Judaism and Religion

The Progressive Imam

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When I told my son that I was going to Cape Town, he told he had a friend there who belonged to a mosque committed to including women in worship, a community under the leadership of a progressive imam. It happened that my commitments to teach at Limmud, the South African version of the British festival of Jewish study, began late Friday afternoon. So I called Imam A. Rashied Omar and arranged to visit the Claremont Main Road Mosque for Friday prayers and an interview.

My new article on the mosque and the imam is now up at the American Prospect. A personal preface: The fact that I wrote about this particular community and its leader doesn’t mean they are unique. Indeed, friends who have already seen the article have already sent me names of other Islamic teachers working in similar veins. I’m writing about Omar because he’s the one I had the opportunity to meet.

I don’t know what portion of Muslims he or his community represent. But I don’t think that the essence of a faith is determined by majority vote. In 1665, the majority of Jews believed Shabtai Tzvi was messiah and that Nathan of Gaza was his prophet. The dissidents who understood that their community was in the midst of mass hysteria had a stronger grasp of Judaism. Today the majority of Orthodox Zionists in Israel are caught up in a warped version of Judaism, originally promoted by that latter-day Nathan of Gaza, Tzvi Yehudah Kook, that sanctifies land, power and Jewish exclusivism. I firmly believe that the majority is deeply mistaken.

This is a statement that can be made from within a tradition. Looking at Islam from the outside I can only note that there is a debate within it. Most writers from the outside who assert what Islam “really” is do

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The Cistern And The King–An Elul Story

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Haim Watzman

A cool wind blows through the vineyard in Yavneh late in the month of Elul. The sun, obscured by large but unthreatening gray-blue cloud, has passed the sky’s pinnacle. Rabban Yohanan Ben-Zakkai’s students, who until just a few minutes previously had been engaged in a heated debate over whether the shofar could be blown when Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbat. This was formerly allowed only in the Holy Temple, which was destroyed some years before. Could a rule applying just to the sacred precinct now be expanded to include all of Jerusalem, or perhaps Yavneh as well, or even the entire Land of Israel?

“We seem,” says Rabban Yohanan—the Nasi, head of the Sanhedrin, reconstituted here on the southwestern coastal plane of the Holy Land after the Temple’s destruction—“to have lost our train of thought.”

Rabbi Yosi points to the sky. “Since the destruction of the Holy Temple, a cloud often passes between us and divine inspiration.”

“Perhaps,” says Rabban Yohanan, “I should tell a story.

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Science and Religion and the Mufti and Me

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Haim Watzman Readers interested in the science (specifically evolution) and religion debate might be interested in the exchange I’ve been participating in with the Grand Mufti and others over on Jewlicious. The GM defines the problem well, and I’ve tried to help him dispel some misconceptions. The gist is that it’s an error to say … Read more

Revelation and Law: Elijah and Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi

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Haim Watzman

When do religions based on text and revelation turn fundamentalist and extreme? When their adherents take their holy books and divine messages to be sources of infallible wisdom that needs no human mediation. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and other creeds can all inspire their adherents to take individual responsibility for weighing competing moral values, but this requires that the community of believers understand that the practical application of religious values “is not in heaven.” In other words, they must realize that revelation and holy texts cannot be understood and used without placing them in dialogue with the real world that we confront in our everyday experience.

At his weekly Shabbat afternoon lecture last Saturday, Rabbi Binyamin Lau cited an aggadah—a rabbinic homily—from the Jerusalem Talmud (Chapter 8, page 5d). (The following thoughts are my own, not Rabbi Lau’s.)

A man named Ula Bar Kushav was sought by the Roman authorities for some unnamed crime. He fled to Lod, then (the early third century CE) an important city in Judea with a large Jewish population. The Romans surrounded the city and demanded that the Jewish community turn over Bar Kushav. If he were not turned over, the Romans would raze the entire city.

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Old-Time Religion, Newly Manufactured. Or: The Past Isn’t What It Used To Be.

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An afterword to Haim’s post on screeds about anti-Jewish attitudes in Islam: A few months ago I wrote an article about anti-Muslim and anti-Christian prayers in Judaism. The anti-Christian prayers are medieval (I urged excising them.) The anti-Muslim prayer I cited is apparently a fake antique: It’s written in a medieval style, and it follows the midrashic convention of using “Ishmael” as a name for Muslims or Arabs. But it’s a product of the contemporary Israeli-Arab conflict, and it shows up in the liturgy of the Israeli religious right, which has dressed up militant modern nationalism as ancient theology.

There are several lessons to be learned:

First, attacks on Islam in authentic medieval Jewish prayers are almost impossible to find, as a leading historian explained to me:

Hebrew University historian Israel Yuval says that traditional liturgical attacks “are always against Christianity,” and are found in Ashkenazi prayers, not Sephardi ones. The rage reflects theological battles with Christianity, which claimed the Bible as its own and argued that Jews suffered in exile because God had ended the covenant with them. The Jewish response was a stress on “vengeful redemption”-looking forward to a conclusion of history in which the power relations were reversed, the Christians destroyed.

There was obviously theological conflict between Judaism and Islam from the time the latter began. But Jews themselves did not perceive Islam as trying to displace and disinherit Judaism in the same way,

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Anti-Semitism in Islam–Not Decreed By Heaven

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Haim Watzman

There he goes again—Benny Morris is giving the battle against Islamic anti-Semitism a bad name.

But then he’s not alone in fray. Nearly every passionate participant in the battle—Pipes, Horowitz, you name it—would make the angelically tolerant Roger Williams, the great American founder of religious toleration, go apoplectic.

In one of the perverse juxtapositions for which it is famous, the previous issue of The New Republic (the back section of which I just got around to reading last weekend) offers us a wonderful essay on Roger Williams by Martha Nussbaum, and then follows a few pages later with an embarrassing and ugly screed against Islam by Morris called “The Darker Side.”

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Putting God in the World: Psalm 27 From Faith to Doubt to Action

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Haim Watzman

There’s a canard that religious people hear again and again from their non-religious acquaintances: “I’m jealous. It must be such a comfort to be able to believe in God.” They haven’t read Psalm 27, which observant Jews recite twice daily from the beginning of the month of Elul (which began earlier this week) throughout the holiday season that concludes eight weeks later.

The psalm (Read the Hebrew text, the 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation, and hear the Psalm read in the original Hebrew here) belies such a naïve view of the relationship between human beings and God.

Famously, this poem seems to run backwards, if your standard is the assumption that people pray so that their prayers will be answered. It begins with a declaration of confidence in God’s protection, goes on to pleading, then to expressions of loneliness and doubt, and ends with a determined affirmation of God despite the uncertainty the poet sees in the world around him. The disparity of mood is so great that some scholars have suggested that the psalm is actually an amalgamation of two entirely separate works.

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The God We Don’t See–My Best Books of This Past Year

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Haim Watzman

At the end of July I was privileged to attend the Sami Rohr Prize Literary Institute, where I spent three stimulating days with the other prize finalists and judges. We were each asked to offer a short presentation about our favorite book of all time. I panicked–I like too many books, and too many genres, to name just one. I offer here my presentation, as transcribed by the Institute staff (and spruced up just a bit by me).

Sefer Yermiyahu, the Collected Poems of Avraham Halfi, and Paradise Lost

I had a hard time coming up with a single most important book, so, to make the assignment easier, I limited myself to my most important reading experiences of the last year—and managed to get myself down to three books. All three share, I think, an effort to deal with the question of what do we do about God when we don’t see God in the world. That is, the empirical evidence that we see before us precludes God’s presence in the universe, even though we intuit that we need or should have, or have to have a God. The first book was Sefer Yermiyahu, the Book of Jeremiah, which I completed this year with my Friday morning study group. The second is the poetry of Avraham Halfi, who was a poet and actor, and whose Collected Poems I have been reading slowly for a couple years and am now close to completing. The third is Paradise Lost, by John Milton.

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What’s My Kid Doing in This School

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Gershom Gorenberg

While the outrageously dedicated volunteers of Limmud – the grassroots Jewish study festival – bounce me around South Africa, Ha’aretz has gotten around to publishing my article on the dilemma that moderate religious families face in Israel as they seek an education for their children (Hebrew original here, English translation here):

At the gates of the state religious schools, in many places in Israel, two cultures meet. One, religious and modern, turns over its sons and daughters to the other, more insular, to educate them in its stead. The parents live with their children alongside secular families in mixed neighborhoods. A quick glance at a list of the teachers’ phone numbers reveals that many live in settlements or in neighborhoods known as Haredi or Hardali – religiously ultra-Orthodox, politically ultra-nationalist.

The geographic gap reflects a rift in attitudes toward religion and toward the wider world. It expresses itself in how each side relates to secular culture, to non-Jews, to the limits of rabbinic authority, and to the manner of thinking about politics…

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Finally, Jewish Law for the Real World

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It is a sign of bad times when a clergyman stating an obvious moral truth is big news. So we live in bad times. Nonetheless, Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld deserves great praise for his op-ed this week in the New York Times on the scandal of the kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, where:

News reports and government documents have described abusive practices at Agriprocessors against workers, including minors. Children as young as 13 were said to be wielding knives on the killing floor; some teenagers were working 17-hour shifts, six days a week…

Herzfeld asserts what should be obvious: that producing “kosher” meat in this way is a desecration of God’s name, and that the leading Orthodox organizations have failed to respond properly. He also asserts that the kashrut of the meat produced in Postville is questionable.

For this he offers a couple of arguments. By his reasoning, if the Agriprocessors company was willing to ignore U.S. law and basic employer ethics, it cannot be trusted to pay attention to Jewish dietary laws. Here, I think, Herzfeld has aimed too low, and accepted the obsessive-compulsive focus of some in the Orthodox community on ritual requirements. His stronger argument is

there is precedent for declaring something nonkosher on the basis of how employees are treated.

That is, food produced through abject exploitation of human beings should be seen as treif even if every other technical detail of kashrut has been observed.

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Biking the 401–Crested Butte, Colorado and the Jewish Question

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Ilana was eyeing a silk-print wrap-around skirt as a present for a friend when a retirement-age Jewish mom with an eastern accent started up a conversation with me. When you wear a kipah, everyone assumes you are Israeli.

We spent this morning at the summer arts fair in Crested Butte, Colorado, a town of 1,600 or so permanent residents that forms a half-moon of built-up area in the midst of a plain between high mountain ridges that still boast patches of snow at the beginning of August. Four hours from Denver, it’s not the kind of place you expect to find a Jewish community, but the woman told us that the local synagogue, the cleverly-named Bnai Butte, counts 60 families among its members. If you add to that the Jews for whom Bnai Butte is the shul they refuse to enter, we must be one of the town’s leading denominations and ethnic groups.

Like other minorities, Jews in outlying places either form insular groups or try to beat the locals at their own native culture. The latter was most evident over our weekend in Crested Butte. A dark-complexioned, kinky-haired young mountain biker wearing devil-blue Duke duds (that’s my alma mater) eyed my tzitziot and smiled a greeting as he passed by me on the street on Shabbat, and a heavily tatooed, long-haired country banjo man called out “Shalom” from his street-musician perch.

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The Freedom To Be Religious: Wins and Losses

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Gershom Gorenberg

Religious freedom is often confused in our parts with freedom from religion, and atheism is mistakenly equated with liberalism. For the state to be secular – so goes the thinking – everyone who lives in it should secular too. As political scientist Yaron Ezrahi once said to me, “The Israeli secular community lacks the understanding that you don’t have to secularize individual identity to evolve a secular state.”

Ezrahi made the comment to me when I was writing a story on Gil Kopatch, a stand-up comedian who for several months in the late 90s appeared on a Friday night TV show and presented a pointed, often-ribald commentary on the weekly Torah portion. Kopatch was attacked by the ultra-Orthodox for his supposed blasphemy. But he confused his secular supporters when he insisted “I’m a believing Jew” and expressed “love of Torah.” Secular MKs presumed that in defending Kopatch’s freedom of expression, they were also attacking religion as such. The idea that freedom of expression includes religious expression was beyond them.

Ezrahi’s comment fit the American model: secular state, religious society. But “liberal” Israelis aren’t alone in assuming that for the state should impose secularism. Here are several recent stories, starting with the most important: