Judaism and Religion

Intellectual Sampler: An Appetizer of Rational Revelation

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Gershom Gorenberg

Blogs, as this blogger knows painfully well, are intrinsically built for short attention spans. So how do you make a blog enjoyably intellectual, something that usually requires remaining focused for hours at a time?

The trick at  The Page 99 Test is based on a maxim by Ford Maddox Ford, “Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” The blog does not  follow that principle to an extreme. It allows authors to give a paragraph or three of context before presenting page 99 of their books – which makes reading the blog much more helpful than just opening a serious work to the middle while standing in a shop. (Remember shops? You can still buy books printed on paper there.)

So in a recent post, before bringing page 99 of his new book, Divine Teaching and the Way of the World: A Defense of Revealed Religion, philosopher Sam Fleischacker explains that he’s dealing with how someone can be reasonable, rational and still affirm that “that one or more of the books long held to be sacred” really can teach you something:

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More Professorial Pride: On Abortion in Israel, and the Anarchistiker Hasidim

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Gershom Gorenberg Two more thought-provoking reports from my students at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism  have just been published: Simone Gorrindo’s article on the Israeli version of the abortion debate is now up at Tablet. The argument is quieter here, perhaps, but not less intense. And naturally, it’s laden with extra helpings of history, nationalism … Read more

Anti-Dissent Disorder: Reb Joshua’s Reading

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Gershom Gorenberg

Joshua Gutoff has an incisive post on Jewish-American ADD at Frost and Clouds (a blog always worth reading):

… Talking about withdrawing from the Occupied Territories – hell, just calling them the Occupied Territories – suggests that the borders of the State have more to do with negotiations and politics and international law than the Bible. …Concern that Israel may use force unjustly, and that the occupation may be more brutal than security needs mandate or that international law allows implies that Israel might be subject to moral scrutiny by the outside world.

Is any of that really so bad? It all seems kind of normal for a normal country. It’s not a good thing to be accused of a war crime, let alone commit one, but to hold Britain accountable, or France, or the US, for unjust use of force is not to attack their legitimacy or demand their dismantling. To call for a state to accept international law is not to deny its sovereignty. None of the above are incompatible with concern, even love, for a country.

Not for a real country, anyway.

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Professorial Pride: Nach-Nachs, Teaching Arabic and More

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Gershom Gorenberg Two articles by my students at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism last semester have just been published, and are a pleasure to read: Ben Preston’s Hasidic Radicals Bellow Down Tel Aviv’s Streets, an inside look at the Nach-Nachs, alias the anarchistiker hasidim,  is up at The Forward. Yardena Schwartz’s The Arabic Education of … Read more

Piano Lesson — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

I am impressed. You play like a Jew, Felix. What I mean by that is that you have Johann Sebastian Bach in your heart as well as in your fingertips. Please don’t tell your mother I said this. She would be upset to hear that she has not succeeded in bleaching Israel out of you. How mortified she would be if, in the middle of an intellectual evening here in this very parlor, von Humboldt were to apply his magnifying glass to you and say: “Aha! A fine specimen of Mendelssohnius Judaeas!”

What’s that? Speak up! And please do not call me Aunt Sara. Approximating family relationships is like slurring a gruppetto. I am and will always be your Great Aunt Sara. If you wish, you may, in the grand company that gathers so frequently in this room, be even more precise and refer to me as “Great Aunt Sara Itzig Levy.” And you may add, if asked, “Yes, the daughter of Daniel Itzig and Miriam Wulff, intimates of the illustrious philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, she who studied keyboard with Friedmann Bach, Johann Sebastian’s oldest son, and who has kept the sweet music of the elder Bach alive in her salon through decades of public indifference.” That will do.

And wipe that smirk off your face. There is nothing more unattractive than the smirk of a seventeen-year old boy.

Oh yes, at your age you know it all. Music is universal. How can the notes emerging from a pianoforte be Jewish, you ask? Felix, you know nothing at all. Remember that I told you this today, in Berlin, in July 1826, because some years from now you will realize how true it was of you when you were young.

Listen to me. And stop cracking your knuckles. You will ruin your joints. This piece you have played so beautifully for me this morning, the Partita No. 5 in G Major, can only be played properly, in our falscherleuchtung age, this time of false enlightenment, by a person of Jewish sensibility. Please do not interrupt me. At your age you are to listen to your elders first. After you listen you may disagree, you may do whatever you want. But first you must listen.

Sebastian Bach was a devout Lutheran, true, but he wrote Jewish music.

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The Book of Naomi?

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Haim Watzman

Mrs. Bond, my twelfth-grade English teacher, launched our class discussion of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar by asking whether we thought that the play had been misnamed. I’m sure that Mrs. Bond was one of many teachers who have used that same question to get student readers to think about the structure of that play. It’s a question that highlights the difference between a story’s pivotal figure—the one around whom the action revolves—and the protagonist—the whom the story is about.

The Book of Ruth, read in Ashkenazi Jewish synagogues on Shavu’ot morning, is often characterized as a biblical novel. Unlike the more convoluted and ostensibly historical narratives of the books of Joshua through Kings, Ruth is carefully structured and gives the impression of being an integral work written with authorial intent, rather than a patchwork of early sources reworked and reworked again by series of editors, each with his own agenda. But what sort of novel is it, and is it properly named?

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Strange Alchemy

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

Daniella Weiss has a soft smile and a round face that is remarkably unwrinkled for a woman of 66 known for most of her adult life as an incendiary activist. A cloth cap covers her hair, in keeping with a strict reading of Orthodox Jewish rules for married women. In her living room in the West Bank settlement of Kedumim, west of Nablus, religious texts fill the bookshelves. Glass cases display a silver crown for a Torah scroll, filigreed spice boxes, and other Jewish ritual objets d’art.

Vehithazaktem
Vehithazakem: Transforming theft into  virtue.

Weiss dates her career on Israeli’s religious right to the mid-1970s, when she helped organize the efforts of Gush Emunim — the Believers Bloc — to settle in this part of the West Bank in defiance of Yitzhak Rabin’s government. Until 2007, she was mayor of Kedumim. Since then, she has been organizing youth of the radical right to establish illegal settlement outposts. She introduces herself as a devoted disciple of Rabbi Moshe Levinger, founder of the Jewish settlement inside Hebron. I visited her recently to find out how she thought settlers should respond to looming West Bank political developments, including the expected bid for U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state.

“A diplomatic tsunami is coming,” Weiss told me, adding that “mental stagnation” afflicts settlement leaders. Their focus on construction only inside existing settlements is “poison,” because settlers need to spread out in order to strengthen the Jewish hold on the land rather than stay in “ghettoes.” Her proposal for “drastic action” to wake settlers up to the looming danger — an idea she said was “burning in her” but that she needed to run by Levinger — was that “we must set up settlements on the Sabbath.”

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Dalal: And Now for Some Good News

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Gershom Gorenberg

Thanks and an apology are in order.

The thanks are to all those who donated to the Dalal Project, helping to fund Dalal Rusrus’s stay at Alyn Hospital, and to all those who contacted Israeli officials, helping to get Dalal’s parents permits to bring her from the West Bank to the hospital in Jerusalem. Extra special thanks are due to the people who helped coordinate what turned into a major organizational effort to make sure one three-year-old girl began the treatment she needs.

The apology is for my delay in getting back to you with an update. Travel, teaching and writing haven’t left me with any waking moments.

Dalal Rusrus, for those coming new to this story, is a Palestinian child from Beit Umar in the West Bank. She suffers from cerebral palsy and delayed development. Through a series of events I’ve described previously (first here, then here, and then here), she was invited for treatment at Alyn Hospital, the only pediatric rehabilitative facility in the region. The relatively easy problem that posed was paying for the treatment. The more difficult one, it turned out, was getting the necessary permits for her father and mother, Osama and Sunya, to enter Israel to accompany her.

The request for donations, here and elsewhere, brought a quick response from Israel and around the world, from Jews, Muslims and Christians. Much of the funding was handled administratively by the Tzedakah Committee at Kehillat Yedidya in Jerusalem.

After many long conversations with Civil Administration officials, Sunya and Osama got the necessary permits. The reasons for the initial refusals remain obscure. What’s clear from my conversations is that the level of journalistic and public interest surprised the officials, and increased their motivation to solve the problem. Activism worked.

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That Fickle, Freckled Faith — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

by

Haim Watzman

illustration by Avi Katz

Some years ago, when my family was young, I had a neighbor with very strong opinions. Strong and often different from my own. Gavriel was warm, generous, devoted to his family, humble before his God, and dedicated to his country. He died suddenly and far too young.

In the years before his death, Gavriel underwent not a spiritual awakening, for he’d grown up observant and believing, but a spiritual deepening. He spent long nights immersed in Hasidic texts and studied Talmud with a black-coated partner from the Bratislaver community. He grew sidelocks and wore longer fringes under his shirt. But he continued to serve in his IDF reserve unit long after the usual age of retirement.

At the memorial service held on the first anniversary of his death, one speaker praised Gavriel for his temimut, a Hebrew word that that, in the Bible, means “whole” and “unblemished.” In modern religious parlance it usually refers to a simple, pure piety, one that harbors no doubts. It was the right word for the occasion, for Gavriel indeed brooked none. He believed with perfect faith in God, the coming of the Messiah, in the justice of Israel’s rule over the West Bank and Gaza Strip and their Palestinian inhabitants, and in the power of his love to make his wife and children happy despite the adversities they faced. He believed these things with such fervor that, in his presence, I was often left speechless, if not convinced.

Were I myself so whole, so tamim, I would have immediately quoted to myself from Psalms 18, “I will be whole [tamim] before him, and keep myself from iniquity.” Or Deuteronomy 18, “Be whole in your faith with the Lord your God.” Or perhaps the first verse of Job: “There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job, and the man was whole and upright, and one who feared God and turned away from evil.”

But I didn’t. I thought instead of another poem, and not even one by a Jew. “Glory be to God for dappled things,” my heart sang at Gavriel’s memorial service,

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Dalal Update

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Gershom Gorenberg I want to thank everyone who has lent a hand to Dalal Rusrus and her family, by contributing funds for her care or by writing to military officials to ask about her parents’ permits to bring her to Alyn Hospital in Jerusalem. Today Dalal’s mother Sunya was given a one-day permit to bring … Read more

Saving Dalal

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Gershom Gorenberg

At 10:03 on Monday morning, Osama Rusrus phoned from Beit Umar in the West Bank with wonderful news:  His wife Sunya and daughter Dalal had crossed through the checkpoint into Jerusalem, on their way to Alyn Hospital.

It took nearly two months of wrangling with the Israeli authorities, especially the agency that never signs its name, and it was touch and go till the last moment.

Before I tell the story, let me note that this is just an early chapter. The next chapter is getting Dalal the full treatment she needs at Alyn, in order to allow her to live as fully as a girl with brain damage can. Right now she is unable to walk, has use of one hand, and has a vocabulary of one word. Treatment, according to Dr. Eliezer Be’eri of Alyn Hospital, will allow her “to develop to her potential, whatever that is” and enjoy a greater quality of life. It will require a  lot of money. If you want to help, read on, or just skip to the bottom of this post for details.

Be’eri met with Osama and his daughter Dalal in October to give an initial assessment of her condition and of whether Alyn could help her. Dalal is three-and-a-half years old and has suffered since birth from brain damage that has drastically slowed her development. (An account of that meeting is here.) Neither Osama nor his wife Sunya were able to enter Jerusalem, so Be’eri performed that initial examination on the patio of the Everest Hotel outside Beit Jalla in the West Bank.

Be’eri’s assessment was that Dalal not only could benefit from treatment, but needed to begin quickly. He arranged for a multi-disciplinary examination at Alyn, and made sure it was scheduled as “urgent.” With Alyn’s letter, Osama requested a permit to enter Jerusalem.

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