correct sexual activity, the piece itself being extremely revealing of the attitudes that filter through in much of the discourse from the haredi world, particularly the hasidic bits, so i thought i’d share it, with some translation and commentary:

1. a “leshem yichud” is a kabbalistic formula meant to be recited before an action in order to concentrate the proper intention and mindfulness.
2. the “sita aher”, normally called the “sitra ahra”, is a kabbalistic term for, not to put too fine a point on it, the “dark side of the Force”.
3. “klipot” is a term referring to the “shells” that enclose the “sparks of holiness that were trapped in the lower worlds (including ours) during the cosmic catastrophe of the creation of evil in lurianic kabbalah.
4. “pogem enayim” means “defiler of one’s eyes” – a transgression of a Torah commandment; according to most interpretations, gazing at immodestly dressed women will constitute this transgression – haredi interpretations of “immodestly dressed” covers pretty much anything that doesn’t cover hair, elbows, knees, neckline or reveals the curves of the (female, of course) body.
5. a “lav doraysa” is a negative prohibition (thou shalt not) directly commanded in the Torah.
6. “lo sasuro achary levavchem vachari anachem” is a hasidishe transliteration of the hebrew phrase which refers to the commandment which is found in the third paragraph of the “shema”, numbers 15:37-41, to not “stray after your hearts”, in other words, follow impulses which might lead to idolatrous behavour.
7. “heshumer mkal dvar ra” is, again, a hasidishe transliteration of the hebrew phrase which refers to the commandment which is found deuteronomy 23:10, to “guard the camp when you go out against your enemies”, usually understood as “watch your back”, but easily reinterpreted to signify the protection of one’s home from evil influences; you will note the implicit attitude to the outside world.
8. a “deraysa” is a Torah commandment. to be “over a deraysa” (again, hasidishe transliteration, inconsistently done) one means to transgress the Torah commandment.
9. “poskim” are halakhic decisors, some of the important ones of whom are mentioned here; of course, it is by no means clear that the *way* in which these guys mean it is the same as the way in which these poskim mean it, certainly their decisions do refer explicitly to watching a film, but rather to other situations. however, if you want to take it that way, this is where you’d get the precedent from. of course, you can see “immodest” women (as these guys think of it) anywhere you like these days, you don’t need to be watching a film.
10. ” to be over on “Vehyisem Kedoshim” and “Kidoshim Tihyo”” means to transgress the Torah commandments to imitate G!D by being “holy” – leviticus 11:45 / 19:1-2 – which is taken by these guys to refer to refraining from illicit sexual acts, although ramban – nachmanides – has a big argument with rashi on this precise point, so clearly this isn’t as clear as it is made out to be.
11. “reshaim” – evil people; presumably this means the baddies.
12. “pogem habris” means “defiler of the covenant”, which is generally understood to be the misuse of the bit of you that the brit affects – in breslover thought i believe this is generally understood to be a euphemism for [male] masturbation, in any case they don’t half go on about it.
13. “see keri while i am asleep” – i.e. have sexual dreams.
14. “shmoneh esreis” – this refers to the “amidah”, the “18 benedictions” or standing prayer, which is of supreme importance in jewish prayer and is said three times daily; they’re worried that your mind will drift off during it.
15. “hiruray znus with my tefillin on” – a hasidishe transliteration of the hebrew phrase which can be translated as “thoughts of whoredom”, in other words, the contemplation of illicit sexual acts while wearing phylacteries during morning prayers, which they suppose will be much more likely; the preservation of proper mindfulness while wearing tefillin is of great importance.
16. “kfirot” – denial of the truth of Torah.
17. “tzadikim” – sages.
18. “holy Shemot” – the various Divine Names, the contemplation and manipulation of which are the practical structures on which many kabbalistic techniques are founded.
19. “azilut, briah, yitzirah and asiyah” – the kabbalistic names of the “four worlds”.
20. “nefesh, ruch, neshamah” – one schema describing the structure of the human soul.
21. “avodas haShem” – the service of G!D, which should of course be one’s primary consideration. the thought that watching a film might actually assist in this, or teach moral lessons, does not, of course, occur.
22. “moshiach” – the messiah.
23. “kedusha” – holiness.
24. “emunah” – belief / trust.
25. “chitzinim” – literally, “externalities”, which, kabbalistically speaking are elements of Creation that “act as a spiritual barrier” between humans and G!D, which are there effectively play “devil’s advocate” and be overcome in order to choose the way of Torah and commandments and closeness to G!D of our own free will.
26. “do teshuvah” – repent.
27. “find my zivug” – to locate and marry one’s destined wife.
28. “if i am married then i am willing to have my children considered semi mamzarim since i will not be able to control my thoughts.” – this, in my view is the most serious, as the prohibitions and disabilities associated with mamzerut (the offspring of Torah-prohibited intercourse such as an incestuous or adulterous liaison) are incredibly unpleasant, restrictive and persistent. this is pretty much tantamount to saying that they wouldn’t be able to get married (quite a penalty in the haredi world) because of your sins. to call this “overstated” barely covers it; there is no such halakhic status of being a “semi-mamzer”; the avoidance of potential mamzerut being a fundamental concern. raising it as a real possibility is, in my view, an outrageous piece of scaremongering based on the falsification of halakhah; it’s basically making up a new category of prohibition which can’t possibly be justified in intent, let alone determined in practice or policed; if having “impure thoughts” makes your kids “semi-mamzerim”, then nobody could possibly consider themselves free of these.

all in all, this would have been funny and mordant as a piece of swiftian satire – as a serious piece of moral exhortation, it is arrant nonsense and appallingly manipulative. if i find out who has been leaving this stuff lying around, i will have words.

“More precision needed. There should be a stamp for that. MPN should be like LOL or TMI.”

i agree. what narks me somewhat (and no doubt there are all sorts of reasons why i am wrong about this) is that this is *precisely* what bothers me about statements about a) religious people and b) the tendentious-as-feck word “judeo-christian”.

“But there again – that’s a matter of fact, not something that can just be declared from the armchair as if it were self-evident. Are Muslims as “diverse” as any other group of people living in the UK? Are all groups living in the UK exactly as diverse as each other, neither more nor less? I don’t see why that would be the case. It’s certainly not impossible that there is something about Islam and/or the history of people who emigrate from majority-Muslim countries that makes Muslims as a group tend to be different from other people as groups, including being less “diverse.” That’s something to find out, not just to announce as a necessary truth. Or a sacred cow…”

i would argue that this is exactly what annoys me about statements about religious people in which jews and judaism are included. jews in the uk are *extremely* diverse – this is an ongoing issue which pops up every time someone decides to say something about how we have a monolithic view, or “the community thinks”. in fact, the community, generally speaking, disagrees on nearly everything. on the other hand, it seems to me that the idea that muslims are somehow less diverse is equally mistaken. on the other hand, i am often attacked for suggesting that there is a “significant minority” (i usually quote 13%, based on a survey done some years back for channel 4) that are problematic particularly if you look at what they think about jews. the *real numbers* that can be attached to this, in this case 260,000 based on 2m muslims (again, if that’s correct) is still a very large number compared to the number of jews in this country. in other words, it is nonetheless possible that a) muslims are not monolithic in their views AND b) there is a significant minority of muslims whose views are problematic – and that one can therefore conclude that this minority is big enough to cause a sizeable problem. please note here that i am not intending to essentialise, demonise or whatever. this is just a numbers game. if 13% of these guys are arseheads, 13% of 2m people adds up to a LOT more arseheads than the corresponding number of jews, especially given that there is no evidence whatsoever that a “significant number of jews” hold views that are problematic for a) the UK b) liberal democracy or c) muslims. on the other hand, there *are*, i would say, a “significant number of jews” whose views on the middle east are problematic for a “significant number of so-called ‘progressives’ and muslims and people in the house of lords or the foreign office”. this, for me, is the source of the false equivalences.

the below the line comments are also quite revealing of the issues that are raised.

i came across this particular gem of an essay  from his website today. it is an elegant argument for the ability to reconcile scientific and religious viewpoints:

“…Even if the Darwinian mechanisms were inadequate, presumably G!D had some sort of means of transforming creatures via natural law, which science would eventually discover. Dissing the neo-Darwinian explanation would mislead people into thinking that it necessarily happened in a supernatural manner.

Together with further contemplation of the topic, in which it occurred to me that the “random” nature of Darwinian evolution was no more theologically problematic than the “random” nature of the events of Purim or of a lottery, I realized that it didn’t make a whit of theological difference which mechanism powered evolution. As a result, I lost all interest in whether the neo-Darwinian explanation of the mechanism made sense or not. It was no more relevant to me than any other obscure problem of science.”

you can read the rest here.

r. slifkin’s continued writing, in the face of the continuing unjustifed attacks on him, is something that we at the spittoon should support. we are against obscurantism and nuttery and attempts to stifle discussion – and we are entirely in favour of the assertion of principles that are both rational, clearly expressed and both scientifically and spiritually honest to a degree that is all too rare in todays polarised debate.

JERUSALEM — A Jerusalem rabbinical court condemned to death by stoning a dog it suspects is the reincarnation of a secular lawyer who insulted the court’s judges 20 years ago, Ynet website reported Friday.

According to Ynet, the large dog made its way into the Monetary Affairs Court in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem, frightening judges and plaintiffs.
Despite attempts to drive the dog out of the court, the hound refused to leave the premises.

One of the sitting judges then recalled a curse the court had passed down upon a secular lawyer who had insulted the judges two decades previously.

Their preferred divine retribution was for the lawyer’s spirit to move into the body of a dog, an animal considered impure by traditional Judaism.

Clearly still offended, one of the judges sentenced the animal to death by stoning by local children.

The canine target, however, managed to escape.

“Let the Animals Live”, an animal-welfare organisation filed a complaint with the police against the head of the court, Rabbi Avraham Dov Levin, who denied that the judges had called for the dog’s stoning, Ynet reported.

Update: This story has been proved to be a hoax. See here.

with this in mind, i thought it was worth setting out a few of the principles that i think are fairly basic to pursuing both the more aggressive and the more peace-loving sides without compromising the integrity of either. i believe we can both aspire to a more peaceful future at the same time as defending ourselves against those who threaten our society; i think these might be the things that we hold in common and the things which we believe are not held in common by those we oppose:

1. the belief that muslims have the potential to integrate into british (and other western) society as productively as jews have.
2. the belief that eventually mainstream islam will decisively reject the path of taking practical steps to take over the world and relegate this safely to the realm of the eschatological – at present the islamist movement still actually thinks it can win over this debate.
3. the belief that peaceful coexistence is possible even in the middleeast, given goodwill and a real desire to find a workable solution.
4. the acceptance that, islamism aside, there are a lot of people out there who have an unreasonable prejudice against any and all muslims, not just the fundamentalist sort – and that if we can only get the mainstream communities committed to a pluralistic, polycultural modern world rather than a salafist 7th century cloud-cuckoo-land, a commitment to standing shoulder-to-shoulder with muslims in fighting those islamophobes for their rights to be a part of that future.
5. the acceptance that 1, 3 and 4 also have ethnic dimensions and that we have nothing against arabs, persians, turks, pakistanis, bangladeshis etc qua arabs, persians, turks, pakistanis and bangladeshis etc.

if these can be accepted, without significant reservation, then we can begin to accept and deal with the following challenges that we believe to be real:

• a. that there are some muslims, whether individuals, groups, sects, parties or tendencies, that have the downfall of our society in mind and consequently hold what we consider to be unacceptable points of view – let’s say 13%, for argument’s sake; not even a particularly sizeable minority in relative terms, but in absolute terms, given the number of muslims there actually are, enough to cause problems for both their own communities and wider society.
• b. that some of these groups are busily trying to co-opt and own all the islamic community structures that presently exist, as well as present their narrative as that of “all” muslims.
• c. that these people have, over the years, received large amounts of funding and inspiration (with strings attached) from saudi and other insalubrious middle eastern places, as well as from credulous, starry-eyed orientalists in the guardianista / multiculti camp – without strings attached.
• d. that these people are busily engaged in not only political entryism a la tower hamlets, but in hoodwinking well-meaning liberals into acting as figleaves for their disingenuous political and religious programme and thereby bolstering their own credibility.
• e. that if you take a look into the history of many of these socalled respectable “community leaders”, you don’t have to look very hard before you start finding the bloody trail of the bangladeshi genocide as well as the knuckle-prints of the global islamist movements like the ikhwaan and hizb ut-tahrir, let alone all the dodgy things that get said in arabic, farsi, urdu and so on compared to what gets said in english for the benefit of the western media.

if one can accept all of these things, perhaps dialogue can get beyond the ceremonial and cynical to the meaningful and productive. i myself have to do some serious thinking about where i stand on “platform-sharing” issues in particular. on one hand, i try and follow mandela’s excellent principle of “talking to anyone that will talk to me”, but on the other, my deep distrust of certain people and groups, not to mention 16 years of experience, have led me to conclude that there are some people that it is not worth engaging with, like, say, the al-muhajigoonies of this world, who deserve nothing but merciless lampooning in the most liberal of terms (of late the ahmadis have been added to this list – so i saw with displeasure this morning an advert for them on the side of a bus). similarly, i have to consider the rabin principle – that it is one’s enemies that one makes peace with, not one’s friends and that platforms for dialogue will sooner or later have to address the points that i raise above – but you have to suspend certain questions until trust has been established; you can’t jump straight into a conversation about israel, for instance.

i would be most interested in whether people think i have the basis of the argument down correctly. alternatively, you can all call me an islamophobic racist or something.

Dozens of Israel’s municipal chief rabbis have signed on to a new religious ruling that would forbid the rental of homes to gentiles in a move particularly aimed against Arabs, Haaretz has learned.

The religious ruling comes just months after a group of 18 prominent rabbis, including the chief rabbi of Safed, signed a call urging Jews to refrain from renting or selling apartments to non-Jews.

…

The signatories also called on the religious community to voice support Rabbi Eliyahu, who could face trial for incitement against Arabs. Minority Affairs Minister Avishay Braverman has also asked Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman to begin the process of suspending Eliyahu immediately from his post as municipal rabbi.

This letter follows a trend of religious rulings against renting property to Arabs in Sefad and foreign workers in Tel-Aviv.

This is what happens when extremism by messianic religious zealots isn’t nipped at the bud. When extreme religious figures begin preaching hate, and feel they can get away with it, then eventually it will become legitimized and excused under the guise of religious belief. We have heard this type of message before, with no significant state response so far.

The signatories to this letter are not fringe personas, preaching to a small community of religious zealots. They are the chief rabbinical figures of many mainstream, middle-class towns and cities, receiving a state salary paid by the tax-payer.

As Haaretz has written before:

Not only are they not acting according to the guidelines, they are exploiting their status and using public bodies and the means at their disposal to incite, inflame passions and provoke divisiveness in Israeli society. They use their titles and public positions for dangerous preaching and to give official cover for their defamatory words.

The justice minister, the religious services minister and the mayors where these rabbis serve must warn them that they are abusing their positions and even suspend them if necessary. Otherwise, they too will bear responsibility for turning Israeli society into a tool in the hands of religious racist fanatics.

Had the title of the story would have read “Jews” instead of Arabs, we would all be crying “antisemitism”, and rightly so. This is flat out racism in its ugliest forms. It has nothing to do with religious belief, but rather for covering up bigotry with religious justification.

This type of behavior should not go unchallenged by the state authorities, and it’s high time that Netanyahu and his government to do something about it. So far the government’s reaction has been pretty minor, and consisted only of Minority Affairs Minister Avishay Braverman asking for the Sefad municipal rabbi, who had previously signed a similar letter, to be suspended. However, we have not heard the response from the Justice Minister, Interior Minister, or indeed from the Prime Minister himself.

It is about time we did.

1. standard “deplore and condemn” statements from the peace camp, from leftie organisations like peace now, b’tzelem, adalah, rabbis for human rights and so on.
2. standard “you see what we have to deal with, this just makes peace more difficult” statements from the palestinian authority and allied bodies
3. standard “vowing revenge on the zionists” rhetoric from the likes of hamas and its fellow travelers.
4. anodyne PR-speak from the military authorities making excuses for why they weren’t able to prevent the incident or prosecute the people involved

what is usually absent is the voice of religious traditionalism – except, unfortunately when it is supporting the obscene “price tag” policy that is bringing the settlement enterprise into further disrepute.

it’s therefore encouraging to see the voice of mainstream modern orthodoxy being raised in a productive way, particularly here in our own dear jewish chronic, where a scion of the united synagogue rabbinate, now a figure of growing authority in the modern orthodox establishment in israel, speaks out against the disgusting attacks on mosques that have been the latest desecration of the Divine Name. r. gideon sylvester is known to me personally as a man of the highest moral and religious principles and a committed a-list educator; it was another sad loss to anglo-jewry when he joined the continuing brain drain of our best and brightest, leaving his pulpit in hertfordshire for a new life in israel. happily, he has not faded from the uk scene, writing regularly in the jc and invariably giving a clear statement of the sort of moral leadership we all ought to be able to expect from a modern orthodox rabbi and zionist.

more of this, please

r. sylvester gives a quick insight into precisely why the actions of the mosque-desecrators are so despicable – not only are they an affront to moral sense and jewish history, but they are in complete contradiction of some of the strongest principles of halakhah (jewish religious law), the system that the most extreme settlers claim to be serving. let us be absolutely clear about this: the provisions in the Torah that are often cited as justification for harassment and persecution of arabs clearly do not apply to the muslim and christian inhabitants of the west bank; they only ever applied to the immoral and idolatrous “seven nations” of canaan, the canaanites, girgashites, hivites, hittites, amorites, jebusites and perizzites, the “seven nations greater and mightier than you” of deuteronomy 7:1. these nations no longer exist. they have not existed, officially according to halakhah, since “sennacherib mixed up the nations” (tosefta kiddushin 5:6) – this is the source of the position cited by r. sylvester taken by rabbis halevy, herzog and sacks. therefore it is, halakhically, impossible to spot, say a girgashite any more. as i have said on numerous occasions, i certainly wouldn’t be able to identify one even if he danced naked on top of a harpsichord singing “girgashites are here again”.

quite apart from this, such activity flies in the face of the even stronger Torah imprecation to “love the stranger, for you were strangers in egypt” – this is repeated no less than three times in the Torah: exodus 22:21, leviticus 19:33 and deuteronomy 23:7. nobody is saying that jews – or even settlers – have no right of self-defence. this, however is simply an act designed to provoke, inflame and exacerbate tensions that are already at breaking point. this is a political act, not a religious one – any suggestion that it has any kind of religious sanction must therefore be resisted in the strongest possible terms. anyone who acts in such a way is a desecrator of the Divine Name and an apostate, not a zealot. they are setting up the land as an idol – building an “asherah pole” next to their altar (deuteronomy 16:21) – and ignoring, with astounding accuracy, the even more explicit words of the Torah – juxtaposed *just one verse before*:

“justice, justice shall you pursue, so that you may live and possess the land that HaShem your G!D Gives you.”

in other words, you have been Warned.

significantly, r. sylvester highlights the participation of rabbis aharon lichtenstein and shlomo riskin, both of whom are major figures in modern orthodoxy in israel, which can often be overlooked in favour of the more theatrical and controversial ultra-orthodox “Torah sages”. like another regular participant in demonstrations of religious solidarity with arab victims of jewish extremist activity and a particularly prominent proponent of dialogue, peace and harmonious co-existence, r. menahem froman, both are also inhabitants of important west bank settlements, r. lichtenstein in alon shvut and r. riskin in efrat. both settlements are, i believe likely to be retained by israel in the event of a peace agreement, unlike r. froman’s settlement of tekoa and the militant strongholds from which settler violence emanates. i’m not aware of these two public and highly regarded figures taking such a public position in this way before – their efforts have been quieter, more background – and it is good to see them taking a civilised stand so publicly. we need more of this – and quickly. it cannot happen soon enough and it cannot be widespread enough. it is time for religious jews to take a stand and say “not in our name – and not in the name of the Torah”.

a falafel for the effendi!

he is also a man of many contradictions. this is the man that gave the principle of “land for peace” the sanction of halakhah (jewish law) – no mean contribution to an eventual settlement – the man who stood up successfully for the rights of the ethiopian jews against the demands of the askhenazi haredi establishment that they convert, who supports the top-level inter-religious dialogue forum known as the alexandria process and a man who has consistently fought for the rights of blue-collar workers with large, traditionalist (but not necessarily that religious) sephardi and mizrahi families, which of course is more or less the majority of shas voters. interestingly enough, the same attributes are also characteristic of most israeli arabs, which has led to the  ironic outcome that quite a few of them end up voting shas for the social and economic programmes it supports. it is ironic, of course, because of r. yosef’s tendency (for all that he was born in baghdad and is a native speaker of arabic) to make astoundingly racist and bigoted comments about arabs, usually in his saturday night religious lectures, but also more or less whenever he gets the opportunity. he is also not a stranger to upsetting nearly anyone else; here are a few of his public statements that have contributed a great deal to peace, harmony and reconciliation…..not.

“It is forbidden to be merciful to [arabs]. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable.”

he later claimed this only referred to arab terrorists, but it hasn’t been forgotten.

“the holocaust was G!D’s retaliation aginst the reincarnated souls of jewish sinners”

this managed to offend all ashkenazim and anyone who didn’t subscribe to the kabbalistic doctrine of the karmic “transmigration of souls”; just call it his glenn hoddle moment.

“Let our enemies and those who hate us die [referring to palestinian authority president abbas] and all these evil people should perish from this world. G!D should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians.”

for which he had to make a grovelling apology to mubarak and others.
referring to the black inhabitants of new orleans as “kushim” – and that hurricane katrina was george bush’s punishment for supporting the gaza disengagement, enough said.

on why non-religious israeli soldiers get killed:

“They don’t observe the Sabbath, they don’t observe the Torah, they don’t pray, they don’t put on phylacteries every day. Is it any wonder that they’re killed? It’s no wonder. May the Almighty have mercy on them and bring them back to religion.”

let’s forget for a moment that he expects these people to fight while his own supporters sit about studying Torah on government stipends; pheuuwww.

and the latest delightful remark, of course, is this:

“The sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews. Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat. That is why gentiles were created.”

i mean, really? is this what judaism has survived 3,000 years for? if this is what judaism is about, i’ll eat my own tefillin. what are we to make of this embarrassment? his opinions, especially the most recent, beggar belief. there is no apparent successor to his credibility; aryeh deri was once touted as such, but got jailed for fraud and racketeering (although admittedly there was quite a lot of racism involved in the prosecution as well, you don’t see the askhenazi rabbonim getting investigated although they’re just as bad). eli yishai, the leader of the shas party in the knesset, is widely regarded as a parochial sock puppet who gives little away to yosef in the outspoken bigotry stakes. shmuel eliyahu, another provincial powerbroker, has just caused another outcry with a disgusting call for jews not to rent property to arabs.

my own opinion, frankly, is that he’s senile or, quite possibly, has had some kind of minor stroke; it is not uncommon for such people to vocalise prejudices that they had previously known enough to avoid saying out loud. of course, that’s not really any excuse, he shouldn’t be thinking like that in the first place. all in all, this is a deplorable state of affairs for the religious leadership of the world’s sephardic and mizrahi jews to be in. there was a time when r. yosef provided principled leadership (not just land for peace, he also opposes ladies’ wigs); in fact, there was a time when sephardi and mizrahi rabbis were the intellectual and philosophical élite, the most cultured, the most urbane and the most open-minded. clearly this era is long over; i’m not a great enthusiast for the doctrine of the “decline of the generations“, but i have to admit this is pretty persuasive stuff in its favour, certainly the current leadership provides very little reason for optimism. roll on the next generation; at least we can see some changes happening at grass-roots level with the new rabbis coming through, but it will be a long time before this filters up to the oxygen-poor, brain-dead level of israeli religious politics.

given that the board of deputies and, by the looks of it, the community as a whole, has withdrawn cooperation with the programme, as it was clearly interpreted as a hatchet job, the same way that “the root of all evil?” was – tendentiously edited and, wherever possible, using extreme examples as if they were the norm. of course whenever the jewish community was mentioned, it was invariably accompanied by a shot of someone strictly orthodox – small boys with giant peyot, or behatted, abundantly bearded, penguinish yeshiva bochurs staring through bottle-top glasses. as we all know, all jews look just like that.

the jewish community yesterday, apparently

a salient example was that of the british humanist society researcher pulling out the “shocking” example of the jewish school that does 8 hours of “religious education” a week compared to 6 hours of science. i wonder which school it was? they didn’t say if it was a mainstream united synagogue school or a strictly-orthodox school, of course.

what the anti-faith-schoolers don’t seem to get is that in this “8 hours of religious education”, they’re *not teaching theology* or “how to be unscientific” – they’re teaching practical skills of language, textual analysis and interpretation. in this sense, the correct analogy is not between a “faith school” and a “secular school”, but between a “specialist school” and a “generalist school” – i don’t see dawkins jumping all over sylvia young because her schools devote 10 hours+ a week to performing arts compared to 6 hours of national curriculum science. these kids need to PRACTICE – and so do religious kids, whether they’re learning Qu’ran or Torah or gita or granth. most religion – and this is an area where the preponderance of christianity in this country distorts the debate – requires considerable grasp of both practical techniques and core knowledge, in the same way that you’d expect a specialist technology college to spend extra time on programming languages to an level of detail not matchable by a specialist modern languages college.

anyway, stereotypes apart, like most of the jewish people (and christians and muslims) i know, religious or not, faithschoolers or not, i do struggle with whether we’re doing enough to encourage critical thinking. and i think it is worth mentioning that, in my opinion, in general, we’re not, which is part of the reason that the kiruv and dawah organisations which are, as far as i’m concerned, the vanguard of clerical fascism, are gaining ground. whether pro- or anti- people don’t know enough about religion to make informed choices and, as a result, many are either accepting it for badly-thought-through, poorly-rationalised reasons, or seeking to have it eliminated for equally misguided reasons. there isn’t a strong enough voice saying that you can be both traditionally religious and a clear, critical thinker, or that even though you don’t believe something yourself you still think it has a role to play. and, in point of fact, i don’t hand over the programming of my kids’ minds to their school, to teach them “the correct way” to think, that has to be my responsibility as a parent as well. part of the problem with the faith schools debate, it seems to me, is that focusing on theology and the problems with critical thinking misses why faith schools are really needed – it isn’t to teach them to “think correctly”, it is to teach them the skills to live in that particular community, which are time-consuming to learn, the same way as if you wanted to grow up to be an orchestra player, you’d need to go to music lessons and spend a lot of extra time practicing in order to be able to perform to the required standard. because christianity does not, generally, require these sorts of skills (say, for example, latin and greek, or scholastic argumentation) it is a lot harder to say how they clearly add value, other than that by all the motivated parents competing to get in increases the performance of the school – i think it might in fact be just another variety of the hawthorn effect.

getting back to the main point about the critical thinking deficit, however, i think a major part of critical thinking is the ability to debate with people of differing opinions. this, i feel, is typified by the current debate over free speech and offence. i analyse the issue and i see a continuum, starting with unintentional offence, going through intentional offence, through harassment to ultimately incitement to violence. it seems to me the debate is currently polarised between those who see all offence as tantamount to incitement to violence and those who see even incitement to violence as merely an expression of free speech. considering the vehemence with which my religion and ethnicity is attacked by the former and their apparent inability to comprehend the continuum connection, one might think that i would go to that opposite extreme – as indeed i have been accused of many times, when pointing out instances of jew-hatred and being told i was merely being hysterical. in fact, i am naturally far closer to faisal’s espousal of the “fry/hitchens standard”, if you like – “so you’re offended? so fecking what?”, as i believe in free speech. my difficulty is where the line should be drawn, which needs a far more nuanced perception than i can currently bring to the debate.

an excellent example of the challenges of critical thinking is currently being debated at harry’s place and elsewhere in this intellectual neighbourhood of the blogosphere between edmund standing and others:

“why would anyone want to take books that manifestly do make assertions about ultimate reality and give clear commands about how humans should behave, the punishments they should incur for thinking or behaving differently, and so on, and then delude themselves and others into thinking that actually those books don’t say what they clearly do say, or attempt to ‘reinterpret’ those books in a way obviously at variance with their intended meaning?”

in other words, if someone says “kill the bastards”, he means “kill the bastards”, not “engage them in debate” – and you should take that statement at face value. the trouble is, mr standing, that *isn’t the way we do it in judaism* (and, i would argue, not the way many people do it in islam) – we take challenging statements like that as a jumping off point, assuming that there is more to the basic statement than meets the eye. it is, for us, clearly established by the talmudic debate about the “oven of akhnai” (BT baba metzia 59b) that human interpretation has the power to overrule a “voice from the heavens”, but our *authority* to do this is derived from the Torah’s plain meaning: “it is not in heaven” (deuteronomy 30) – in other words, that it is for us to interpret how the Text should be interpreted, that’s how it’s designed in the first place, not as an instruction manual free from ambiguity. jewish texts are based on cardinal principles of interpretative methodology and it is understanding how these work that constitutes a large part of the training that jewish children undergo when they are understanding their texts. i would go so far as to say that you can see the difference between people with this training and people without it is abundantly evident from the attitudes of, say, your average bible-belt christian and those of your averagely educated student of jewish law – the latter would not consider carrying out a punishment from leviticus, or even suggesting that it should be carried out as stated in the plain text without the full range of checks, balances and protective safeguards detailed in hundreds of folio pages of Talmud, commentaries and halakhah, under the precise circumstances in which such conditions apply. yet what some people seem to object to is interpretations based on simplistic misunderstandings. the objection then is:

“We don’t look at the work of medieval cartographers and then try to ‘reinterpret’ their maps so they fit with modern understandings of geography.”

well, no, but this isn’t a physical phenomenon here, it’s a legal framework, so its application is always going to be a matter of interpretation. i really don’t see what’s so hard to understand about that – but nonetheless, i don’t see an authoritative argument being made in return for the benefit of those who might not understand why interpretation is important; G!D Forbid, someone might think that that’s what those texts actually mean, or that G!D actually Wants us to behave like bronze age maniacs, when nothing could be further from the truth.

r. jonathan sacks once said, in conversation with john humphrys i believe, that the Torah seeks to teach us to learn to think for ourselves; initially, like a parent, G!D Chastises us and then Picks us up – but there is an expectation that we learn, over time, to pick ourselves up and eventually, not to fall over in the first place. i would argue that developing critical thinking is a salient example of precisely that and that the Commandment to do so is itself a Divine Mandate – so objections such as this:

“In every other area of human thought and writing, we turn to the latest, most advanced ideas, not to the primitive ideas of men of the past.”

should be shown as the red herrings they are. of course, this objection is foreseen:

“There is absolutely no rational basis for ‘reinterpreting’ ancient texts to make them appear relevant to today, nor any objective criteria for how this should be carried out, or to what extent such texts should be ‘liberally’ reinterpreted.”

but why should such criteria be objective? do we demand objective criteria against which to measure the Torah? do we demand that the world be judged against the Torah’s criteria? no, we do not – by the Torah’s own command. nor do we always demand a “liberal” interpretation. the point is that the giants of Torah throughout history to the modern era have always provided for the best of modernity to be understood, whether as “the wisdom of the nations” or as “Torah and wisdom”, but this perspective is in danger from the tendency to look inwards, to assume we have all the answers, from fear and suspicion of the outside world. simply to assert that “it’s not a valid question”, or that “it comes from an impure source” is not going to cut it in the long-term, whether or not you’re able to control the sources of people’s knowledge; and, if this is what is sought, it is both immoral and contrary to the justice that the Torah commands us in the most emphatic terms to pursue.

we need to understand and respond to these questions and attacks as a bona fide challenge, as if they were asked in an open-minded way – because regardless of whether the people conducting the public polemic are open-minded or not, similar questions will always be asked from “inside the camp” – and not to be able to address them effectively will prove the case of the public polemicists.

recently, i gave up posting on pickled politics, partly because of the level of personal animosity i was facing, but mostly just in frustration at my apparent inability to get my point across. now, i suppose i have nobody very much to blame for that apart from myself, but i’ve never felt that was a problem before now. now, i think i’m starting to work out what it is that is bothering me; certainly, it’s not about the denizens of one blog, or even the blogosphere, or even the media. it’s not any one set of views, not any one person, but a set of trends, a collective movement i sense in wider society.

one of the things i like about the spittoon and my co-contributors is that they take a robust approach towards the cosy relationship between the left and the various apologists for, supporters of and partisans of islamist extremism. they take, of course, an equally dim view of other forms of clerical fascism, whether it be jewish, christian, or hindu, although, of course, we are often excoriated for not writing sufficiently on these subjects. and why is that? well, the answer that “they’re not as big a problem” simply won’t do. clearly, the activities of the likes of rss/shiv sena in india, or hardcore fundamentalists in the american south ultimately affect all of us. for me personally, the behaviour of both the extreme west bank settlers and that of rejectionist ultra-orthodoxy evokes both profound heartache and deep anger – just as the “as-a-jew” clique that only appear as jews in order to display their preening self-importance whenever an opportunity to attack israel arises. however, i would nonetheless argue that, from the perspective of wider UK society, these concerns are less immediate, in that these groups have no meaningful accommodation with either our government or the UK media, however influential they may be in the communities they come from. what bothers me, really, is what the effects of ongoing and intensifying fundamentalism on me, my family and community and wider society – in this, locally speaking, islamists are in the vanguard, as the leading proponents and practitioners of violence against my community specifically and, generally, against UK civil society.

the question inevitably arises – who’s really worse? well, i think i would on balance come down in favour of the idea that wherever a particular group becomes influential and the closer they come to the levers of power, the more of a problem they are in a particular country. thus, in the UK, the utterly misguided, racism-of-lower-expectations the-west-is-ultimately-responsible-for-everything-bad-y’know attitude has allowed the entryism of islamist organisations and sympathisers everywhere from the police to government to the left-wing media. but would it be any different anywhere else? i expect not – militant fundamentalist christians are busily inching closer to the levers of power in washington, india has had already had one bjp government and i think we’re all aware of the subversion of mainstream democracy and the processes of civil society in israel by the religious parties and the settler lobby. we’ve got a lot of muslim fundamentalists here in the UK and, in a profound act of ignorance and credulity, we’ve allowed islamic education to be systematically outsourced to salafi and wahhabi dawa organisations for a generation, with entirely predictable results – i think we can say the same of many european countries, although i would fall well short of the apocalyptic and hysterical “eurabia” scenario – in fact, i’d be more worried personally about the behaviour of the catholic party in poland led by an anti-semitic priest and any prospective alliance of a russian political party with the orthodox church – not trend anyone jewish can afford to ignore.

of course, in europe particularly, this isn’t the first time we’ve been here. there was of course an “enlightenment”, which consisted in large part of reaction against the authoritarianism of various forms of christianity, whether by trying to eliminate it altogether and replace it with a sort of ersatz state paganism, as in france, or whether to regulate it as a sort of national industry, as in germany and scandinavia, or whether to simply satirise and philosophise it into a manageable social pressure and community support lobby, as in britain. the enlightenment taught that religion was nothing but a corrupt power structure which only the mad, the bad and the deluded would indulge. as we also know, removing religion simply forced the mad, the bad and the deluded to find other channels for their unpleasant attitudes and activities. we still see this outdated and reductionist position being reinvented for modern times using all the tools of modern cultural influence, from popular science to childrens’ books to comedy. religious people are portrayed as knaves or fools. there appears to be no middle ground, no compromise possible – religion must be rooted out, cleansed and exterminated.

of course, we’ve been there before too – modern fundamentalism, as karen armstrong (before she started to become part of the problem by sucking up to the goons at MPAC-UK) pointed out in her still masterful study of fundamentalism “the battle for G!D” evolved largely as a reaction against the enforced, clumsy and often brutal imposition of modernity on societies all around the world. the fundamentalisms we have today have reached their current forms because of the political, technological and social realities of the societies in which they evolved. their priorities and obsessions are driven by the battles they originally fought, against pluralism, liberalisation of dress, behaviour, increased social equality (or inequality), against practically irreversible geopolitical realities, against the aftereffects of wars and economic dislocation. those who give aid and comfort to fundamentalists are inevitably picking and choosing where they have shared priorities and obsessions – anti-imperialism, anti-abortion, anti-homosexuality, anti-israel, social breakdown, the emancipation of women, the legacy of slavery – but they are always at odds with fundamental features of the societies they criticise.

what i see developing, however, is a sort of multi-lateral polarisation in which the first casualty is moderation, the second is tolerance and the third is social consensus. the effects of this, however, touch all of us, but the effects are peculiarly corrosive on those of us who are able to combine amd integrate reason and religion and deal with the subtleties of creation, revelation and evolution. we are frequently at odds with obscurantists and bigots within our faith, but we are now fighting a rearguard defence against anti-religious forces, without any letup in the attack on reasonableness, complexity and dialogue that continues from reactionary fanatics. both sides, naturally, accuse us of giving aid and comfort to the other in its mission to destroy them – if we’re not with them, we’re against them – and no prisoners will be taken.

so, on one hand, we have the forces of militant anti-religion mounting attacks on everything from headgear to faith schools, on the other we have the walls of the ghetto being built anew, only with gun-ports this time. we can also see the social contract of the enlightenment renewed; previously, the deal was “give up your difference and you’ll get rights as a citizen” – this time, it’s “you’ve abused your rights as a citizen, we can no longer tolerate your differences”. the behaviour of religious fanatics, in their quest to dominate their own communities, has destroyed the delicate balance which allowed religion to be an integrated part of civil society. naturally, comes the response: they want all or nothing? fine – let them have nothing. but what of those of us who always wanted to co-exist? who prize our cultural and spiritual distincitiveness? oh no, distinctiveness is still allowed – but religion will no longer be a valid reason for it. diversity in sexuality, gender, disability, intelligence, talent, wealth – all these are permitted, but not religion. we are offered the choice – everything or nothing. well, we want neither.

i refuse to hide in the ghetto. i contribute to this society. i work. i pay my taxes. i don’t walk about naked, nor do i hide my face from the world. i will not assimilate, nor will i act as if i am living in another country or another century. i refuse to eat foods that are forbidden to me and i refuse to forbid those foods to others who may want them. i refuse to give up the sabbath, the festivals, the Torah and my other sacred texts – and i refuse to impose my vision of them on those who do not share my perspective. if i am attacked, i will defend myself. if i am insulted, i will respond in kind. i am not looking for a fight, but i will not shrink from one. i will not allow others to define what i am. the search for social consensus has been a long and painful one – and now it has been destroyed again, by the hubris and arrogance of religious and anti-religious fanatics. i do not know if we can put the pieces back together again, but there has to be a basis for us to live together – both enforced segregation and enforced assimilation are fascistic responses.

judaism has always been not so much a culture or a religion as it has been a 3000+ year-old argument. there is nothing so boring as loads of people violently agreeing with each other – except perhaps two groups of people refusing to concede anything that the other is saying has any value or validity. the counter-enlightenment is in full swing, without any sign that it has learnt anything from the enlightenment.

the thing that struck me initially, from the moment i got to the airport for our easyjet flight, was the other-worldliness of our ultra-orthodox fellow-travellers. now, the thing is, we live in a strictly orthodox community at least in part and know a lot of people with black hats, large beards, modest wigs and a mediaeval approach to family planning and, for the most part, they’re really just like everyone else. these guys on the plane, though – they’re really, really not fun to be around. mrs bb had some words with one who pushed in front of the buggy with mini-banana #2 in it and he looked at her like she was from outer space. she was clearly a respectable married woman, modestly dressed (at least by most people’s standards, even if she wasn’t covering her hair) and travelling with a skullcap-wearing husband. casual interaction with these people doesn’t appear to reveal that they have learned any of the laws of deportment, behaviour or politeness – and, yes, there are plenty of these in the halakhah. next thing, we sat down next to another who was quietly studying talmud, and rocking his daughter in her buggy. he’d seen the whole thing and said quietly to us “people just don’t know how to behave these days”. it was nice to be reassured that appearances aren’t everything.

this initial impression i got of the total fracture of israeli society along religious lines was only reinforced throughout my stay. bernard lewis famously described it as split down the middle between the “jews of christendom” and the “jews of islam”, which, largely speaking, remains true: the “christian” jews – i.e. mostly ashkenazi, from europe, north and south america and the british commonwealth, split into multiple ideologically-driven subgroups covering the spectrum from militant secularism to religious fanaticism, each with its own microclimate. the “islamic” jews, from the middle east, africa and south/central asia, whose relationships are more tribal, more ethnically based, and a traditional approach to religion that embraces all levels of observance – their relationships with each other and the islamic world based more on empirical and family experience than ideological principle. both “christian” and “islamic” jews can be pragmatic or stubbornly bloody-minded, depending on circumstance.

however, the real change i see in the society is from the russians – jews (mostly) of neither european christendom nor the islamic world, but fundamentally different to both; for the most part as hostile to religion as only people brought up under communism can be, with the attitude to ethnicity and human rights that brought us the siege of grozny and the ascendancy of vladimir putin; they understand the law of the jungle, but for all this, their very lack of religious scruples brings its own pragmatism. not to mention, of course, israel’s significant population of arabs, druze and circassians. this, then, is the israel that has developed since the end of the cold war. the fundamental four-way split is only exacerbated by the political culture, with proportional representation enabling parties to be created around ethnic blocs, religious minorities and political tendencies, the current coalition being comprised of parties which are defensive hawks, ethnic conservatives and free market economists, which is why it looks so right wing to your average guardian reader.

what really struck me, however, is the extent to which religion divides the society. we were initially staying in a hotel in the beach resort of netanya and it astonished me just how hard it was to find a kosher restaurant – and the preponderance of cyrillic menus. we also spent a goodly time staying with mrs bb’s utterly delightful cousins in haifa who are what i’d call “soft” secularists; in other words, they have no problem with religious people as long as nobody gets in their face about it. however, they don’t know the first thing about jewish practice, not even the most basic blessings; even our three-day-a-yearers know more. aside from them living in israel and speaking hebrew, you’d be hard put to tell them apart from, say, your average brazilian. my own cousins are somewhat more traditional, but not much; then again, their parents made aliyah as adults with a jewish education and some of their partners are from traditional or religious families. however, this is the exception rather than the rule. both are relaxed about the religious practice of others, but what really gets their goat is the behaviour of religious people who refuse to participate economically, who they see as cynically exploiting society and the political system.

israelis (particularly in corporate jobs) also work a six-ish-day week, from sunday to friday lunchtime in most cases. if you’re sabbath-observant, this doesn’t leave a great deal of time to do anything else. effectively, this means a significant barrier to socialisation or interaction with the non-sabbath-observant. if i lived in israel, my own practice would effectively remove my social life with anyone who wasn’t within walking distance, or sabbath-observant. in fact, there would be significant pressure to abandon my observance entirely or become more obsessive about it, because there’s no time to actually do anything like take the kids out for the day. it seems to me that this drives a wedge between the religious and secular, leaving little room for the moderately religious and driving polarisation of behaviour. it is easy to see why any religious control over public life causes huge inconvenience to the secular, as well as why secular behaviour clashes so hugely with religious observance (for example, israelis never, ever turn off their phones!)

compared to the gaping rifts in the jewish population, there is comparatively little dislike of arabs. the general abrasiveness of israeli behaviour is observable in the aggressive use of mosque loudspeakers, but certainly in the north (from about haifa up to the lebanese border) there is a sizeable arab population which appears moderately well-integrated into the workforce, if not socially. i didn’t get any attitude from any of the arabs i interacted with, certainly and, if anything, they were friendlier and politer than the jewish israelis (well, that’s family). my cousins don’t have many arab friends, though they appear comfortable working with and employing them. my recently-widowed, english-born uncle is of a different generation, but even he made reference to the integration of arabs in the workforce – they’re not all blue-collar by any means. he volunteers at a major city hospital where the director is an arab, dr masad barhoum - “and”, said my uncle, “good for him”. the sad thing is that the policy of separation from the palestinians has simply resulted in the importation of foreign labour – it’s not unusual to see asian “guest workers” where once you’d have seen palestinians. i think we’re all pretty aware of the effect on the palestinian economy, but the israeli economy simply sources its labour elsewhere. this is the result of the bombings and terror; fifteen years ago, it simply wasn’t the case. this is why economic co-operation must at some point resume, at which point the wall will have to come down.

the matzav – the “situation” – is clearly a cause of huge frustration. i was struck by the disappointment in the political class and in the country’s leadership (our relatives are generally kadima supporters, with some likudniks, albeit i’d say they were pretty left for likud) together with the repeated recognition that “we are authors of our own misfortune”. if i had to sum it up in one sentence, what i heard from my family could be stated as: we should be doing our bit to fix the situation with the palestinians, but we just haven’t done so; it just seems to be too hard to do and there are too many forces, internal and external, that are pulling in the other direction. there is a sort of quiet despair that i haven’t seen before, together with a dogged determination to give the iranians and their hizbollah stooges a dam’ good kicking if they go any further. not many of the people i talked to were looking for a fight, but more than one person stated flatly that an attack on iran was on the cards; they are now purpose-building “sealed rooms” in their flats and houses as a matter of course against WMD-enabled rocket attacks. but in the meantime, life goes on, although there isn’t much hope of a resolution, people simply try and get on with life as best they can. i talked to a number of people about the ray hanania peace plan that i have previously promoted. it produced reactions varying from surprise (for all that it was reported in the israeli press) to disbelief to sceptical welcome. it was just hard for people to believe that such a thing was feasible although, in principle, they understood and supported the compromises that would be necessary. this, if nothing else, i found encouraging and cause for hope.

of course, none of this is the “front line”, politically speaking. i didn’t visit the separation wall, or the green line, or jerusalem. these places are where the people with an axe to grind (like extremists, journalists and activists) tend to cluster and they’re extensively reported. naturally, few of these people – and it is largely they who influence the political arena – it is rare, however, that anyone ever reports on how people think and act in israeli civil society itself, because it’s not nearly as “interesting” (read “nutty”).

in my view, there are a couple of things that are absolutely essential for israeli society to get out of the stalemate it’s currently in:

1. political reform – this eternal coalition-building simply gives extreme views and splinter groups disproportionate leverage.
2. a comprehensive commitment to social cohesion – this means not only that the ultra-orthodox are going to have to work, but that israel itself needs a five-day working week; israel once spent a great deal of effort on social integration, unfortunately it was mostly wasted on trying to build a socialist, secularist utopia. israeli society needs a vision for all its people, not just the excluded middle.
3. more long-term political horizons and engagement with the world; i think this will come from new realities in the diaspora, j-street and the new european jewish lobby organisation ought to help this reorientation.

i don’t know if any of these things are possible – the social, political and international pressures against it are formidable.

we can but hope.

“Do Anglicans, even moderates, really think of G!D as a sexless being? I was under the impression that most moderate religious people still think of G!D as male. People could use the singular ‘they’ and refer to a ‘parent’ if they were really that bothered.”

i think she could with some justice aim this question at judaism, but it is, nonetheless, a bit of an old chestnut. the best way i can answer it is that in the same way that we deal with anthropomorphism in the text: G!D Isn’t male any more than G!D Has a “hand”, or a “back”, G!D Forbid. when the Text speaks in these terms, it is only to be understood as the way *we* understand the interaction, not the *actual reality* – hence, when we speak of G!D as “Father” or “King”, these are merely the interactions and relevant relationships that are being described, not the Ultimate Reality of the Divine. by the same token, a number of incredibly important Divine Names and interaction/relationships are *female*, such as “E-L ShaDaY”, which comes from the word ShaDaYiM (breasts) and “Ha-RaHaMaN”, which comes the word ReHeM (womb), not to mention the considerable symbology of the Divine Feminine in kabbalah around the SheKhiNaH (Divine Presence) and “Matronit” and the male-female interrelationships actually *within* the G!DHead. one might also mention the idea that the “community of israel” is synonymous with G!D’s “bride” on some level, so that would require one of us to be “male” and the other “female” in that particular situation.

“And then there’s Jesus – no-one could lead themselves to believe he was genderless. Judaism has Moses, Islam has Mohammed – all these prophets are male. How does a person get around that one?”

perhaps by mentioning the seven major jewish prophetesses, sarah, miriam, deborah, hannah, abigail, huldah and esther – (talmudic reference: BT megillah 14a)? according to the great authority rashi, rebecca, rachel and leah should also be included.

a more serious criticism, i believe, is the following:

“If one accepts and follows traditions without question purely on the basis that they are traditions, this leaves the door wide open for all kinds of nasty things. In general, it silences and disables those who disagree with the traditions and would like to do things differently. It’s those ‘harmless’ traditions which can make people feel stifled and like there’s only one right way to do things. At the very least, they discourage creativity, critical thinking and independence.”

this is certainly a position with which we at the spittoon can identify – certainly within judaism (and, i and others would argue, within islam as well) the idea that there is One True Way Of Doing Stuff is a corrosive and oppressive idea not borne out by a truly insightful examination of the texts involved. however, the accompanying analysis is flawed:

“One can usually assess how harmless a tradition is by examining what the penalties are, if any, of not following it. In your example, I would imagine that a Jewish/Muslim pork-eater would face many negative reactions from their community, plus residual religious guilt, and that this is probably the real reason why they ‘like following the tradition’.”

now, this might be a perfectly adequate summary of how the uneducated “feel” about the law in question, in fact, the penalty in halakhah is the indication of exactly how important the principle incurring the penalty is in the first place. in fact, halakhically, the penalty is thirty-nine lashes, a comparatively light penalty compared to breaking shabbat, which is a stoning offence. now, before you get all bent out of shape on how unpleasant it is to get lashed, you’d have to also consider the standard of evidence, which required five further tests before the lashes could be administered:

1. the pork-eating in question would have to be done in front of two kosher witnesses (many, many difficulties in establishing what one of these looks like)
2. the two witnesses would need to have absolutely no discrepancy in their statements.
3. the pork-eater would have to receive a warning from the witnesses that by so doing, he would incur a penalty of lashes.
4. the pork-eater would have to respond that he had understood the warning and the penalty, reiterating precisely what they both were.
5. the eating would then have to occur within 3 seconds of this response.

incidentally, to be binding, the verdict would also have to be handed down by a properly constituted and duly authorised religious court – and there hasn’t been such a court for approximately 1500 years, but considering the re-establishment of such courts is a religious duty, i personally would prefer to rely on the other safeguards. even so, i hope you can see from the standard required that anyone who actually meets it is clearly out to make a point. oh, and, incidentally, if you ran away before the verdict was carried out, you couldn’t be re-arrested. in such a case, the negative feeling from your community is likely to be the only sanction.

another interesting challenge is made here:

“To what extent, for a religious person, is their holy book really their holy book, if they disregard most of its teachings (or haven’t even read it all the way through)?”

for jews, as we were born into a covenantal relationship, we are as subject to it as to the laws of the country we were born into. the same obtains with UK law. presumably amy’s not suggesting that i’m not obliged to follow the regulations of her majesty’s revenue collectors despite the fact that i may never have read them or heard of their provisions? by the same token:

“To align oneself with a movement, an organisation, that one disagrees with at least in part, knowing that in doing so you are giving it power – numbers at least, and in many cases, money too?”

i am not sure how this is different from being a citizen of a country whose policies you may or may not agree with – you’ve still got to pay your taxes.

as part of this discussion, i analysed deuteronomy 22:29 in its context. this provoked a number of further responses including:

“Regarding the Deuteronomy verse (22:29), it says that ’she shall be his wife, because he hath humbled her’ – humbled? That’s rather chilling, no? Is that a mistranslation too?”

not only that, but it is also misrepresenting what the text says, which is ‘AiNah” – “forced”, but not in a *physically* violent way, as in verse 25, more in such a way as to give her no choice but to marry him. i would say that this represents bringing about a marriage by “putting the woman in a compromising position”; if you know pride and prejudice, it’s what wickham does to lydia bennet to get money out of the family; he has to be bribed to marry her. the Torah is trying here to prevent the woman becoming unmarriageable; there is nothing to say that she can’t *then* divorce *him* (after betrothal and before final marriage), thus retaining her autonomy and a hefty divorce payout; it is just that *he* is forever prevented from divorcing *her*, not the other way around. i would understand this verse as a face-saving exercise.

amy then goes on to say:

“Regardless of whether rape occurred or it was ‘just sex’, isn’t it a bit sexist to generally suggest that it’s okay to buy a woman in this way?”

now, i’m not sure you can really project your attitude back to the bronze age as if human values and relationships have always been the same; i mean, that is the same sort of point of view that would reduce shakespeare’s “merchant of venice” to simple antisemitism. the initial audience of the Torah (as opposed to G!D) wouldn’t really understand what you’re getting at here. the thing is, you aren’t “buying a woman”; you’re contracting for procreative services, as it were, which can only be done by ensuring exclusivity on the woman’s part. the woman must enter into the contract without coercion and of her own free will and can exit it at her discretion on virtually any grounds (including bad breath) and is, for the duration of the contracted marriage, entitled to a statutory level of maintenance (and alimony), clothing, housing and sexual satisfaction, breach of which by the husband is, needless to say, grounds for divorce. this quite simply was revolutionary within the context in which the Torah was given; not only in that the woman had to agree, but that she maintained her rights, her property and right of cancellation. in fact, it compares positively to modern civil law in most respects – most people agree that merely falling in love is a rather worse basis for marriage than shared values and clear responsibilities on both sides! both sides contribute assets – the wife’s contribution is *not* a dowry, but her reproductive capabilities, hence:

“(Following your interpretation, it’s a bit like having to pay for something you broke in a shop – fair enough if it’s a vase, but a person? Why does having sex make you a broken person?)”

well, it doesn’t, nor is this implied, although permit me to observe, tongue-in-cheek, that most of us would pay more for new underpants than for second-hand. the statutory levels, in any case, are nominal – in reality, these would in the past have been negotiated, in the case of a woman who had emancipated herself from her father (or previous husband by divorce or widowhood) possibly by the woman herself. and there’s more:

“If God is a supremely knowledgeable being, with ultimate powers, and is perfectly good and moral, why couldn’t he send a clear message – even in the bronze age – that women are people, not property?”

the same reason that G!D also didn’t send the clear message “don’t drive on the wrong side of the road” – it wouldn’t have made sense at the time, only now. the clarity would in fact have been precisely the opposite.

“What stopped him from telling these citizens in no uncertain terms that it’s okay for women to have sex, they don’t have to be virgins until they’re married, and it’s not right to buy and sell them?”

the fact that this wasn’t a student dorm at berkeley, it was bronze age canaan – and if you hopped behind a bush with someone, you’d be liable to end up with your throat slit, or sold into slavery, thus precipitating a blood feud; it wasn’t like there was a police force and cctv; this was the wild fecking west! people took what they could get and, like it or not, if a woman didn’t have protection from a father, guardian or husband, she might be fair game, unless she stayed within the protection of the law. to be honest, this feels somewhat anachronistic reasoning, based on a very different axiomatic substructure, as the following statement identifies:

“I find it quite convenient that you’re explaining away misogyny as mistranslation, and contradictions as just not knowing the ‘right’ context of the verses in question. You seem to be taking it as your a priori assumption that there can’t possibly be any real inconsistency in the texts, there can’t possibly be any real misogyny. Why not? Why can’t there be?”

the answer to this is that if, axiomatically, one believes, as i do, that the Torah is a Divine document, any inconsistency in the texts is there to teach us something and the basis of traditional methodologies is the ability to identify the root cause of the inconsistency in order to illustrate the teaching point concerned. this has certainly been our approach as long as we can remember -and, more to the point, this is documented quite a long way back. secondly, in the conception we have of G!D it would make no more sense for G!D to Be a “misogynist” than it would for G!D to have a “hand”, or to “be angry”; these things are simply expressions of how we experience what we interpret out of the text. we believe that G!D Expects us to behave with respect and compassion to each other, not to systematically disadvantage half the human race. now, obviously, if you have different assumptions, then these might include a priori that any statement in the Torah reflects bronze age sensibility and capability in terms of gender relations, science and critical reasoning and therefore there can’t possibly be any real lessons to be learned from it. on this i suspect i might have to differ from you, seeing as how our culture is based almost entirely on this document and in most respects is generally considered to have produced major leaders in each field who are also committed to some of the same assumptions about the document. this is not to say that they are all going to agree with each other all the time:

“Why is your ‘methodology’ necessarily going to result in a clear, unequivocal message?”

because it is based on a clear set of assumptions and underpinned by a unified philosophical structure – i’m not saying that this necessitates clarity and unequivocable messaging in all cases, because it doesn’t, but in the case of this particular verse, it clearly precludes certain interpretations such as “G!D Is a misogynist” as nonsensical. there are some other pertinent questions that obtain:

“On what do you base your faith in it?”

on the fact that this way of doing things has preserved the sole remaining diaspora culture of the ancient world through several millennia of unremitting and occasionally genocidal hostility. in other words, it works.

“How do you know that the eventual interpretation is right, in any case?”

the principle we test it against is “after the majority shall you incline” (exodus 23:2) but we *also* preserve minority opinions (BT bava metzia 59b) in case eventually they become majority.

“What do you check it against?”

it’s peer-reviewed. all jewish law has been aggressively picked apart, analysed, defended or amended on this basis. that is what the talmud documents.

“Then you say that two contradictory positions can both be the word of the ‘living god’? How is that even possible – how can a creator of the universe not make his mind up?”

of course – but “it is not in heaven” (deuteronomy 30:10), so we are told we have to work it out for ourselves, on the authority of the Torah itself, so the majority opinion came down on one side at that time. G!D may well Have an opinion, but in the famous talmudic debate of the “oven of achnai” (the reference given above) the majority decision was to say “bugger off, G!D, this is a human decision now, You Said so in the Torah”.

“Not be 100% clear about his message? Do you not find it slightly odd that all this interpretation is necessary?”

no, we find it incredibly empowering that we are being treated like grown-ups responsible for our own actions, not children with no sense of right or wrong.

“Why doesn’t God reiterate his message and clear things up? Hasn’t he got the power to do this?”

well, yes, obviously, but during the “oven of achnai” debate, the position of the majority was “we do not make legal decisions on the basis of Divine Voices from Heaven”.

we still haven’t quite got to the bottom of the equality debate here, however:

“When I talk about a sense of equality, I am talking about equality between men and women – e.g. what is it that leads you to know that stoning a woman to death for not being a virgin is wrong? Would you only know that it’s wrong if you’d read all the scriptures? Or would you know that it’s wrong based on your own empathy and reasoning? I would argue the latter, seeing as I know it’s wrong, and I haven’t read all the scriptures or engaged in textual interpretation.”

i would argue that the case that you are basing it on your own “empathy and reasoning” alone is not a strong argument. nobody grows up in a vacuum. you have these attitudes because you developed them, based on your upbringing. i would argue that you *have* been influenced indirectly by them because they have influenced the society you grew up in. i can even point to the bit of Torah that it comes from: “you shall love the stranger [person who is different from yourself] for you were strangers in egypt” (leviticus 19:34) nor am i saying that my own reasoning is inoperative – obviously, i needed to use it to apply the verse to this situation, similarly the sages needed to apply it in order to get the relevant safeguards in place to prevent it happening unless it really, really, really, REALLY applied. if you’re going to do something as drastic as stoning a woman to death for not being a virgin, you’d better be really sure that’s what the text says – and that what the text says applies to this EXACT situation.

“This is what I’m talking about. A religious person reads such a horrendous verse, thinks ‘That can’t be right’ and proceeds to delve more deeply into the scriptures to find some way of justifying it.”

i don’t really understand why this should be so wrong – it is the way the Torah does thought experiments; under what circumstances might such a penalty apply? what might justify it in *practice*? are you sure? are you really, really sure? what principle is being upheld? that’s not the same as “justifying” it – you can’t be “justifying” it if you end up effectively prohibiting it, which was the actual effect – but then again, you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t know the proper context for Torah, which is as the written component of jewish law, not as a copy of “gender relations for dummies”, which is how it is so often abused by literalist protestants and bible-bashers in particular.

“I doubt that a person starts reading scriptures and then concludes ‘Well whaddaya know? Stoning women is immoral!’”

i agree – and so do the sages! although there are more morally complex issues in the Torah than this one.

amy is also good enough to address a criticism i make of her that she is generalising about religious people:

“Sure, not all religious people follow their religion in exactly the same way, but they do believe in a god/gods, and their holy texts do mean something to them. These are the two aspects of religion that I critique in my piece, and they appear to me to be pretty universal among the faithful. The rest is a critique of the arguments used by religious feminists to defend the misogyny in their holy texts, and examples of religiously-inspired misogyny. What is it that I’m generalising about? What is it exactly that you object to?”

well, i suppose what i object to is the implication that religious feminists are “defending misogyny”, because as i have attempted to show, i don’t think the misogyny is there either in intent or in application – except by people who really don’t understand either the text concerned, or who don’t follow an acceptable standard of textual interpretation. i accept that it *could* result in misogyny, because it *has* – but human beings do get things wrong from time to time and Torah is not easy.

anyway, i hope this is not too irrelevant and that there are enough interesting nuggets here for the conversation to continue here; certainly i would encourage people to take a look at the original piece.

a woman causing an earthquake yesterday by blatantly showing her elbows and knees

well, i expect most of us have probably heard by now that, according to the not-at-all-bonkers iranian regime, that immodestly dressed women cause earthquakes. i expect the haitians are buying their chadors as we speak. in the interests of balance, i thought it might be instructive to see which other religious figures are saying and doing stupidly daft things this week:

1. mobile phones damage your neshama

we are reliably informed that the son of the vishnitzer rebbe, a prominent hasidic sect (that’s vishnitz, not the rebbe himself, he can’t be a sect on his ownsome) doesn’t want yeshiva students to carry mobile phones, because they can damage the neshama which, in jewish mystical thought, is one of the higher and more holy parts of the soul. i should, in fairness, point out that the damage is indirect not direct, as the mobile phone *might* be able to access the internet which *might* lead to someone looking at porn. or the student might start texting girls, or looking at them, or talking to them, or something like that. anyway, i do feel i should mention that vishnitzer women don’t in fact shave their heads under their wigs, so there are untold sensual delights on the horizon once the students leave yeshiva and head for the wedding canopy, so presumably married students can be trusted to carry phones. nonetheless, this is not the only danger out there, as the rabbi went on to say; there is an even more terrifying danger to the haredi world – the haredi newspaper.

2. haredim forbidden to read haredi newspapers

yes, you heard right; the ultra-orthodox vishnitzer hasidim have been banned from reading the ultra-orthodox newspaper, hamodia. for those of you who are unfamiliar with it, it’s slightly right of genghis khan and the only pictures allowed, if they’re of human beings at all, are something like this:

dangerous images of debauchery

 anyway, it’s not allowed. as hamodia itself declares:

“ALL Haredi Jews, by virtue of their faithful commitment to lead a wholesome spiritual life, free of the gratuitous violence and nudity so prevalent in today’s media, will neither own a television set, nor have internet access or radio in their homes.”

so, are the vishnitzers worried that pictures of the latest gedolim get-together might cause a ruckus? no, it’s because newspapers might, y’know, actually inform them about, y’know, stuff that, y’know, the rabbis might not actually want them to hear…. like reports of rabbinic corruption, for example, sorry, putting them at risk of falling foul of Torah prohibitions on tale-bearing and slander. i am sure mr justice eady would approve!

3. discriminating against christians will cause civil unrest in the UK

everyone’s favourite evangelist ex-archbishop, george carey, in a letter to the employment appeals tribunal objecting to a nurse rather stupidly being forced to take off her christian jewellery, threatened that:

“The fact that senior clerics of the Church of England and other faiths feel compelled to intervene directly in judicial decisions and cases is illuminative of a future civil unrest.”

yes, you heard right – christianity is under attack, apparently. ruth gledhill disagrees, pointing out that if you want to look for somewhere where christians are actually being persecuted, there are plenty of places, but i think predicting bedlam in bristol and uproar in uttoxeter is probably a bit on the alarmist side.

4. spate of hindu beheadings anticipated

apparently a headless body found at a temple of the hindu goddess kali was ritually decapitated and intended as a sacrifice. as loony religious behaviour goes, this one is hard to beat, but i look forward to john denham putting a well-funded programme to prevent human sacrifice by engaging with bemused community leaders from neasden. or something.

5. deepak chopra takes blame for american earthquake

my favourite right now – apparently, it isn’t immodestly dressed women, but fatuous, over-indulged, stupidly rich new-age gurus that cause earthquakes. followers of deepak chopra on twitter would have seen the following:

“Had a powerful meditation just now – caused an earthquake in Southern California. Was meditating on Shiva mantra & earth began to shake. Sorry about that.”

oh deary, deary, deary me.

1. transparency at the jewish leadership council

ok, we know who the board of deputies are. we know what it’s for. we know how it’s funded. we know how you get to be on it. we know who it represents. now, we have this new organisation called the “jewish leadership council”. on it, you have various movers and shakers, you’ve got the vc/banking/property tycoons, you’ve got the charity/safety/israel activists, you’ve got synagogue movement machers, you’ve got access, you’ve got international connections, you’ve got lords, baronesses, knights and the chair of ujs – you’ve got two women and no rabbis, for some reason. you’ve got no haredim, for some other reason. you’ve got leaders from the most broad-based and influential organisations in the community – but what are they for? clearly, this is an influential bunch of people, but who chooses them? who decided that there should be a jewish leadership council in the first place? how are they accountable? what is their strategy? what is their relationship with the board? how is it funded? i for one would like to know.

2. promote jewish (especially sephardic) cultural literacy

we are not short, for good or ill, of jewish education organisations, from the controversial chabad to the inestimable limmud and all points beyond. however, for the most part, systematic approaches aimed at enhancing jewish identity are without exception entirely religious-based. more worryingly, they seem to be ignoring the question of cultural literacy. whilst there are instances of successful specific initiatives, like the yiddish summer school run by the jewish music institute, or the various ulpanim run by israel-focused organisations, there is a distinct lack of provision for the sephardic and oriental communities to promote the learning of ladino and judeo-arabic – essentially, globalisation is being driven by majority tastes, hence the largest groups attract the most funding and if one didn’t learn it at one’s mother’s knee, one might struggle to gain familiarity with anything from cookery to piyyutim, history to dress. there are organisations, including musical groups and individual tutors, who are promoting and disseminating the results of their knowledge and expertise in specific areas, normally as a result of academic research, but there is no-one who can teach you about the culture of, say, an “indian iraqi”, everything from how to make sambusak and sehug to singing shbahoth pronounced correctly – in other words, the customs, the language, the music, the food, the history. and the same goes for the different ashkenazi traditions, with the possible exception of chabad, who integrate their cultural traditions such as “farbrengen” as part of their outreach programmes. it is possible that this may be the result of a hundred years of zionist shelilat ha-galut (“negation of diaspora behaviours”) or an enlightenment/modernist hangover against the backward ways of “ghetto culture”, or simply the influence of organisations whose sole concern is increasing religious observance, but surely one can no longer argue that diaspora jewish is simply something to be outgrown. yet we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater on this one – and forgotten much of what made being jewish interesting. this is something i believe where we can learn something from how other diasporas have preserved their cultures, the various south asian communities being a case in point.

3. take a lead on environmental frumness

something was said about making Shabbat the “greenest day of the week” – now, i am the first to expound on the benefits of one day with no driving, tv or communications, but i worry about the effects on the planet of copious use of tinfoil, urns, hot-plates, leaving lights on and most of all the use of disposable plates, cutlery, glasses and so on for ease of clear-up at synagogue kiddushim or on other communal occasions. i was less than underwhelmed at chiefy’s “green shabbat” damp squib and am regularly appalled at the environmental disaster area that most community functions seem to be. there is an opportunity for the community to change this – it is 100% wrong that correct religious observance should be in breach of Torah prohibitions on wastefulness and the destruction of natural resources. i would be delighted if religious organisations could take a lead in this department – the progressive movements have already made steps in this direction and organisations like limmud have made concrete moves to make policy into reality on its conferences. there are organisations such as hazon that are focused specifically on doing this in a jewish way – it is about time that the religious establishment, particularly within the traditional communities, does the same. a set of guidelines would be a start.

4. break the stranglehold of fiftysomething personal fiefdoms

i lose count at the number of community organisations in this country whose leadership and patronage is controlled by middle-aged people who run them as if they were their own personal kingdoms. sometimes, these people have some claim to expertise, or have built the organisations up, but more often than not, they have simply prevented the organisations from developing by hanging on to all the levers of power, dispensing patronage with the help of compliant boards of part-time trustees, picked for their names, contact books, relations and fat wallets. how many of these organisations have executive scrutiny from anyone under 35, let alone under 30? how many of these boards provide an effective check on the power of the chief executive or director? more worryingly, what happens when an organisation which has no competition begins to stifle innovation in its key area of focus and actively prevent other organisations challenging its dominance, or even block activities in its area which are not under its control? i propose that all community organisations adopt a code of practice which includes a commitment to the future planning of the organisation, specifically to succession planning and provides for some kind of non-executive checks and balances. not being an expert in charity law, i’m not sure what the actual rules are, but enough charity scandals have made it into the papers (and i know of some which haven’t even got that far) to suggest that there is something to address here, perhaps through the board?

5. shul and mosque twinning

although there are a plethora of opportunities for the ceremonial activities associated with interfaith dialogue (i’m thinking here of the likes of the indefatigable and admirable sir sigmund sternberg) and quite a few effective practical collaborations amongst communal professionals and academics (i’m thinking here of the leo baeck college jewish-christian-muslim conferences in germany and the tireless liaison work done by the cst) there are still far too few grass-roots initiatives (here, i’m thinking of the likes of radio salaam-shalom or the alif-aleph student dialogue activities) in the mainstream synagogue movements. i would propose a simple solution – a programme of twinning between synagogues and mosques, perhaps trilaterally including churches if it helps. by the same token, i think jewish-sikh dialogue has long been neglected and, particularly in view of our similarities as religions with a partly ethnic element, it would be extremely helpful to bring gurdwaras into the mix. a programme of working together on uncontroversial and useful community projects such as litter collection or redecorating local facilities would enable the building of links which would contribute strongly to community cohesion.

6. transparency in the tzedakah industry

every day, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pounds are donated by religious jews to the needy. the giving of “tzedakah” (not exactly the same thing as charity) is a religious obligation that is taken extremely seriously by both observant and non-observant jews. however, this system lacks transparency. every traditional morning service includes a point at which money is ceremonially donated, usually into a collection box. usually this money is given as coins or even notes, but there are a number of schemes, widely used in the strictly orthodox community, whereby tzedakah vouchers are purchased en masse, donated by the purchasers and then redeemed by the recipients. however, these cashflows, which are then collected and redistributed by either communal officials or charitable networks, undeniably place significant amounts of patronage in the hands of synagogues, rabbis and charities. there is little transparency about these donations, how they are used or what strings may or may not be attached.

on the other side of the transaction, a huge industry has built up around getting money donated for tzedakah to “the needy” or “for Torah study” – however, a sizeable (though who knows how much?) amount is directed towards ultra-orthodox institutions both here and in israel. similarly, the communities for whom “Torah is their profession” (in other words, they don’t work for a living, but live off these donations whilst studying full-time) are disproportionately benefited. i’m not saying they live in the lap of luxury, but they certainly have a lot of children, don’t pay a lot of tax (or, in israel, serve in the army) and don’t seem to pay much attention to the talmudic maxim, which is part of the normative halakhah of the shulhan arukh, that “he who does not teach his son a trade, teaches him to be a thief” (BT qiddushin 29a). moreover, if you spend any time in the strictly orthodox community, you will become aware of the number of people who come asking directly for money from the community during prayers, in most cases waving a laminated note under your nose about the operation they need to pay for, the medication they need to take, the institution of Torah learning that they are supporting or even the wedding they need to make for one of their 12 children. all of them seem to be able to afford plane tickets and most of them seem to think if you are collecting in the UK, you have no obligation to ask in english or provide any kind of english explanation of what you’re asking for, which is just plain rude.

now, i don’t deny that some of these are worthy causes, but some of them definitely aren’t. the money isn’t audited at either end. the tax authorities certainly aren’t consulted. money often goes missing, is diverted, is used to gain undue influence or ends up funding things of which i certainly do not approve (like illegal settlements) and we are all aware of the recent scandals in america over money-laundering. there is a secondary industry (well known in stamford hill) whereby you can hire a driver for a couple of days who has a list of addresses where people live who give to good causes live and the amount they are likely to give and he will shuttle you round from door to door in return for a cut. one person of my acquaintance used to keep a wodge of five pound notes by the door for when anyone rang – and, apparently, a lot of them complained about how little he gave! now it is all very praiseworthy that the jewish obligation for charitable giving is so powerful, but it is currently driving a lot of very, very questionable behaviours and practices.

the authorities have long been interested in the hawala system by which muslims raise money for good (and some not so good) causes and a focus on this is part of most anti-money-laundering computer systems. it is only a matter of time before the tzedakah system comes under scrutiny as a racketeering practice. in fact, it probably already is. my advice, particularly to the strictly-orthodox communities is this: clean house. do something about the lack of transparency. get audit trails and control systems in place – or you will live to regret it when this augean stable is eventually cleaned. there is an opportunity for, among other things, a cashless system to be introduced whereby people seeking donations can be issued a portable card reading device. similarly, if we can issue hechshers (stamps of kashrut) for food, there is no reason why we cannot do the same at the UK end for reputable collectors of funds – that way, we who wish to fulfil our obligation to donate can be assured that our funds are going to someone or a cause who really deserves it and not to anywhere else.

7. call the kiruv industry to account and combat the influence of artscroll

regular readers of the spittoon will be aware of my opinions on the kiruv or “outreach” industry and the organisations that are engaged in it. many of these organisations worry me. not because i object to bagels and speed-dating, but because i object to the hidden agendas of these organisations and the power they are increasingly gaining within the communal mainstream. at least one major united synagogue has outsourced its jewish education to a kiruv organisation in the past, which has been a source of some controversy. the ideology that drives these people comes straight from the haredi world. that is not to say that it is necessarily such a bad thing, but it’s simply not healthy that it is allowed to infiltrate and take over the mainstream of jewish education. the stalking-horse of this entryism is the powerful “mesorah publications” publishing house, home of the artscroll series of books. now i don’t know of one jewish house that doesn’t have at least one of their books, including mine, but i for one worry about allowing the hashkafah (“worldview”) of this part of the community to become dominant. both artscroll and the kiruv movements push a monolithic, heavily edited, selective, prudish, intolerant and above all doctrinaire view of judaism which flies in the face both of our history and the jaw-dropping complexity of jewish thought, theology, law and culture. people like simplicity and for things to be set out for them to understand – that’s fine. but what goes with this, both in the publications and the programmes, is an ideology – and it’s not an ideology that we should be comfortable or complacent about. the traditionalist mainstream has been supine in the face of this onslaught, in many cases sympathising with its negation of non-orthodox communities and streams of thought and, in many cases, actively encouraged by the power players in the religious leadership. it is time we fully understood what these organisations stand for, what their political aims are, what links they have to israeli political parties on the [ultra]religious right and what influence they have over the community in this country. they have been able to buy silence so far with what is in many places entirely praiseworthy community work, but it is time we had some transparent scrutiny of these organisations.

all suggestions are welcome!

scary kiruv cartoon

on reading it, i didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. on one hand, it’s a caricature of the position of the kiruv (“outreach”) organisations, but on the other hand, once you start digging into their theology, their internal politics, their fundraising activities and their influence on the jewish community and israeli politics, it’s hard not to find them scary.

i’ve been thinking about this for a good long time, because as an observant jew, albeit one who was became observant as an adult, i am constantly aware of the phenomenon of the ba’al teshuvah, the “penitent”, the returner-to-traditional-judaism. when you’re trying to do this, the kiruv organisations are the first to stand up and say they’ll help. however, i never took them up on their offers, because i could see where it led and i had seen its effect on friends and family when conflict arose. i won’t say that i’ve never met fantastic rabbis from chabad, project seed, aish or the jewish learning exchange – but i was always aware of the kiruv undercurrent and kept my involvement at arm’s length. it would appear, however, that not everyone is in possession of the requisite confidence and critical faculties to counter the half-truths, mendacious reasoning, tendentious interpretation and evangelistic love-bombing; people want their outer message of family values, Torah and a truly integrated lifestyle to be true – and so it is.  and, yes, of course these people are often more amusing than scary:

Lubavitch Sends T-800 Back in Time to Protect Holy Temple (thanks, the Knish)

but that’s not all it is.

what i truly find sinister about these organisations is their monolithic nature. like all fundamentalisms, they take a mythologised golden age (which may or may not have happened) and posit a fall from that state, which can only be regained by a return to the actions, behaviours and values espoused by the organisations which claim to represent the legacy of that golden age. whether this is an idealised picture of the yeshivas of lithuania, the shtetls of poland, or indeed the era of the prophets, patriarchs and classical rabbinic sages. if only we all attained that standard, they claim, it would all be different – the world would be transformed and us with it.

well, the world would be transformed all right, but something vital would be lost – and that is the vitality of religious biodiversity. there has always, *always*, *always* been variation in both belief and practice, there has *never* been a time in which we all did exactly the same thing and observed a uniform code of dress, behaviour, ritual and belief. maimonides’ “13 principles of faith” divided the community for a century. the hasidim and mitnagdim fought like cats and dogs (and continue to do so) – the accommodators of modernism and the NAY-SORRENDUR vanguard, the rationalists and mystics, the scholars and the businessmen – we’re all necessary just as much as we always have been. what i really, deeply object to is this idea – shared either overtly or covertly by all kiruv organisations, is the concept that we must all dress like this:

and spend all our time doing this:

hevruta study in a yeshiva

and everyone else should just be happy to pay for us to do this, because after all – we’re doing the world a favour by sitting and studying Torah all day. now, actually, i don’t entirely disagree that studying Torah a lot is a good thing for the world, but i also note that the sages expected us to Get A Job and Pay Our Taxes as well. rashi had a job. rabbi akiva had a job. maimonides had three jobs. now, suddenly, we’re expected to all wear the black-hat uniform and aspire to a life of Torah study?

i’m sorry, it’s never been like that and, hopefully, it’ll never be like that. but of course, we must remember what the consequences of not being like that are, in the view of the people in the ultra-orthodox world who fund the kiruv organisations. i was not entirely surprised, of course, to find that these cartoons are supposed to have caused the haitian earthquake – that’s right, because G!D Is bound to kill thousands of people in the caribbean just to get the jewish community’s attention.

this sort of thing is a wake-up call. these people are not the future of judaism – they are our wahhabis, generous, well-funded, well-organised and intelligently marketed – and puritanical, intolerant and disingenuous. just as we outsourced islamic education to the saudi international dawah programme a generation ago and are now reaping the dubious benefits, we are in the process of handing these people the future of jewish education. we should take ownership of our own Torah back before it’s too late.

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“A Bag of Fibs,” the classic collection of tall tales from the pre-state Palmach militia, tells of a truck driver sent from Tel Aviv to deliver a water cistern to Jerusalem. During the steep approach to the city, at Sha’ar Haggai, he slams on the brakes and the tank slips off the truck. While backing up in order to reload the tank, he falls in and drowns. Israel’s cistern is the religious autonomy that has grown within it.

In 1985 I spoke on Army Radio with Moshe Unna, then a leader of the National Religious Party and of the Religious Kibbutz Movement, which had created a world in which mixed dancing and egalitarian, socialist culture were taken for granted. In the middle of the interview, Unna suddenly grew quiet and began to cry. Eventually he said meekly that when he tried to speak to his own party, Haim Druckman would shout him down until the veteran MK was silent.

Today Druckman is perceived as a “moderate,” and the culture of silence is being imposed on Pinhas Wallerstein, until recently the long-serving head of the Binyamin Regional Council. A leader of the Samaria hilltop settlements in the 1980s, Wallerstein was convicted of causing the “death by negligence” of a rock-throwing Palestinian youth. Now he says he can’t take it anymore. His attempts to condemn systematic, violent attacks on innocent Palestinians are silenced by his erstwhile friends.

MK Yaakov Katz (National Union), the leader of the Knesset political camp that inherited the NRP’s mantle, said “good riddance” upon hearing of Wallerstein’s departure, adding that the movement is “tired of his whining.” It is not for nothing that Katz failed to condemn recent death threats against the defense minister, but instead said that every time the government tries to carry out “crimes against the Jewish people,” the Shin Bet security service instigates slanderous provocations. After all, the Shin Bet initiated the murder of Yitzhak Rabin.

It is not for nothing that the head of the Council of Rabbis of Judea and Samaria is Rabbi Dov Lior, who was a respected Torah authority for the Gush Emunim Underground and a mentor to Baruch Goldstein – who Lior described as “holier than all the martyrs of the Holocaust,” “principled” and “persecuted.” With several important positions, Lior receives tens of thousands of shekels a month from a government that has blinded itself to reality.

The religious public was the first to fall into the cistern, but the state itself will follow shortly after. In its weakness, Israel has developed an autonomous, competing religious apparatus, one operating in stark opposition to the promises of Israel’s Declaration of Independence for civil equality. Israel has passed racist legislation like the Citizenship Law, which prohibits Palestinians married to Israeli citizens from becoming naturalized citizens, and has brought the consequences of such legislation upon itself. It is no coincidence that the country now has a justice minister who calls for the legal system to be informed by Jewish juridical codes, as well as an interior minister driven by transparent racism and a foreign minister with a racist platform. As such, most Jewish first-graders in Israel receive a religious education explaining that the goyim are not human beings, that women are inferior and that the secular are deficient.

A similar process is taking hold across the Middle East and beyond. In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, the world of the madrassa has swallowed the national-secular order completely.

This pattern is anything but coincidental. When the secular system allows religion to create a messianic bubble within it, it creates a hothouse that converts religion into reality and fosters the growth of violent sentiment with no room for those who are both pragmatic and religious.

Unless democratic, non-messianic forces in Israel unite, they will find that the existential threat to Israel is the religious-messianic threat both within and without. They must dismantle the religious-messianic autonomy, step by step, and restore equality, democracy and openness in Israeli society, or Israel will be no more.

hat/tip: Eyal

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Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak received this week a death threat letter, warning him against the settlement freeze by the Israeli government.

“If you think of destroying the settlements, you are mistaken, and I will kill you,” read part of the letter, which has been transferred to the Shin Bet Security Service for investigation, according to Channel 10.

“I will harm you or your children, be careful,” the letter continued. “If not now, then when you are no longer a minister and have no security around you.

Two months ago, Israeli news daily, Ma’ariv exposed a book written and endorsed by prominent right-wing and settler rabbis, advocating the killing of gentiles who endanger Jews.

The article on Ma’ariv’s website (Hebrew) was correct in describing this book as “the stuff of Jewish terrorism”.

In it, the authors, two rabbis from a settlement in the West Bank, provide religious justification for killing anyone who endangers Jewish lives, even if they are a child or a baby.

Shockingly, the book isn’t shy about endorsing revenge attacks. For example, it also allows harming the children of rival leaders in order to deter them from actions against Jews.

“Revenge is an essential [war] need to prove that evil behavior does not pay off.” Therefore, “sometime one must commit ruthless acts that are designed to create the correct element of fear.”

However the book doesn’t stop there, and also justifies killing anyone, Jew or non-Jew, who supports the opposite side, and even children if it is foreseeable that these children will grow up to be enemies of the Jews:

“Anyone who supports the evil army in any way is a supporter of murderers and is considered a rodef. A civilian who encourages the war gives strength to the [enemy's] king and soldiers to continue the war. Therefore, every civilian in the sovereignty fighting against us that encourages the combatants or expresses his satisfaction with their actions is considered a person with an intent to kill. Therefore, he can be killed. And anyone who weakens our sovereignty with his or her speech is also considered a rodef.”

The term rodef is a highly charged one. Literally, it means “pursuer”. In context, it is a murderer, or someone trying to commit murder. It is allowed and even required to kill a “rodef” in order to stop him.

In the past, right-wing religious leaders have been quick to use the charge of “rodef” against Israeli political leaders engaged in negotiations or the transfer of land to the Palestinians. This was heavily employed against Itzhak Rabin in the months before his assassination by an Israeli religious right-winger. Sadly, it is not surprising that it is reappearing now.

There is a fine line connecting theological support by religious leaders for such actions, and the actions of individuals or groups who employ violence against civilians and political leaders in order to achieve political goals.

This is how the people who sent the death threats to Ehud Barak and his family, or those who employ the “price tag” policy against Palestinian civilians feel secure in their divine backing.

This line of thinking has no place in modern society, no matter the denomination it originates from.