Judaism and Religion

God — Why Bother?

by

Haim Watzman

I’m not partial to faith healing and miracle stories. I like to keep my feet on the ground when talking about God. And so does my good friend Anne Hodges-Copple, who serves as rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Durham, North Carolina.

So I was a little surprised when she sent me a recent sermon that centers on what looks ostensibly like a simple story of faith and healing. It happened recently when Anne went on a church mission to Belize, in central America.

Late one night, only about ten days ago, twenty-year-old Rachel woke up in her one room house on the outermost edge of San Mateo, Belize. Her husband and two young sons were still asleep. She looked over the swamp outside the window of the tiny box of a house she and her husband had built from discarded wood planks and scrap metal. Like other rather ramshackle dwellings nearby, her house was built on piles that rose above the soft ground created by filling in the lagoon with a dubious combination of sand and trash. San Mateo was created away from any land that could be valuable to developers and to keep poor workers and their families out of the sight of the thriving tourist industry of San Pedro. Despite the beautiful multi-hued turquoise waters of the Caribbean that surrounds Ambergris Cay, Rachel and her neighbors were surrounded by brackish water, and a ground so lacking in nutrients that the hardiest shrub had a difficult go of it.

Rachel awoke because she sensed something was wrong. As she told the social worker at Holy Cross Anglican School later that day, she felt something invisible move across the swamp and into her home. She felt something dark and sinister blow into the house. She closed the board door across the window. Shortly thereafter her youngest child, three year old Ronan, woke up crying. He called out in a terrified voice that crabs were eating him. Candles were lit and the child examined by worried parents. They could find no evidence of any bites. They could find no physical source of the child’s continued cries. They tried to soothe him, but he remained listless and distressed. Rachel feared that evil spirits had come into her house perhaps, upon her child.

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We Couldn’t Make Any of This Up

by

Gershom Gorenberg

Since Purim is past, I can put up a brief compendium of news stories that should be satires. Well, actually, if we made this stuff up, you would accuse us of third-degree cynicism. But we’re innocent. This stuff really happened.

  • In Maryland, the Washington Post reports, a Muslim woman was told to leave a line in a bank and be served in a back room because she was wearing a scarf over her hair. The bank said it had a “no hats, hoods or sunglasses” policy, intended to prevent robberies and identity theft (you might want to visit us for more information about how to actually prevent this kind of crimes). Giving the bank the benefit of the doubt, the clerks did not believe that she was hiding an assault rifle under her scarf. So apparently, they found it absolutely impossible to verify a person’s identity when her hair was covered. Perhaps this is part of an “all those people look the same” policy, which may apply equally to Muslim women and Orthodox Jewish women who cover their hair.

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“For You Were Slaves…” Remember?

by

Gershom Gorenberg

I have a new article up at the Hadassah Magazine site on African refugees in Israel:

When he was 13, Akon told us, the government-backed militia came to his village in southern Sudan.

“They started killing people and burning their houses,” Akon said, speaking so quietly that I had to lean over our coffee cups to hear his voice amid the music in the Jerusalem café. “They killed my mother. My sister, they raped her, and she died.” The militiamen took Akon to northern Sudan, where they sold him as a slave.

So began the nine-year odyssey that brought him to Jerusalem.

Looking across the table, I saw lines in a dark face. He looked much older than 22 years. The family that bought him, he said, put him to work taking care of their cattle and camels. He was the first to rise each day, the last to sleep. He was beaten and insulted. Because he would not convert from Christianity to Islam, he said, “I was a devil in their eyes.”

Slavery was something I had read about in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and history textbooks. Now a former slave sat across from me. I thought of inviting him to my Pesah Seder, then wondered what he would think of the words.

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Who Am I to Say? (Occasional Advice)

by

Gershom Gorenberg

Dear SoJo

I am a secular Jew who has a profound respect for Jewish tradition and will be making aliyah shortly. I do not believe in an intervening god, nor do I consider the Torah an accurate historical record or an exemplary moral treatise (not necessarily an abominable one either). I do, however, recognize it as an immensely important cultural anchor that should be studied by anyone wishing to preserve Jewish “peoplehood.”

I’ve fallen in love with an Orthodox woman – dati leumi [religious Zionist], I’d call her. I’ve expressed to her that I have no problem – indeed, I’m quite happy – with upping my observance in the interest of preserving tradition (Shabbat, kashrut, etc). However, I cannot accept the idea of sending my children to a religious school where they learn that the Torah is accurate history and the infallible word of God as written by Moses. She seems open to the possibility of sending her children to a school that exposes them to the Torah while allowing them the freedom to draw their own conclusions about the text’s origin.

Does such a school exist? What has been your experience with this issue? I read your recent article on dealing with the fundamentalism in Israeli religious schools. Are there no progressive religious schools in Israel? Have you come across any couples at your synagogue who are not entirely on the same plane religiously?

Semi-Secular

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Huntington’s Legacy

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Samuel Huntington has died, though it took a few days for the news to reach the media. Huntington, a Harvard professor of political science, was the author of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. When someone dies, the custom is to praise him. I’d like to honor custom, but Huntington’s most famous book was a pernicious work that has seems to have served as ideological underpinning for America’s failed foreign policy under George W. Bush.

Soon after 9/11, when everyone was talking Huntington, I wrote a riff on the book and my concern that it would create unneeded battle lines. I’m sorry to say that my worries were justified. Here’s part of what I wrote then:

…as some ideas do, this one seeped into popular culture, ready to be quoted when the need arose even by people who couldn’t quite recall the source. September 11 created the need. Say “civilization,” and instead of a battle against an invisible enemy with an opaque ideology, you have a war of the West against Islam. The problem is that Huntington’s thesis is intellectually fuzzy, factually incorrect – and likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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Big Tent Judaism

by

Gershom Gorenberg

Thank you, Aliza!

Because Aliza commented recently on my latest post on conversion, I discovered her blog, Memoir of a Jewminicana. As she tells, she’s a first generation of Dominican descent, and an Orthodox convert to Judaism. She writes softly and powerfully about that experience, and I wish a lot of people born as Jews were reading her.

Much of what she blogs is about the dissonance of converting: She loves the faith. The Jews, however, can be terribly unwelcoming. She’s not talking about the kind of Israeli ultra-Orthodox rabbinic court judge who’s already ready to reverse your conversion. She’s talking about everyday Jews who can’t get straight that not everyone who’s Jewish grew up in their neighborhood, with their grandmothers’ accents, with their mothers’ advice (what a polite understated word) on what can be talked about at the dinner table, and with their skin color.

Here’s a piece from one recent post, called The Worst Guest in the World:

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Rabbis v. Jewish Tradition: More on the Conversion Crisis

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My latest piece on the conversion crisis is on-line, a bit late, at the Hadassah Magazine site. Crisis is too nice a word. What’s really happening is that part of the Israeli state rabbinate has adopted a radical ultra-Orthodox innovation: regarding conversion to Judaism as something that can be annulled.

Yes, folks, I said, radical ultra-Orthodox innovation. That’s not a contradiction in terms; it may be a redundancy. Like other contemporary religious communities that claim to represent old-time religion – salafist Muslims, fundamentalist Christians – ultra-Orthodox Judaism is a creation of modernity. The ultra-Orthodox assault on conversion is just the latest bit of evidence.

So here’s the article:

Nearly two years ago, a Danish-born Israeli woman named Yael and her husband appeared before the rabbinical court in Ashdod to end their marriage. Since the couple had agreed on an amicable divorce, they anticipated a pro forma procedure.

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Who Am I to Say? (Occasional Advice)

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Dear SoJo,

Very recently, as a lark, my sons and I decided to have our DNA checked. We expected to see vague northern European references and perhaps a surprise or two. When I opened the pdf file with the result (from dnatribes.com), we discovered, with mouths agape, that we are Ashkenazi. That is, the graph showed we are mostly Ashkenazi, almost 100%. (There was some Afghanistan, Iraq, and Turkey thrown in for good measure). I had always been intrigued to see what a DNA test would show and because my friend went for dna testing in chicago and had a wonderful experience, I decided the time had come for me to give it a go too.

This is delightful, of course. And probably not unheard of (see Madeline Albright and Christopher Hitchens). Nonetheless, it’s a confusing state to be in. I was raised in a strict Catholic home and our “German, English, and Irish roots” were all anyone ever alluded to. These results have left my friends asking me “Why don’t you make your family tree?”

As a scholar of archeo-anthropological studies , I am fascinated by migration, wandering hordes, tribal customs and linguistics. But, never in a million years did my mother ever say, “Oh, yes, dear, by the way, we are Ashkenazi Jews, but they converted to Catholicism due to the pogroms.” My mother doesn’t even know what a pogrom is. However, when I gently confronted her the other day with this information, she said “Oh, we sort of knew this.”

Now, my question to you is, and I ask it sincerely, because I am getting a lot of weird answers: What is a Jew?

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Why Pass on the Trauma? A Conversation with Avraham Burg

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On bloggingheads.tv, I’ve interviewed Avrum Burg about his nearly new book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From its Ashes.  I say nearly new, because the book came out earlier in Israel, where it was roundly attacked, mostly by people who hadn’t read it but knew precisely what it said. I’m told that this … Read more