Yussel

Piercing Together the Genizah

2011-12-28T15:36:00.000-05:00

The story first appeared in The Forward

Computer scientists at Tel Aviv University are using artificial intelligence to gather the fragments of the world’s largest collection of medieval documents, the legendary Cairo Genizah, to tell the story of 1,000 years of Jewish history and culture. They have reconstructed more than 1,000 documents from 350,000 individual items found in the Cairo storage room: more in a few months than in 110 years of conventional scholarship.

They have decades to go before they are finished.

“The Genizah contains information about every single Jewish subject in the world — all learning,” said Rabbi Reuven Rubelow, manager of the Friedberg Genizah Project , which funds the research. “If it is holy, they kept it in this room."

In some ways, the contents of the Cairo Genizah are more important than the Dead Sea Scrolls, SEVERAL scholars believe. While the Dead Sea scrolls were the religious literature of a small sect that lived in the desert for a few years, the Cairo Genizah told the story of the day-to-day details of a millennium of Jewish life.

“What we have learned about Jewish culture and history... in the Muslim world in a century of research is unparalleled, unparalleled,” said Mark Cohen, professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University. It is especially true of the day-to-day life of the Jews.

“It’s like looking through a trash can outside your home,” said Phillip Lieberman, assistant professor of Jewish studies and Law at Vanderbilt University. “I can tell a great deal about your life from what I find.”

What the Tel Aviv researchers are doing will revolutionize that search.

While some of the archive includes complete letters, manuscripts and documents, much of it consists of fragments, some containing only a few words, or pages out of context. The fragments are spread out through 70 different libraries and museums around the world. One page of a letter could be in Oslo and another in Philadelphia.

Nachum Dershowitz and Lior Wolf of TAU’s Blavatnik School of Computer Science are taking the digitized documents and feeding them into computers to rejoin the parts.

Until now, researchers had to rely on serendipity to put together fragments; they would look at a document and remember that it looked like something they saw someplace else, Cohen said. But now, computers are able to learn from their own experience which fragments fit with which. The more documents the computer sees, the better the algorithm will get, an attribute of A.I. scientists call computer learning. The project uses A.I. techniques THAT WERE developed over the past decade for myriad reasons but only recently brought to bear on the Cairo Genizah.

Although A genizah has been described as a “holy trash” dump, IT is ACTUALLY a word from the Persian, meaning “hoard” or “hidden treasure.” The practice of storing documents in a genizah derives from the Jewish idea that letters, like people, are alive and sacred. When they wear out, or “die,” they are to be treated with respect, especially if, like the Torah, they contain the words of God. They are eventually either buried or, as in the case of the Cairo Genizah, allowed to decay on their own.

Eventually, genizot became neutral receptacles for any community documents. The one in Cairo is by far the oldest and largest.

The brilliant, eccentric Moldavian-born talmudic scholar Solomon Schechter is credited with the discovery of the Cairo Genizah in 1896. Schechter , WHO AT THE TIME WAS on the faculty of Cambridge University, was told of the Cairo Genizah by Scottish twin sisters, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, who had uncovered the trove during their travels to the Ben Ezra Synagogue.

Solomon Schechter

Shown two documents from IT, Schechter immediately understood that the sisters had [tripped STUMBLED] on a historic treasure. One manuscript was the original text of “The Wisdom of Ben Sirach” (“Ecclesiasticus”), from the second-century BCE, part of the Christian Apocrypha and the origin of part of the Jewish Amidah prayer. Schechter immediately sailed to Egypt.

Founded in the ninth century, the synagogue is located in the Fustat section of medieval Cairo, once home to a teeming Jewish neighborhood. The genizah itself was in a dark, sealed room just under the roof. The contents were protected in part by Egypt’s dry, warm air and in part by a curse that threatened anyone who removed a document.

Schechter found a letter signed by Maimonides among the documents, as well as a draft of Maimonides’s laws that was hand-corrected by the author. The Cairo Genizah also contained the oldest piece of Jewish sheet music, the oldest rabbinic text ever discovered and, as an illustration in an 11th-century child’s reading primer, the oldest use of the Star of David.

It contains social and commercial documents stretching from the 19th century back to the ninth century. ThIS genizah was, in short, a vast storehouse of information on life in the Middle East AND its culture and economy, from sex to glassmaking.

Understandably, much of it is in poor condition. Paper had crumbled or been stuck together; parchment was torn; text was missing in the middle of documents. Some pages were covered with a molasses-like goop, of undetermined origin. No one had cataloged them.

Schechter shipped back most of the trove to Cambridge and took some with him to New York when he became president of the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1902. Other scholars and collectors around the world took the rest.

To piece it together, the first order of business was finding out where it all was.

“The Friedberg people went around the world and made a list,” Dershowitz said. Some is in private hands, sold by dealers in the 19th century. Seventy percent is still in Cambridge, another 20% to 25% is at JTS, according to the foundation. The rest is scattered around the world.

Now that they know where everything is, the, entire collection is being digitized. Documents or fragments are photographed either by the libraries or by the foundation, shipped to the Freiburg office in Jerusalem and uploaded onto the computer there. Cambridge alone sends almost 10,000 documents on disk by courier each month, Rubelow said.

The documents are scanned using algorithms developed partially for facial recognition. The computer ignores content and looks for matching physical attributes. “We look at the shape of letters and the spacing between lines and things like that,” Dershowitz said. “If you have two pages from the same book, then the layout of each page is similar.”

So far, the computing project has found about 5,000 fragments that might be rejoined, mostly from collections in Geneva and New York, but human scholars have gone through those and affirmed that only 1,000 of them are actual matches.

“This [computer joining] is especially important for historical fragments,” Cohen said. “They are less well preserved. They have the most tears and holes.”

The most important find? Dershowitz said it was the discovery of more works of Saadia Gaon, a 10th-century philosopher. Everyone thought all his extant work had been found, but more was in the Cairo Genizah, and even more has come to light during the Tel Aviv investigation. Dershowitz’s researchers are now experimenting with dating some of the documents and determining their provenance.

Lieberman said the Cairo Genizah scholarship is surprisingly relevant to modern Jews. The Jews in the Medieval Muslim world were highly assimilated culturally and economically into the greater society as modern Jews are, and lived peacefully with their neighbors for centuries. How they did so could be important to know, he said.

The work is unlikely to be completed in the lifetime of most of the scholars, Dershowitz admits.

“In ‘The Book of Ethics,’” Dershowitz remarked, “it said, ‘It is not your job to finish.’ It’s our job to start. Let other people finish.”

Climate change, forest fires, and cultural collateral damage

2011-01-06T11:59:00.002-05:00

Carmel Forest in better days

The price of climate change isn’t just high temperatures and rising seas. It is cultural, political, economic and philosophical. Climate change has collateral damage.

In December, the worst forest fire in Israel’s history destroyed 12,000 acres (4,800 hectares) of forest. The fire did not just destroy trees; it destroyed one of the philosophical underpinnings of the Jewish state, costs millions of dollars, dozens of lives and could even contribute to bringing down a government.

The fires should not have been a surprise. In 2001, Israeli scientists predicted that the changing climate would eventually lead to heat waves, drought, a change in rain patterns and eventually forest fires. All that turned out to be true. Guy Pe’er, a co-author of Israeli’s National Report on Climate Change, said what happened in Carmel was “a taste of the future.”

The fire roared through the mountains in the northern part of the country, south of the port city of Haifa, an area about 1,500 feet (500 meters) above sea level, which draws thousands of tourists because of its exceptional beauty in a region more famous for desert. Something like 5 million trees were destroyed. Forty-three people died, many of them burned to death in a trapped bus.

In the report almost a decade ago, Pe’er and others said that if temperatures in the area rose by as little as 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7) Fahrenheit, the desert would expand northwards by several hundred miles. But at the rate temperatures were rising, the temperatures would be higher than that by century’s end. This would essentially put an end to Israel’s Mediterranean climate.

This year, the rains did not come. Carmel suffered from eight months of drought and unusually high temperatures, hovering around 96 degrees Fahrenheit (30 C). It was prime forest fire weather. And Israel was totally unprepared.

Getty Images

Some background puts this into perspective. It’s not just the trees.

Israel is perhaps the only country in the world that has more trees now than it did in the beginning of the 20^th century. Trees became the symbol of the Zionist movement, reclaiming the land from the desert and the neglect of millennia. Many Jewish homes in the diaspora had little blue boxes sent by the Jewish National Fund, an organization devoted to planting trees in the Holy Land. When you had loose change, you put in the blue box. Stores in Jewish neighborhoods stocked the boxes as well. Children who went through the rite of passage of the bar or bat mitzvah often received planted trees as presents. (My family probably has a couple of dozen plantings in our name). It was a legitimate wedding gift. Millions of trees were planted, turning northern Israel green. The forests were lines of mostly pines, exceptional only in where they were, how many of them there were and how they got there. For the area they were extraordinary, and there were so many of them they actually changed the local climate.

Unfortunately, the JNF never invested any of that gift money in forest fire fighting equipment and the country itself discovered to its dismay it also had neglected fire emergencies under the theory that most of the buildings in Israel are made of stone and hence not fire prone. The fire burned itself out more than it was put out, and a country famous for sending aid to other countries suffering from natural disasters had to ask for help for itself. Even the Palestinians chipped in with engines.

The unpreparedness could cost the Interior Minister his job and the poor response of the government did little good to the precarious government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Meanwhile, the JNF is trying to collect funds to plant more trees and is running into opposition from contributors who are unhappy about what they did with the money they had, and scientists who believe the best way to restore the Carmel forests is to leave them the hell alone and let nature rebuild them. Nature is likely to do a better job.

Except for the changing climate, that is,which could make the forests of Carmel just a brief moment of verdure in the long history of that sere and benighted region.

Einstein, Relativity and Wingnuts

2010-08-30T17:47:00.002-04:00

"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits"--Albert Einstein. --First it was evolution, then global climate change. Now it’s the Theory of Relativity and it’s iconic formula, E=mc2.

Conservative bloggers are attacking Einstein’s theories as a “liberal conspiracy,”claiming they are controversial outside of “liberal universities.” Puzzled physicists, who consider relativity to be a seminal discovery of their science, seem as unsure how to react as did biologists when first confronted with modern creationists.

While relativity has always had rejectionists--mostly anti-Semites—the new dispute draws the denial into the realm of American politics, where it doesn’t belong.

The debate became public when a conservative website, Conservapedia, posted a definition of relativity making the charge it was part of an ideological plot, and then added a list of counter examples it claims disprove the theories. The postings were picked up by the liberal blog TPMuckraker and went, in the jargon of the internet, “viral.”

Conservapedia was created by Andrew Schlafly, the 49-year-old lawyer son of Phyllis Schlafly, the antiabortion activist. He studied engineering physics from Princeton and law at Harvard, and founded Conservapedia three years ago because he felt Wikipedia, the dominant online encyclopedia and one of the most visited websites in the world, had a liberal, anti-Christian, anti-American bias. Among other things, it accepts evolution as a fact and will occasionally use British spelling.

(Schlafly did not respond to repeated attempts to interview him for this article).

Einstein, a notorious liberal, would be amused but hardly surprised.

Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton defined modern physics in 1666, with his laws of motion and energy and his description of how the planets circle the sun. His universe was beautiful, rational, deterministic. His laws still dominate how we think about the mechanics of the world. In 1905, the 26-year-old Einstein, working as a patent clerk (even brilliant physicists need a day job) in Bern, had a very good year. He published four papers, any one of which would have made him famous, but the first cinched it: the Special Theory of Relativity. The famous formula is in that paper: energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Energy, the mass of an object, and the speed of light, all seemingly disparate attributes are entwined. The mass of any object can be converted into energy, as the world subsequently found out to its horror.

Ten years later, he added gravity to space and time in the General Theory of Relativity. Every time you feel heavier when an elevator you are riding in accelerates upward or lighter going down, you are feeling effects described in the General Theory.

The theories were radical for their time. They did not contradict Newton as much as they complemented Newton. Einstein had pulled off a rare thing in science, what the historian-physicist Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm shift. There aren’t many in the history of science, and as Kuhn wrote, one sure initial reaction was disbelief, which is certainly how Einstein’s papers were first greeted.

In 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington, observing the stars around the sun during a solar eclipse. The light from the stars was deflected as it passed by the sun just as Einstein predicted. It made Einstein world famous.

(Asked what would he think if Eddington came up with a different answer, Einstein replied, “Then I would feel sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is correct anyway.”)

For most of the 20th century, scientists fanned out around the world to test the predictions inferred from relativity. Many--perhaps most--hoped they would be the ones to disprove Einstein. Unlike evolution, which takes millions of years to well, evolve, relativity can be proven in laboratories within minutes, and has. Einstein’s theories have been verified going back now nearly 100 years.

“There is no controversy,” says historian and physicist Michael Riordan, adjunct professor of physics at the University of California Santa Cruz. “The theory isn’t wrong, it’s incomplete and has refinements that might or might not be true.”

Andrew Schlafly

A second paradigm shift overtook Einstein, the theories of quantum mechanics, a concept Einstein never accepted. Quantum mechanics, created by a slew of physicists led by the Dane Niels Bohr, did to Einstein what Einstein did to Newton--complemented his theories. Like relativity, quantum mechanics also has passed every test.

No serious physicist doubts relativity or quantum mechanics any more than any serious biologist doubts evolution.

Which brings us to Andrew Schlafly.

Schlafly is obvious very bright. He was accepted at both Princeton and Harvard Law. He is obviously very well educated. He graduated both after a distinguished academic career.

That creates a puzzle: how could someone as bright and as well-educated produce web entries so perfectly inane.

Schlafly’s main argument appears to confuse relativity, an abstraction in physics, with relativism, a philosophical argument having nothing to do with physics. He believes that accepting relativity leads to moral and religious relativism, which is like saying growing apples leads to giraffes.

What seems to have triggered it was a 1989 Harvard Law Review article, now all over the internet, written by liberal law professor Lawrence Tribe, using relativity as a metaphor for understanding constitutional law. Tribe thanked Barack Obama in the footnotes (which isn’t surprising since Obama was then editor of the Review), hence it must be a liberal conspiracy.

Some of the statements in his relativity entries (I haven’t bothered to look at other pages) makes me wonder if he is underestimating his readership or whether he is pandering to them, knowing what he is writing is nonsense but they’ll never figure that out because he is feeding their prejudices.

For instance, Schlafly claims that “virtually no one who is taught and believes relativity continues to read the Bible,” but doesn’t say how he knows that. Has he polled them all? Are there any data to support that?” No one as educated as Schlafly can write that with a straight face. I was taught relativity and read the Bible every Saturday morning. A world famous astrophysicist in our synagogue also believes in relativity and reads the Bible. I can match Schlafly’s anecdotes with mine, and none of them prove anything. As a trained engineer from Princeton, he knows better.

He also uses examples from the Christian Bible as evidence the theories are wrong, which of course is religion, not science.

Perhaps there is something else going on.

After the physics community learned to accept Einstein’s theories, attacks continued from less reputable sources, anti-Semites, apparently upset that a Jew was credited with producing something that important. They called it “Jewish science.” Nazis proposed that Germans should do better and came up with an alternative construct, totally incoherent, called Deutsche Physik. German physics didn’t recover until after World War 2.

While there is no overt anti-Semitism in the Conservapedia, the entries on relativity echo the old arguments. For instance, Schlafly writes: “The theory... is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.”

Forget for a moment that he is assuming everyone who believes in relativity is a liberal. Greg Gbur, assistant professor of physics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte points out in his blog Skulls in the Stars that if you “replace ‘liberals’ with ‘Jews’ in [that] sentence, the words might well have been written by a Nazi circa 1930s-era Germany.”

The attacks on Einstein, overtly anti-Semitic or otherwise, take two forms, and Schlafly repeats them both: that Einstein plagiarized the theory and that the theory is is known to be wrong.

All scientists base their work on that of their predecessors, “standing on the shoulders of giants,” as Newton put it. Deniers point to the work of Jules Henri Poincaré, and Hendrik Lorentz which preceded Einstein’s publication by several years. These men were superb physicists (Lorentz won a Nobel Prize) and had thought about relativity, but neither made the huge leap in imagination Einstein did, although Poincaré came close and probably did influence him.

Another claim is that the theories originated with Einstein’s first wife, the Serbian physics student, Mileva Marik. She may well have served as a sounding board, but there exists no serious evidence she made any substantive contribution. Einstein biographer Ronald Clarke wrote that Einstein didn’t think her bright enough to understand what he was working on. She was an Einstein in name only.

No scientist has had his life probed by more respected biographers and historians than Einstein, and none of them have discovered any proof that the credit for relativity is misplaced.

To prove that the theories wrong, Schlafly provides a list of about two dozen “counterexamples.” The list changes regularly so you can’t come up with a solid numberr. Some are irrelevant, confusing relativity with quantum physics; some misinterpret the science, and many are demonstrably completely wrong.

Schlafly claims that “The lack of useful devices developed based on any insights provided by the theory; no lives have been saved or helped, and the theory has not led to other useful theories and may have interfered with scientific progress.”

The sound you hear is jaws dropping.

First of all, just because nothing useful came out of the discovery of a law of nature doesn’t make the discovery wrong. Everything does not have to have a practical application. But his premise is erroneous.

Everyone who has had a PET scan in a hospital, many who have undergone radiation therapy for cancer or turned on a particle accelerator has used Special Relativity, says Riordan. If you have a GPS navigation system in your car, Einstein is guiding you. If your electricity comes from a nuclear power station, Einstein is lighting your home. That E=mc2 is wrong surely would have surprised the physicists at the Manhattan Project who used it to destroy two cities, not to mention the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The GPS issue is interesting. Schlafly says a Navy research office denied the GPS satellites made use of relativity and that there is nothing about the satellites relevant to Einstein. The navy office he quotes said no such thing and scientists who programmed the satellites had to program relativity into the four clocks in each satellite or the satellites would be useless. Every physicist knows this, and I know at least one of the physicists who actually did the programming. Can Schlafly, with his Princeton engineering really degree not?

GPS satellite

Perhaps the most bizarre of Schlafly’s counterarguments involves what Einstein called “spooky action from a distance” which Schlafly uses to disprove relativity. He uses Jesus to back him up.

Start with the premise (I do) that quantum physics makes no sense at all. Einstein would agree with that sentiment. One of the foundations of relativity is that there is a cosmic speed limit--nothing can move faster than the speed of light.

In a thought experiment with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, published in 1935, he postulated that if you took a molecule containing two atoms, you could describe the two atoms with one formula. They shared attributes, a wave function. If you then separated the two atoms, they would still share the same wave function so that if you altered one, the other would reflect the change instantaneously even if it was now across the galaxy.

Nothing, Einstein wrote in his relativity papers, could go faster than the speed of light, so of course this is impossible. This isn’t as funny as Schrödinger’s Cat, but nonetheless proved, so Einstein believed, that quantum mechanics was nothing but solipsism.

But quantum physicists can prove that actually happens, something they call “entanglement.” Forty years after Einstein died, the French physicist Alain Aspect used a pair of entangled photons he created with lasers and proved that a change in one instantaneously changed other, speed of light be damned.

Other experiments have verified Aspect’s work. No one has the remotest idea how that works. As is usual, however, Shlafly uses that as evidence relativity is wrong. Einstein, who thought relativity was right, used it to show quantum mechanics was wrong. In fact, it proves neither. Just because we don’t understand something doesn’t make it wrong; it just makes it mysterious. And quantum mechanics doesn’t contradict relativity, it adds to it. We are just not sure how.

Which brings us to Jesus.

Shlafly quotes John 4:46-54, where Jesus, fresh from turning wine into water, cures a child in a remote geographic location. Schlafly never explains in detail (one gets the feeling he just wanted a Biblical reference to please his audience) but the book says it happened instantly which would defy Einstein. But we doesn’t know how fast the cure happened since the kid was elsewhere and more important, if Jesus is who Schlafly thinks he is, why can’t he perform miracles? Miracles are acts that defy the law of nature.

And what the hell does that have to do with science?

Here’s where Schlafly’s rhetorical technique comes to play.

Gbur says that Schlafly uses a technique known in rhetoric as the “Gish Gallup” (named for a creationist debater who employed it), which can be defined as: throw as much crap out there as possible and give the appearance you know what you are talking about and take the chance no one has the energy to dig through it all. Schlafly piles statement after statement, footnote after footnote. and even stacks impressive mathematical formulas with jargon. Some of the references refer to himself and some have nothing to do with the argument, and few deal with outside sources.

Physicists have mixed feelings about how to react. Several refused to comment for this story because they did not want to give Schlafly credibility. But Clifford Will, professor of physics at Washington University, in an email from Paris, wrote:

“The internet world is full of kooks and crackpots who put out all kinds of drivel. It is pointless to attempt to refute these people with evidence, because they don't believe in evidence.

“…People may not like relativity, but the experimental and observational evidence that supports it is so overwhelming that it is a now fact of the universe,” he wrote.

Einstein himself, who got the first word above, gets the last word:

“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

Jewish genetics, Palestinians, and those Italian girls

2009-12-21T11:39:00.008-05:00

Genetic evidence in the last several years has shown that most Ashkenazic Jews (most American Jews) are Middle Eastern-European hybrids. They are genetically descendent from the people of the Middle East. But a new study hints that there was a good bit of fooling around in southern Europe in the old days. Those Italian girls! And, guess who are their (our) closest genetic cousins? Palestinians.

Whether Jews are a people, a religion, a tribe, or a form of neurosis (my vote) has long been a matter of argument. One result, since the Holocaust, is the belief that the Jews were not really a people, just a religion. It also was speculated that most Jews may be descendants of converts like the Khazars in the Caucuses and really share very little historically. See Arthur Koestler. But DNA evidence, going back almost a generation has disproven that notion. A new study confirms that. Ashkenazim around the word are mostly more alike among themselves then they are with non-Jews. Most can trace their ancestry back to what is now Israel and the surrounding areas.

Scientists in Israel and the U.S., using genetic markers called genomic microsatellites (don’t ask), studied 78 individuals from four Jewish groups around the world and compared them to 321 individuals from 12 non-Jewish populations. They found:

Jewish populations showed a high level of genetic similarity to each other, clustering together in several types of analysis of population structure. Further, Bayesian clustering, neighbor-joining trees, and multidimensional scaling place the Jewish populations as intermediate between the non-Jewish Middle Eastern and European populations.

These results support the view that the Jewish populations largely

share a common Middle Eastern ancestry and that over their history they have undergone varying degrees of admixture with non-Jewish populations of European descent.

In other words, a shared ancestry. A peoplehood.

But here were two surprises in the study, published in BMC Genetics. One, although most Ashkenazim come from the northern part of Europe, most of the European genes come from southern Europe--Italy, Greece, Sardinia. One guess is that most of the intermarriages and assimilation happened after the Jews dispersed from the Middle East during the years of the Roman Empire, at least more so than in later years when they wound up in Germany and Poland during the Middle Ages. Then, they generally were sequestered in ghettos and in villages or parts of cities and had limited interaction with surrounding populations until the beginning of the 19^th century.

And the second surprise is that the group of people closest genetically to the Jews are Palestinians. Both come from the Levant area and Mesopotamia. That could be that many Palestinians are likely of original Jewish or Samaritan origin.

Combatants in the Middle East might note.

[OK, the photo is Dominique Sanda and friend in "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," about an Italian-Jewish family in WW2. Seems appropriate. You'd rather see Khazars?]

Holy Days on the Last Frontier

2007-09-23T00:59:00.000-04:00

[The author is spending the current academic year teaching at the University of Alaska Fairbanks with his daughter, Hannah. The following appeared on his person blog.]

The high holy days at what is believed to be mostly northerly synagogue building in the world, and one of the world’s northernmost Jewish communities, has begun. It is Judaism at the edge. That’s the synagogue above before anyone arrived.

Or Hatzafon (the Light of the North) sits on the northern edge of Fairbanks. A few blocks north is the frontier and there is nothing for 800 miles. There may well be Jews living further north than latitude 65, probably in Siberia, but no one knows of a synagogue building that high.

The congregation is about 80 families, almost all, like most Alaskans, from somewhere else. The president is from Delta Junction but he is a thoughtful convert. The woman running the Sunday school is from Massachusetts and several others I have met are from Long Island and Montgomery County, Maryland. Only the military are here by chance. One man told me he was from Delaware and has been here for 30 years. His first winter, the temperature dropped to 66 below and he absolutely had to go outside to experience it, and, no doubt, so he could tell the story 30 years later.

They have no permanent rabbi although they did buy a duplex home and convert it into a synagogue a few years ago. They also have a part time administrator, both of which put them ahead of the synagogue I belong to in Baltimore. They have begun a search for a rabbi. They get student rabbis for the summer and save their b’nai mitzvot for when one is around, and it would be interesting to see who they can get to come up here permanently.

For Rosh Hashanah they brought in a woman rabbi from San Diego. They are affiliated with the Reform movement in part because it gives them more flexibility to please more a diverse population. Congregants range in skills from one man with a lovely, if untrained, voice who acted as a knowledgeable cantor, to people who know very little. They use, at least for the moment, an old Conservative prayer book for shabbot with the Hebrew transliterations pasted on the pages. They have ordered the new Reform siddur. The machzor for the holidays is the New Machzor from Media Judaica, which lacks the excruciating translations of the Silverman, and is less traditional and has little explanatory text.

(The nearest Conservative synagogue is in Vancouver, in a whole other country. There is a Chabad House in Anchorage and two other Reform synagogues there and two small ones near Kenai. That’s it for Alaska’s Jews, all 5,000 of us in a zillion square miles.)

About 60 people came for Rosh Hashanah. The dozen or so children played in the kitchen area; the adults prayed in what was probably one half of the duplex converted into a sanctuary. Most were regular members, a few were people who apparently came in from the bush (which in part may explain the pickup trucks in the parking area), and there were a couple of visitors, including one young woman from Montclair, N.J., who is working for Americorps in Nenana. There is usually someone from the army base. They have two Torahs, including a small kids’ one, both in need of repair. The large one came from a defunct synagogue in the Ohio River valley. They are starting a repair fund.

The rabbi read the Torah; she didn't chant it. Haftorah is read in English for both holidays by the congregants. On Yom Kippur, the Torah was read by members in Hebrew, sometimes quite haltingly, sometimes skillfully. I had an aliyah and the reader was a young Israeli who danced through it. Most of the melodies were the ones I am used to and singing was enthusiastic, especially those prayers with transliterations in the book. One woman added both harmony and counterpoint to Adon Olom that was gorgeous. Indeed, it’s a good singing congregation. Yom Kippur was handled by the congregation and the house cantor, and done well.

The people are unique, delightfully odd and, like all Alaskans, notably friendly.

Hannah starts teaching in the Sunday school on the 30th, two courses, Hebrew and Judaics. I get some of my Schechter tuition back. Well, actually, no--she gets to keep it all.

Unlike communities back where most of you live, Alaska is oblivious to things Jewish. There are not enough of us to make an impact. School certainly doesn’t close down for the holidays, there being maybe a dozen Jewish students in the high school and no teachers I know of; the university schedules freely, there being maybe a dozen Jewish students (I haven’t met any yet--there is no Hillel). There is Jewish faculty, including the chair of English. When I told my students there would be no class last Thursday because of the holiday, several came up after class to ask questions. This was clearly all new to them. Often, the president has to call the Christian chaplains at the nearby army base to explain why a soldier has to be excused from duty because of the holidays. Jewish chaplains are rare in the current military and there hasn’t been one in Alaska for years. About four or five soldiers were at the service.

Keeping observant here is not an option for those less than rabid. Although the supermarkets keep the normal brands, many of which are kosher (including Hebrew National), unless you are willing to spend an inordinate amount of money to import food, you turn into a vegan whether you like it or not, and the stricter you are, the harder it would be. Lighting candles at this latitude is a major chore. Around the summer solstice you would have to stay up to nearly 3 a.m, and at the winter solstice, you light the candles right after lunch. Go any farther north of here, say 200 miles, and whole days go by without sunrise or sunset. (The synagogue here simply schedules candle lighting at 7:30 p.m. no matter what it’s doing outside.) Living within walking distance of a synagogue could be life-threatening when it’s 44 below zero, and you sure as hell aren’t going to wheel an infant in that weather--the kid would be solid by the time you arrived.

Tashlich was at the ice bridge (don’t ask--i’ll tell you later) on the Chena river. Our sins apparently float down the Chena to the Tanana and eventually, one hopes, to the great Yukon, where they no doubt merged with lots of other sins.

Yom Kippur had about 50 people and a pot-luck dairy break fast. All were reminded that poultry counts as meat and that the fish has to have fins. The (non-Jewish) owner of one of the better sea food restaurants in Fairbanks sent over some fish and salad--just to be nice.

You do the best with what you've got.

The Frozen Chosen

2007-04-18T20:44:00.000-04:00

If the temperature falls below -35, Sunday school is canceled--A personal note, if you don't mind. Wondering what the hell I've been? Getting a job.

I thought you all would like to know that starting in mid-August, I become adjunct professor of journalism (Snedden Chair) at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. It's a one-year appointment and I'm the first person to hold the position. I just came back this week from five days in Fairbanks. I'm also happy to report that Hannah is coming with me next year, and will start 9th grade at West Valley High School in Fairbanks. She is already wearing a Wolf Pack sweatshirt. Carol will join us periodically when her job permits--she hates cold weather. We hope to live on campus and will return to civilization once or twice during the academic year. We also intend to maintain a place in Alaska through next summer for exploration. It is very beautiful.

I will teach two courses, Prospectives in Journalism, which I can design myself (think corporate ownership, the new media, political pressure etc.) and science writing. Additionally, my students and I will be working on a year-long project, probably on climate change, which is occurring in Alaska faster than anyplace else in the world--or at least is being better measured than anyplace else. I hope to turn it into a book. All that will require some time in the field, an adventure. Muck-lucks and whale blubber, yum. The International Arctic Research Center is based at the university, so a major resource is up the street.

We will return to Baltimore late spring next year. We're home until August 13th or so. Alaska is allegedly the best-wired state in the country so I will not be out of ready touch. I will keep this going until then and then I'll start a blog for that purpose. I've had requests.

And the line about the Sunday school--it's an actual message on the website of the only synagogue in Fairbanks, which claims to be the northernmost synagogue in the world. Now imagine kids trudging off to Sunday school in -35 degrees and darkness. The frozen chosen. Oh, and the bear photo? That is a nine-foot Kodiak bear on display at the Anchorage airport. One's only possible reaction to seeing a nine-foot bear--even stuffed--is 'oh shit.'

Of course, you blame the Jews

2007-02-21T16:42:00.000-05:00

Darwin changed his name for business purposes—In America, we have a president who thinks the Theory of Evolution is just another theory. In Britain they put Charles Darwin on their money, the £10 note. It just got funnier.

Try this from a Texas newspaper:

By ROBERT T. GARRETT / The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN - The second most powerful member of the Texas House has circulated a
Georgia lawmaker's call for a broad assault on teaching of evolution. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, used House
operations Tuesday to deliver a memo from Georgia state Rep. Ben Bridges.

The memo assails what it calls "the evolution monopoly in the schools."
Mr. Bridges' memo claims that teaching evolution amounts to indoctrinating
students in an ancient Jewish sect's beliefs.

"Indisputable evidence - long hidden but now available to everyone -
demonstrates conclusively that so-called 'secular evolution science' is the
Big Bang, 15-billion-year, alternate 'creation scenario' of the Pharisee
Religion," writes Mr. Bridges, a Republican from Cleveland, Ga. He has
argued against teaching of evolution in Georgia schools for several years.
He then refers to a Web site, www.fixedearth.com, that contains a model bill
for state Legislatures to pass to attack instruction on evolution as an
unconstitutional establishment of religion.

Mr. Bridges also supplies a link to a document that describes scientists
Carl Sagan and Albert Einstein as "Kabbalists" and laments "Hollywood's
unrelenting role in flooding the movie theaters with explicit or implicit
endorsement of evolutionism." .....

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stori...

Naturally, you want to blame the Jews. Darwin’s real name, of course, was Chaim Darwinsky from Chelm, and this is a Jewish plot to undermine a Christian America. We had a speaker at the latest meeting of ZOG, the Zionist Occupation Government. Sorry you missed it. We served cake. It was at my house. Nice turnout, by the way.

But don’t laugh too soon.

The theory of evolution accords with the secrets of Kabbalah better than any other theory. Evolution follows a path of ascent and thus provides the world with a basis for optimism. How can one despair, seeing that everything evolves and ascends? When we penetrate the inner nature of evolution, we find divinity illuminated in perfect clarity. Ein Sof [the essence or light of God] generates, actualizes potential infinity.

From The Essential Kabbalah; the heart of Jewish mysticism, by Daniel C. Matt.

You really gotta go the the fixed earth website cited above, however. Keep in mind this man was elected to a state legislature. Keep in mind that Chisum was too. When the story was published and was met with waves of hilarity, Chisum recanted and apologized Don’t you really miss Molly Ivins now?

As someone pointed out, if Darwinsky actually said only the fittest survive, Chisum, Hall and Bridges are living proof he was wrong.

The president of the Fair Education Foundation, Marshall Hall, said he had sent the memorandum to Mr. Chisum at the request of Mr. Bridges, whom he called a longtime friend and supporter. Mr. Chisum, in a letter accompanying the memorandum, said he distributed the memorandum “on behalf of” Representative Bridges. He said he knew Mr. Bridges through the National Conference of State Legislatures “and greatly appreciate his information on this important topic.”

The memorandum was condemned by some Texas lawmakers and by the Anti-Defamation League.

In a letter to Mr. Chisum dated Feb. 14, Mark L. Briskman, director of the league’s North Texas-Oklahoma regional office, said, “We are shocked and appalled that you would share this outrageous anti-Semitic material with your colleagues in the Texas House.”

Questioned Friday about his apparent endorsement of the memorandum, Mr. Chisum appeared to back away from it. “I read it, but he didn’t ask me to edit his memo,” he said. “It does not reflect my opinion.”

Of course the Christianists are not alone in their disdain for Darwin[sky].
And our record isn’t too clean either. See Darwin and the Zoo Rabbi here.

Special thanks to the folks at SCJM for calling this to my attention.

"God Gave Us These 15 Commandments...."

2007-02-13T18:40:00.000-05:00

After seven months of actually working for a living, the author of this blog wishes to announce he is returning to his disruptive ways and this blog will resume next week. Stand back. We are all going to get struck by lightning.

jns

War is not heck

2006-08-06T15:49:00.000-04:00

And try not to make it too loud, please--There is nothing happy about what is happening in the Middle East but the inability of the world to understand it is infuriating. It’s a war. It’s a war between radical Islam and western civilization. It is a war between terrorism and those who would live in peace. It also clearly is a war between Israel and Iran. People actually get hurt in wars. And the world is dumping on the good guys.

This war is even messier than most wars. It is what experts call asymmetrical. One of the world’s best armies has been slugging it out for weeks with a guerilla band of about 5,000 and making little visible progress. My belief is that part of the problem is that they started meekly, rejecting the Powell Doctrine that says that if you go into a war, you go with overwhelming strength and know how you are going to get out. They instead sent the air force. If I know that air power could not defeat a guerilla force and never has in all of history, why didn’t the Israeli politicians and generals? (It’s possible the generals did but were inhibited by the politicians; I don’t know.) Only when it was finally obvious that wasn’t working did they send the boots over the border. If I know that this was a different kind of war than the wars everyone has been fighting though history, why didn’t they? The U.S. is having the same problems in Iraq, had the same problem in Somalia and even in Vietnam. This is how wars are fought these days, not organized army against organized army.

Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. They were responsible for killing more Americans than any other group until 9/11. They blew up embassies, invented suicide bombings, and just incidentally, are dedicated to the eradication of Israel and western civilization. They are a wholly-owned subsidiary of Iran and Iran is using it as an adjunct army to create chaos. They set up their own territory within the sovereign state of Lebanon, hurled rockets at Israeli towns and cities, kidnapped Israeli soldiers and refused a U.N. resolution to behave. Having had enough, and getting no support from the rest of the world, Israel went after them. And every bleeding heart in the world, who had ignored the rockets and the kidnappings, came out in force. They lament the deaths of innocent Lebanese. So do I. So do the Israelis.

But Hezbollah has bragged about how they infiltrate civilian populations (despite human rights organizations denials), and then let the world scream "massacre" when the Israelis attack. And the world sucks it up. Bad Israelis.

Either you are prepared to go after them and accept the civilian casualties or you surrender and save everyone the aggravation.

War is hell. People get killed. Most of them are innocent of anything except being the wrong place at the wrong time. When the British bombed Hamburg in the summer of 1943, some 40,000 Germans were killed in one night. They buried the dead in mass graves in the shape of a cross. I don’t remember the French advising restraint or exclaiming the response was disproportionate, or Belgians demonstrating in protest. The U.S. did the same thing to Dresden and Tokyo. No one complained. Want to discuss Hiroshima and Nagasaki? That is a war. Shit happens. It is terrible and should never happen but it does. And when the Israelis kill--in almost every case, accidentally--a few hundred Lebanese, suddenly the world is outraged. This must stop! Bad Israelis!

(Part of the problem, I think, is Israel’s traditionally abominable public relations. You would think with a country of 6 million Jews they could find five good p.r. people, but apparently not, or at least the establishment won’t let them do their thing. Did you know that the Canadian U.N. solider killed in the Israeli raid e-mailed home his unhappiness with Hezbollah using his outpost as a shield to fire rockets? Why don’t you know that? Do you know the Israelis have tape from unmanned drones of Hezbollah using human shields? Why don’t you know that? Why haven’t you seen the tape on CNN? Why aren’t reporters allowed to imbed themselves with the IDF? When I was in the Middle East in 1967 for UPI, the answer I would get from the IDF was that it was too dangerous and they didn’t want to be responsible. War correspondents know the danger, volunteer for the job and ask for access, not protection. Not much has changed. No wonder Israel is losing the p.r. battle.)

This must stop when the Israelis have finished what they need to do with Hezbollah. To do anything else is a victory for Hezbollah, for radical Islam and for evil and we are all in deep doodoo. The world needs to leave Israel alone to do it--if they can. As to the mood in the Arab street? Fuck ‘em. If that’s their sense of morality, they are the ones we need protection against and it is that immorality Israel now is battling.

Blame it on the Jews--or why Mel Gibson isn't tending bar

2006-07-30T10:55:00.000-04:00

The unexpurgated arrest report for Mel Gibson, director and producer of "The Passion of the Christ" can be found here.

If Jews actually controlled Hollywood, Gibson would be lucky to be tending bar in Malibu, no less living there.

Don't you just love the web?

j

Putting the good doctor back together

2006-06-14T14:17:00.000-04:00

My son, the doctor, the philosopher, the rabbi, the lawyer. And you still don’t call--He was one of history’s great geniuses. He was a world-famous physician and scientist at a time when Christianity did it’s best to suppress science and scientific medicine. In his spare time, he codified Jewish law and for all practical purposes, created the Judaism of the last 1,000 years. He absorbed Aristotle and influence Aquinas. He may even be the reason why there are so many Jewish doctors. And he would love what’s about to happen.

Moses Maimonides (Moshe ben Maimon), the 12th century philosopher-physician, left a good bit of his life’s work in a hole-in-the-wall storage room in a Cairo synagogue. Fragments of his life’s work are scattered in libraries around the world after being recovered from the receptacle or genizah, along with the works of other Jewish philosophers. Now, thanks to the Internet, scholars in Britain are going to piece the fragment together to see what they contain.

There is neither the space nor the time to go into his work and influence. I’ve begun a course on him and know little. [He’d like that] Click here for a start. The man is huge. His influence on the world in general, Judaism in particular, is hard to exaggerate. He is referred to in yeshivot in the present tense as if he was in the next room. Actually, he may be. He not only codified Jewish law, he produced the 13 Articles of Faith that underlies post-sacrificial Judaism. Back to the science.

The genizah is the place they hid manuscripts that contained God’s name and therefore could not be thrown out. The Cairo genizah was discovered in 1896 and is one of the great treasure troves of Jewish literature. Scraps of documents in the genizah were widely distributed. About 10,000 pieces are in the University of Manchester’s John Rylands University Library, but 300,000 tiny fragments are known to exist.

Using a $670,000 grant from the British government, the Manchester Center for Jewish Studies researchers will post images of the fragments on the World Wide Web. Others around the world will post what they have and then the community will try to reassemble the pieces into a coherent whole on the Internet, a bit from here and a bit from there. Until current imaging technology, that was impossible. No one has any idea what we will learn from this, which is exactly the point.

Maimonides would love it. “Teach thy tongue to say 'I do not know,' and thou shalt progress.” Yes, doctor.

If we replaced Jewish princesses with concubines, would it help?

2006-05-16T09:54:00.000-04:00

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue--Voltaire meet the Bush Administration. In its non-ending war on science, the Bushies attacked a meeting of the Centers for Disease Control on sexually transmitted disease just concluded. The conference was to discuss how the promotion of abstinence-only sex education could undermine the fight against STDs by reducing or eliminating the time spent discussing other forms of protection, particularly condoms. The list of speakers went through the usual peer review, and included at least one outspoken opponent of abstinence-only education. When the political appointees at CDC were done, that speaker was eliminated and two proponents were added. The moderator also was changed and the symposium, a respected international meeting, had a title change. It went from "Are Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs a Threat to Public Health?" to"Public Health Strategies of Abstinence Programs for Youth." The Christianists in the Bush Administration are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these programs. ("Christianists" is a wonderful new word to describe those who push Christianity into government.) If they won't believe scientists, would they believe rabbis? Read on. It's not just their mishegas.

Abstinence, of course, is complicated. If young people all kept their virginity until marriage it is absolutely true that STDs would disappear. Unfortunately, the world and youthful hormones don't work that way. Study after study has shown that most kids who make those pledges don't keep the promise or at best delay the first sexual encounter a year or so and then just do it.

According to a study just published, [not yet posted] in the American Journal of Public Health, Janet Rosenbaum, a doctoral student at Harvard, found that more than half the kids who take the vows deny they did so a year later, usually after they have become sexually active. And of course, there is the 10% who lie. They had, in fact, been screwing around, claimed they were still virgins and would not do whatever it was they said they never did. It reminds one of Oscar Levant's line that he knew Doris Day before she was a virgin. According to the Washington Post:

Rosenbaum said her study shows that efforts to evaluate such programs' effectiveness is complicated by teenagers' reports of behavior that may be influenced by religious or social factors. "Whatever environment you're in, you're more likely to conform," Rosenbaum said.

Additionally, teens have redefined virginity to include the usual act of a penis in a vagina and but exclude oral and anal sex, which has their own dangers. (The Jewish comedian Sarah Silverman once said: "I didn't lose my virginity until I was twenty-six. Nineteen vaginally, but twenty-six what my boyfriend calls 'the real way.'" Whatever.) One might also suggest that the wedding night is about the last night you want to learn what the hell to do with that other body in bed, but that's another argument.

In some Christian circles, the hymenally challenged have become something of a fetish. The hilarious San Francisco columnist Mark Morford describes Purity Balls, where dad dresses up in a rented tuxedo and his little girl (sometimes as young as 7) dresses in the latest creation from J.C. Penny and they head off to the nearest Marriott or Holiday Inn ballroom. They dance and then:

It begins. At some point the daughter stands up, her pale arms wrapped around her daddy, and reads aloud a formal pledge that she will remain forever pure and virginal and sex-free until she is handed over, by her dad (who is actually called the "high priest" of the home), like some sort of sad hymenic gift, to her husband, who will receive her like the sanitized and overprotected and libidinously inept servant she so very much is. Praise!

The High Priest then responds by pledging that he will protect his daughter's virginity at all costs, so help him God. I don't think this will replace the bat mitzvah in Jewish communities.

So, we get to the Jewish angle and boy, do we have a solution for you! Yes, premarital sex is forbidden by all streams except the left wing of Reform. Birth control is fine except for the right wing of Orthodoxy. In Orthodox Judaism there even is a rule against using a condom or any birth control if you are married and still childless, it being a mitzvah to have children (fruitfulling and multiplying and all that). One consequence is that young Jews are getting married later so that they will, they feel, be ready when the babies come. They are up against the rule on birth control. In a meeting in Jerusalem this week, Modern Orthodox rabbis (those are the guys not wearing black hats) suggested that perhaps the rule ought to be bended rather than have people delay marriage. But one guy came up with a killer of an idea. According to the Talmud, says Rabbi Tzvi Zohar, horny young people can be accomodated: concubines. A single man and a single woman can be assigned to each other to do each other. As long as the women goes into a mikvah, a ritual bath, before she services the guy, she is not commiting a sin.

Is this a great religion or what!

[Illustration: "The Loss of Virginity" by Paul Gaugin]

The things that you're liable to read in the Bible, Methuselah lived 900 years.Oy, was he tired.

2006-05-09T15:16:00.000-04:00

[And now for some of the stuff I didn’t get around to doing while I was earning a living]

Methuselah lived 900 years and posed a serious threat to the Social Security program. Okay, serious question: If Noah could live 950 years, Adam 930 and Methuselah almost 1,000, how come we can get to maybe 80 and croak? What did they know we don’t, or, more important, what was different then? Yes, I know, I’m taking those numbers literally and I don’t believe them any more than you do but, if you take the Bible literally, you do have a problem. They lived a lot longer than we do. And I won’t even mention Sarah having a baby (Isaac) when she was in her 90s. Even she laughed at that. A mathematician--and True Believer--has actually come up with a statistical explanation that to him, at least, makes sense. He is Arnold C. Mendez Jr, on Biblestudy.org, and I’m assuming he is a mathematician because he understands what a coefficient of determination is and I don’t. He is intrigued by the fact the great flood was something of a turning point and longevity was at its longest just before and after.

After the flood the earth was completely different than the earth before. There were widespread global differences. These would include changes in the climate, composition of the atmosphere, hydrologic cycle, geologic features, cosmic radiation reaching the earth, ozone concentration, ultra violet light, background radiation, genetics, diet, and a host of other subtle and/or profound chemical and physiological changes. These changes caused a rapid decline of the longevity of post flood humanity.

He came up with the formula: y=487.78exp(-0.0907x) where x represents the generation number. [I have absolutely what I have just pasted here and if it turns out to be obscene, forgive me]. After 20 generations, longevity matched reality and the decline perfectly--more or less--matched an exponential curve. He submits that’s a lot more mathematics than the alleged authors of the Bible could have known. Of course he also admits an 11% margin of error, but we’re talking metaphysics and statistics here. [And thanks to Laurie Snell and the good folks at Chance News at Dartmouth. May you live 546 years.]

We should be sending mohels to Zimbabwe to train the troops

2006-05-02T20:23:00.000-04:00

I think I'll write this with my legs crossed. Wait. It's too late--The AIDS epidemic in Africa is not laughing matter, actually. Indeed, it is one of the worst medical calamities in history. One does feel a slightly warm feeling however that one way of helping control it may be a very very old religious practice--circumcision.

Several studies have shown that removing the foreskin cuts down on transmission as well as making you Jewish. OK, half right. One study in Brazil last year showed this was true and while the evidence is still underwhelming, physicians in Africa are so desperate they are not waiting for peer reviewed articles to show them the way. For $3, doctors in Zambia will do the surgery. Without the beard and the wine and the food. About 400 men a month are requesting the procedure, far more than the physicians--who are not nearly as fast as your average mohel--can handle. (A mohel--pronounced moy-el--is a rabbi specializing in circumcisions and generally takes less than 2 minutes to do the job. The actual surgery takes seconds and is done before the baby--8 day old boys--know what happened to him.) Swaziland also is beginning to look into the practice. The research seems to show that the procedure dramatically cuts transmission of the HIV virus both to and from the man. The theory is that the cells in the underneath part of the foreskin is very susceptible to the virus as are the inevitable cuts and abrasions.

One published journal article actually shows the opposite, that it makes men more likely to contract the virus, but that study seems to stand alone. Many physicians in Africa are waiting for the World Health Organization to make a decision, which it has yet to do, awaiting more definitive studies. Two such studies are underway in Kenya and Uganda and results are due next month. And things out there are fairly desperate.

You get cramps at the piano just thinking of Belarus

2006-03-24T11:15:00.000-05:00

You can blame it on your ancestors, none of whom could play the piano—Among the genetic price you pay for being an Ashkenazic Jew is dystonia, a disorder that cramps muscles or causes involuntary movements. It isn't fatal, but it can be a pain in the career. Ask Leon Fleisher, the concert pianist whose career was diverted by the nervous disorder. Until Fleisher regained use of his right hand, he wound up playing mostly one-handed concerti. There are some, believe it or not. Botox apparently cured the camps and he's back playing the usual repetoire with both hands—and very well indeed. We can now guess something about his genealogy he didn't know before.

It turns out, Leon can blame his genes. Judy Siegel in the Jerusalem Post reports that a genetic mutation among a small group of Jews from Belarus in the 17th century is probably the source of Fleisher's problem—and that of other Ashkenazim. They were among the survivors of pogroms at the time and their small number produced a genetic bottleneck. Someone among them had the mutation, LRRK2 G2019S, and because of the circumstances, passed it on to others in the group. In the 18th century, the Jewish population of the area exploded and so did the mutation, the reason why one in four of the Jews who can trace their ancestry to that area, have the gene.

The work was done at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and is based on work at UC San Francisco.

Interestingly, the gene is also found among a group of North African Arabs, further evidence that the Ashkenazim have Middle Eastern origins. They probably moved into Europe after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 C.E., and somebody, gasp, intermarried.

Listen, if you want to chat, Moses is that guy feeding his camel over there by the tree

2006-02-20T16:46:00.000-05:00

We'll skip the Mormon cartoons—Here’s an interesting little problem. What if people invented time machines and could go back into the past, let’s say to the reign of Ramses II, and discovered that the Hebrew slaves were only a couple of thousand in number and they fled into the desert under the leadership of a guy named Moses. The Pharoah, figuring that a few thousand slaves weren’t worth bothering about, lets them go. End of story. If you are Jewish you just had a cornerstone of your faith undermined by science. Or, maybe they go back to Jerusalem in during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius and found that a carpenter in Nazareth named Jesus had indeed been executed outside of Jerusalem, but his body was thrown into a common ditch grave and never seen again. If you are Christian, you’ve got a problem.

It has happened to the Mormons. Mark Twain once described the Book of Mormon as “chloroform in print.” I thought the Mormon Tabernacle Choir was living proof that if you put together 200 mediocre singers you just got a loud mediocre chorus. Whatever. One of the main precepts of the book is that North American Indians were descendent from one of the lost tribes of Israel and came to this continent in 600 B.C. They built a civilization here, but split into two warring factions. By 385, one group, the idol-worshiping Lamanites, defeated the God-fearing Nephites, and they were the ancestors of the Indians. It's one reason the Mormons have gone to great lengths to convert the Indians—to bring them back into the God-fearing fold.

Along comes DNA testing and it turns out the Indians came from Asia with no sign whatsoever they ever set foot in the Middle East. That’s a whoops. The Mormons, like conservative Christians and Orthodox Jews, take their holy book as literally true—every word. Since the Church of Latter Day Saints has converted millions of Indians based on the premise they were the people described in the book, this is a major problem. Mormonism, indeed, one of the fastest growing religions in the world, gets much of its new strength from those regions where the Indians live. At least one missionary has quit, no longer capable of believing in what he was doing. It is not known how many others may have.

Much of the DNA work comes from something of an apostate, Simon G. Southerton, a molecular biologist and former Mormon bishop in Australia. Southerton notes that DNA testing of Jews throughout the world shows a strong common Middle Eastern origin. No one doubts their origin. But when he tested the indigenous people of the Americas, including maternal DNA lines from 7,300 Indians from 175 tribes, he came up with no sign of Middle Eastern origin. They came from eastern and central Asia.

The DNA evidence isn’t the only problem with the Book of Mormon. It is full of anachronisms, such as the domestication of farm animals, which never happened, and despite millions of dollars in research, Mormons have found not a single bit of archeological evidence to support the ancient civilization theme.

Church leaders have dismissed the acknowledgment of the scientific evidence “heresy,” of course. And outsiders like me might think such a blow might at least put a crack in the faith. But probably not. As one professor, quoted in the Los Angeles Times noted: “This may look like the crushing blow to Mormonism from the outside, but religion ultimately does not rest on scientific evidence, but on mystical experiences. There are different ways of looking at the truth.” Mormons have barraged the web with responses, including some totally discounting the DNA evidence. Search Google for “Mormon” and “DNA’ and you’ll see how effective they have been. They have also launched a major attack on Southerton. Southerton has fired back.

But since Mormon leaders insist the book can’t be wrong, they seem to have a conundrum. They claim the book can’t be proven or disproved by science. But of course, it has.

How many Jewish mothers does it take to produce the Ashkenazi Jewish population? Four, of course

2006-01-13T09:38:00.000-05:00

You never write, you never visit, you never compliment the soup--Apparently, about half of us can trace our ancestry back to four women. Well call them Leah, Rachel, Sarah and Rebecca. I made up the names--sort of--but not the genetics.

Researchers in Israel, using mitochondrial DNA analysis, have found that many of the Ashkenazim, Jews mostly of central and eastern European origin, descended from the four matriarchs. mtDNA [do you capitalize the first letter of a lowercase name when it leads a sentence?] is passed through the female line, mother to daughter. If a woman has no daughter, her mtDNA ends with her. Using DNA analysis, Doron Behar of Rambam Medical Center in Haifa and Karl Skorecki of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, traced the ancestry of 3.5 million Ashkenzim back to the four. No one knows when they lived, but it was probably within the last 2,000 years, and no one knows where. They could have been contemporary but maybe not. We dont know who they are at all, only that they produced a line of females that produced 40% of the 8 million living Ashkenazim, including, for all I know, moi. They are of Middle-Eastern origin and their descendents were apparently most fruitful and multiplied greatly in the last 1,000 years. Is that cool or what? Its published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Ashkenazim originated, like all Jews except converts, in what is now Israel and surrounds, and with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the failed rebellion against Rome, spread out to Europe, mostly through Italy. They soon found their homes in places like Germany, Poland, Ukraine and Russia and by World War 2, there were 10 million of them. (After World War 2, there were 4 million of them). Sometime between that diaspora and now (probably earlier than later) the four women began their long line. Ashkenazim represent 8 of the 13 million Jews now alive.

We ought to at least write. And dont forget to compliment the chopped liver.

[Illustration: Mothers of the 12 Tribes, Barbara Mendes, used with the permission of the artist. See www.barbaramendes.org]

What right does the government have to tell me what to suck. UPDATED and AGAIN

2006-01-08T17:46:00.000-05:00

Hey, that was before the election. Now it’s after the election. Leave that penis alone!--There is no place where the battle between church and state gets nastier than when science and medicine are involved. Remember Ms. Schiavo? A particularly nasty one is going on in New York and the fault is with the politicians. We've reported on it before, but now it is even more interesting. It involves an ancient and widely discredited procedure accompanying the circumcision of Jewish males. The practice is called metzitzah b'peh, and in it, the mohel, the rabbi who performs the circumcision, “cleans” the penis after the slice by sucking on it. [I’m not making this up] It’s an ancient practice, going back to the time before germ theory and antiseptics.

[In mid-June, a compromises was reached. See below]

Before we start, I must add that the practice was dropped long ago by most mohels. [mohelim] Liberal jews, which are most of us, likely never heard of such a thing [I hadn't] and are appropriately repelled. We use antiseptics, thank you. Even most Orthodox Jews reject it. It is practice generally restricted to a few Hassidic cults, especially the Satmars, the very extreme right wing of Judaism. You have your right wing nuts; we should have our right wing nuts. It’s only fair. About 4,000 are performed in the city each year, mostly by parents who parked their critical faculties at the synagogue door and forgot to reclaim them. Proponents believe the procedure was mandated in the Talmud, the rabbinic writings that far preceded Pasteur.

We move now to New York City, where those cults are alive, well and very noisy. One mohel, Rabbi Yitzchok (Isaac) Fischer, came under the scrutiny of the New York City Department of Health when three children came down with herpes. One of them died. It seemed Rabbi Fischer had herpes and passed the viruses onto the children during metzitzah b’peh. The city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden (Jewish), threatened to take away Rabbi Fischer’s license. The small community the mohel served, went ballistic. They insisted the herpes came from the mothers (it didn't, tests showed) but they agreed to keep Fischer from performing more circumcisions. Meanwhile, three more babies were infected, one with brain damage. It is not known who did the snipping. Fischer took a blood test but the results have not been made public. Self-serving rumor in the Orthodox community insists his blood was clear but no one else is buying that, especially the authorities.

Now it seems there was a mayoral election coming up, with the incumbent mayor, Michael Bloomberg (Jewish) and he has enjoyed considerable support from the Orthodox community. Bloomberg promised the city would not ban the practice and he would let a rabbinic court decide the issue since Jewish law was involved and it is at least as wise as the laws of the State of New York. Fine, except the court didn’t. In an almost impossible situation, caught between civil law, Jewish law, and some seriously demented proponents who have been known to behave like thugs, the court still has not ruled. One Orthodox expert, a famous bioethicist, denounced the practice and was harassed by advocates.

The election came and went, Bloomberg was reelected and now Frieden has issued an unprecedented warning that practice endangered the lives of Jewish babies, a clear violation of Jewish law [which it is]. And the extremists are in total uproar, claiming the ruling violates the separation of church (or schul) and state [which it doesn't] and accused Bloomberg of reneging on a promise not to obstruct their mohels. They threatened to show up at his inauguration wearing yellow Stars of David, the patch the Nazis made Jews wear, yet another example of Godwin's Law in real life. When that was met with outrage by the rest of the community, they held back. The directive from the health department stands and most Members of the Tribe cringe with embarrassment.

The city board of health, apparently not intimidated, has ordered reporting of cases of neonatal herpes in order to track the problem.

The point is that if Bloomberg had the courage to tell the thugs to shove in the first place, he wouldn’t be in this jam. But then there was this election.... So babies are endangered. In God’s name, of course. The trick, as Joyce Purnick wrote in the Times, is not to try to finesse your way out of difficult situations, but to do what's right and the hell with it.

In other words, some Jewish New Yorkers were ready to display a symbol of Nazi persecution at City Hall because the health department issued advice to parents about a procedure than can kill babies [she wrote].

The would-be protesters restrained themselves, a welcome decision to those who might have been troubled to see anyone in 21st-century New York equating a letter from public health professionals to the horrors of the Holocaust.

That anyone even thought of invoking - and demeaning - the Holocaust underscores something we suspect Mr. Bloomberg has figured out by now: There's no winning the really tough ones, so he may as well follow his own advice. Mayors, he advised in a speech last September, "solve problems not by taking both sides of big issues, but by deciding what's right and then going after it."

You wouldn't think that took a lot of courage would you?

UPDATE--Finally, some kind of compromise was reached when the state and the rabbis reached an agreement to make this seriously disgusting practice at least conform to 19th century standards.

The new state guidelines require mohels, or anyone performing metzizah b'peh, to sanitize their hands like a surgeon, removing all jewelry, cleaning their nails under running water and washing their hands for up to six minutes with antimicrobial soap or an alcohol-based hand scrub

The person performing metzizah b'peh also must clean his mouth with a sterile alcohol wipe and, no more than five minutes before it, rinse for at least 30 seconds with a mouthwash that contains 25 percent alcohol.

The circumcised area must be covered with antibiotic ointment and sterile gauze after the procedure.

And, lest you non-Jews out there cluck at our crazies, did you hear about the three Christian ministers who snuck into the Senate to bless the seats of the hearing where Sam Alito’s confirmation hearings will be held. They applied “holy” oil to help assure his confirmation.

I’m not making up any of this.]
Illustration: The Sacrifice of Isaac, Caravegio, 1602]

The Christian War on Christmas

2005-12-18T11:05:00.000-05:00

There is indeed a “war” against Christmas. By Christians. The evangelicals and the Fox commentators ought to be reminded of the sagacious Pogo, who exclaimed that he had met the enemy and “he is us.” It is the Christians who have become the enemies of Christmas, certainly in the U.S.

I always thought this was a good time of the year not to be a Christian. I don’t have to be offended by what they’ve done to my most important religious holiday. “They” are not Jews or Moslems or secularists. They are Christians.

Some historical background would be useful here. Christmas doesn’t really coincide with the birth of Jesus. If the New Testament is accurate, he was born in the spring. Remember the shepherds and lambs? There are no lambs in December. The holiday in December derived from the pagan worship of the winter solstice. The Yule tree is one of the pagan symbols, which is why the Puritans banned Christmas trees. In fact, they banned Christmas for several generations because for the holiday’s pagan origins.

Christmas itself was not always the major Christian holiday it is now. Easter was more important. It became a big deal during the Victorian era, at least in the English-speaking world. Most of the Christmas carols, which sound so ancient, actually were written in the 19th century. Americans tend to give credit to Clement Moore and his poem about the night before Christmas, written in 1822, which morphed St. Nicolas into Santa Claus, the holiday’s prime icon—a jolly old guy who drove a sleigh of reindeer and dropped down the chimneys of homes—millions of them simultaneously—to bring presents to the families. You see a lot more pictures of Santa than Jesus these days.

But a more likely fashioner of the modern Christmas was Charles Dickens whose A Christmas Carol (1843), one of several Christmas stories he wrote, created the aesthetics of our current holiday. Think of how many images of Christmas come in Victorian dress. Throw in a little Currier & Ives, and you have our idealized holiday.

There’s nothing wrong with any of that. Indeed, it’s quite lovely, actually, especially the music. But that’s the ideal. It turns out Christmas is nothing like that at all.

It has become a materialistic orgy with the Jesus part just noise.

When I was a kid, the rule was that the Christmas season began the weekend after Thanksgiving. Now the ads and the decorations begin before Halloween and the ads come in torrents. Christmas has become not a religious holiday, but a commercial event, the biggest of the year. For many businesses, your profit comes in November and December or it comes not at all. I stay out of malls in November and December because the goyim are out in droves shopping and dropping credit cards.

What the hell does any of that have to do with the purported birth of the messiah. Ain’t my messiah, but if he is yours, why aren’t you offended? You cannot name a product that doesn’t have a Christmas ad, sometimes invoking the melodies of carols to sell stuff. From celebration of what you believe is the most important event in history we get a holiday of consumption, materialism and bad taste.

It wasn’t the ACLU that did it. We Jews don’t care what you’ve done to your holiday and I doubt many Moslems do either.

Is there a war on Christmas? Yes, and Christmas lost. And Christians did it.

Oh, and Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Happy New Year. Don't bother me with Kwanza.

And, as my Christmas present to you all, the words of Walt Kelly:

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!

Don't we know archaic barrel
Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou?
Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Polly wolly cracker 'n' too-da-loo!
Donkey Bonny brays a carol,
Antelope Cantaloupe, 'lope with you!

Hunky Dory's pop is lolly gaggin' on the wagon,
Willy, folly go through!
Chollie's collie barks at Barrow,
Harum scarum five alarm bung-a-loo!

Dunk us all in bowls of barley,
Hinky dinky dink an' polly voo!
Chilly Filly's name is Chollie,
Chollie Filly's jolly chilly view halloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Double-bubble, toyland trouble! Woof, woof, woof!
Tizzy seas on melon collie!
Dibble-dabble, scribble-scrabble! Goof, goof, goof!

Kabbalah and evolution—Madonna not withstanding

2005-12-03T14:21:00.000-05:00

"The theory of evolution accords with the secrets of Kabbalah better than any other theory. Evolution follows a path of ascent and thus provides the world with a basis for optimism. How can one despair, seeing that everything evolves and ascends? When we penetrate the inner nature of evolution, we find divinity illuminated in perfect clarity. Ein Sof [the essence or light of God] generates, actualizes potential infinity."

From The Essential Kabbalah; the heart of Jewish mysticism, by Daniel C. Matt.

God googles Google

2005-11-28T17:47:00.000-05:00

Snip, snip. You are on a mission from God so ignore Google—Researchers in South Africa, where HIV is rampant, found that men who were circumcised had half the cases of HIV than men who were not over a two year period. In the first random trial on the topic, involving 3,200. The uncircumcised, had 49 cases of HIV infection; the circumcised only 20. This is part of a long list of research projects showing that circumcised men have fewer sexually transmitted diseases. The research on HIV is in the newest Public Library of Science Medicine, the wonderfully free medical journal—which brings up an interesting point. If you search Google, you would not know that the preponderance of scientific evidence supports the health benefits of circumcision because the first pages in a Google search have been taken over by anti-circumcision groups, including the Circumcision Information and Resources Page (CIRP), which cherry-picks its data to tilt the balance against circumcision. Freud would probably have an excellent explanation. Circumcision is not politically correct these days and fewer baby boys in the U.S. are being circumcised. It’s one of the problems with Google—what you get is not what you are looking for always because it can be corrupted. If you use Google to decide what to do about your baby son, you have to work hard to get unbiased information. Use Google’s Advanced Scholar Search, which is less prone to being tilted, and you will get an entirely different, and far more accurate picture. The American Academy of Pediatrics calls it elective surgery. You don’t do it to your kid just just to prevent diseases, especially HIV, which is still relatively rare in the U.S., but there are known health benefits and few if any disadvantages. Unless, of course, your are Jewish, in which case it is a non-issue. We’ve been doing it before HIV and probably before most STD evolved.

Take a letter, kid, right to left

2005-11-10T11:48:00.000-05:00

You go practice that alphabet on the stone right there and don't start a fire—Every time you dig a hole in Israel or the adjacent areas, you stand good chance of digging up something interesting. On July 15, the last day of digging in the site called Tel Zayit, archeologists from the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and Johns Hopkins uncovered the oldest known writing of a full alphabet, what is called, lovingly, an abecedary, of early Hebrew. What makes the finding so remarkable is that the archeologists claim have been able to date it precisely, late 10th century BCE, and to trace it to the kingdom of Israel founded by Solomon and David.

All it is are the 22 letters of the alphabet, slightly out of order from the modern Hebrew alphabet, but the find is interesting for several reasons. The abecedary was probably written by a scribe practicing his letters, which meant formal writing and probably a bureaucracy, and was inscribed on a limestone boulder embedded in a wall, probably as a good-luck charm. The charm didn’t appear to work: a fire soon destroyed the place.

The writing also shows that the ancient Israelites were literate 3,000 ago, according to Pittsburgh’s Ron E. Tappy. Biblical Hebrew is thought to derive from Phoenician and the inscription appears to many scholars to reflect that transition. The letters are clearly on their way to being the aleph, bet, gimmel of Hebrew, written from right to left. All western alphabets eventually derived from the same source.

The Zeitah Excavations at Tel Zayit are halfway between the Israeli city of Ashkelon and the West Bank city of Hebron, south of Tel Aviv. The ancient town was apparently part of a border settlement protecting the southern approaches to the capital at Jerusalem. The site reflects the Caananite culture, the foundation of the kingdom of Israel and may have been written about the time of David and his son, Solomon, who took over in 1037 BCE or shortly thereafter. Following Solomon’s death, the kingdom split in two, Israel and Judah. The Tel Zayit find would have placed it in Judah.

The formal presentation of the find will be next week in Philadelphia. And, as with all archeological finds in the area, there also will be controversy. Not everyone is convinced it is what Tappy says it is, with the dating, as usual, the source of most of the contention. And people who want to believe in what's in the Bible (in this case, Kings 1) will claim it as proof and those who don't won't.

But wait. There is more. Would you believe a reference to Goliath? Israeli archeologists digging at Tell es-Safi, an ancient Philistine city and the biblical city of Gath, have found a small ceramic shard with the earliest Phoenician inscription ever found. It was written in “proto-Canaanite” letters and contains two non-Semitic names, one of which, is etymologically related to the name Goliath, and Gath was supposed to be the home of the giant slain by the young David. The archeologists from Bar-Ilan University don’t claim the Goliath on the shard is the Goliath of the Bible as it apparently was a common name. The shard is dated about 50 years after little David hurled his stone. Nice story anyhow.

Religion is the opiate of the sociology class

2005-10-15T18:11:00.000-04:00

If this country turned itself to God the whole damn place would burn down—America is a God-fearing country, probably the most religious developed country in the world, and the more religious we get the safer, healthier we all will be, we are told. You may well have heard that in a political speech or two, or from one of those screamers on Fox or the sanctimonious ranting of a preacher or two. Is it true? Is religion associated with lower rates of “lethal violence, suicide, non-monogomous sexual activity and abortion?” Will be we a better country if we get even more religious?

Enter an independent scientist named Gregory S. Paul here in Baltimore, who has actually done a study of this notion and published it in the recent issue of the Journal of Religion and Society. Paul points out that until the 20th century, most western nations were fairly religious, some more than others, but as the century progressed, most of those countries became secularized—with the exception of the U.S. While church attendance in France, Britain, Italy and most of the European countries shrank in the 20th century, the U.S. became far more church-going. Whereas in Britain, until Tony Blair, any prime minister referencing his or her religious belief quickly apologized for the gaffe, we have a president who ran on his evangelical beliefs and even, apparently, nominates Supreme Court judges on that basis. The Elmer Gantry set—has taken a prominent place in political discourse. Are we better off? Paul says no.

In the U.S., many of the religious right attack evolution because if evolution is true, they maintain, there is no need for a Creator, and without a Creator we will sink into anarchy and chaos. Evolution is, they assert, a leading contributor to social dysfunction because it is amoral.

OK, but the least religious developed country in the world is Japan, the country where evolution is least controversial is Japan, and guess which country has among the lowest crime rates and most stable societies in the world? The country with the lowest level of acceptance? Do I have to say? Evolution is not an issue in Europe either, and their societies are far safer and more stable than ours.

The homicide rates in Christian Europe and the Americas were once astronomical. While it has decreased dramatically all over, guess which country has by far the highest. It’s true of most major crimes as well.

How about sex? (How about sex?). The U.S. has a sexually transmitted disease rate six times higher than the secular developed, pro-evolution countries, Paul writes. In the totally secular Scandinavian countries, it has been virtually eradicated.

The rate in the U.S., of youth suicide and juvenile mortality is far higher. “Life spans tend to decrease as rates of religiosity rise, especially as a function of absolute belief,” he adds, with Denmark being the only exception. There are fewer abortions in the secular countries, as well as fewer teenaged pregnancies. The age when kids first get laid is the same all over, religious or otherwise. It's too early everywhere.

Paul is not alone. A recent U.S. Census Bureau report showed that teenage pregnancies in the more religious red states are twice what they are in the blue states where manners of morality are closer to European standards than say those of Dallas. According to FBI statistics, the more religious red states have higher murder rates than the blue states (one reason most states without the death penalty are not in the South). The divorce rate is 50% higher there as well. And would you believe that those states that most talk about self-reliance and cut-backs in social programs get far more money from Washington then they send there, in other words, living off the dole.

As far as hypocrisy goes, we are unmatched.

Paul admits his study has weaknesses, mostly in working poverty into the equations. But we are the richest country in the world, so why do we have that poverty in the first place. Oh, never mind.

The Lord is My Archeologist, I Shall Not Want

2005-09-08T17:59:00.000-04:00

Bathsheva, call your agent--One of the bitterest fights between religion and science is the fight between believing Jews on one hand, and a new generation of Biblical archeologists over the historical accuracy of the Torah, particularly about the kings of ancient Israel, David and Solomon. Where they really, as the Bible says, great kings over a rich kingdom that ruled a vast area of the Middle East, or were they insignificant rulers of a pip-squeak monarchy in the armpit of some other major kingdoms. Was Jerusalem a major capital or a backwater in the last days of the Bronze Age? The Biblical archeologists are, as you can imagine, not terribly popular among believing Jews and the fact that most of them are Israeli makes the battle nastier. The fact is that the archeological evidence for many of the events in the Bible or Torah is not plentiful.

Enter the archeologist Eilat Mazar, of the Shalem Center and Hebrew University, who is digging in what is called the City of David slope in Jerusalem. She has uncovered what is apparently a very large building, possibly even a palace. Pottery found in the ruins she dates to the Jebusite period, which immediately predates the reign of David, 11th or 12th century BCE. The building itself is later, probably 10th or 11th century BCE, about David's time. She is working a strip 10 meters wide and 30 meters long and the building is bigger than that. How much bigger, she doesn’t yet know.

The building’s foundation consists of huge stones placed on an earthen landfill. Because of the size, she guesses it has to be a palace, temple or fortress, probably the first.

"For years, there have been those who contended there was no evidence of public construction in 10th century BCE Jerusalem," says Mazar. "Based on this, they claim that David and Solomon were not important rulers, as described in the Bible. Now there is evidence of such construction, and those who minimize the importance of David and Solomon have to deal with the facts. Because in an out-of-the-way and remote settlement you would not find a structure like this, the construction of which required abundant resources and a great capacity to plan and execute."

II Samuel 5 descibes David conquering the city and then building a palace outside the boundaries of the city, a new building, not one constructed on the ruins of an old one. Mazar says there is no evidence of anything under the ruins she’s uncovered. The construction itself is complex and was probably very expensive, the kind of thing a new ruler would want to throw up to impress the people he just conquered.

Not everyone, of course is convinced. Two Jews, three opinions. Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University, the leading critic of the Torah’s historical accuracy, is not impressed. He’s visited the site and thinks the dating is a “stretch.”

"Once every few years, they find something in Jerusalem that seems to confirm the biblical description of the magnitude of the kingdom in the time of David. After a while, it turns out that there is no real substance to the findings, and the excitement subsides, until the next outburst," he says, "and the excitement subsides, until the next outburst."

Talmud meets viruses, sank by same

2005-08-30T11:26:00.000-04:00

Watch what you suck, fella. God may be watching--It would be harder to find a better topic to start off the autumn blogging with than circumcision. I knew you’d agree.

There is a minor brouhaha going on in New York City--and I say minor because it involves a small minority of one community and the issue is clear cut--over an ancient and totally discredited practice involving a mohel, the rabbi who performs circumcisions. The issue is not, I emphasize, circumcision--it involves how it is done. Circumcision binds a Jewish male to the covenant with God and is mandated in the Torah, the five books of Moses. It defines a jewish male. Except for a small group of disconnects, the practice is not controversial in the Jewish community, including among those of us who have had one. There also are clear medical benefits.

Mohels are rabbis trained in the practice. Most are Orthodox but that does not limit their practice. Virtually all Jewish families (perhaps as many as 90%) hire a mohel eight days after the birth of a son. The whole family shows up, the mother leaves the room in terror, the baby (usually anesthetized on wine-soaked cotton) cries, and the whole thing is over in a matter of seconds. The food is usually excellent.

Enter Rabbi Yitzchok Fischer, 57, a mohel in New York City. Three boys, one in Staten Island and twins in Brooklyn, contracted Type-1 herpes after Fischer did the procedure. Using an ancient technique mentioned in the Talmud, Fischer used oral suction to stop the bleeding of the penis. I don’t have pictures. One of the boys involved died of the infection, which can be lethal to infants. It is possible Fischer had a cold sore when he performed the oral suction and the virus was transmitted through his saliva. The practice has been condemned as unsanitary since the 19th century, has been abandoned by most Orthodox mohels and is rejected by nearly every non-Orthodox authority. Using a tube for suction is now the norm and is endorsed by the Rabbinical Council of America, the largest Orthodox rabbinic association. Use of oral suction now resides exclusively in charedi (ultra-Orthodox) communities such as the Hassidim, where it is considered integral to the procedure. These communities say they have no intention of stopping the practice.

(Keep in mind that endangering the life of a child--or any other human for that matter--is the gravest of sins in Jewish law so these people are several entrees short of a kosher combo plate.)

Since February, Fischer has been under court order not to perform the ritual in the city while the health department investigates.

That would seem to be a slam-dunk, but this is New York City and this is an election year. The charedi community is in high dudgeon over the interference by the city and there are a lot of them in New York, particularly in Brooklyn. So, when they pressured Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who is, of course, Jewish, and is running for reelection) for a meeting, he acceded to their request and afterwards issued a statement that sets new records for pandering:

“We’re going to do a study, and make sure that everybody is safe and at the same time, it is not the government’s business to tell people how to practice their religion.”

Yes, but:

• The study already has been done and was published in the journal Pediatrics. There have been eight neonatal infections all traced to oral suction.

• It most certainly is the business of the government to intervene in religious matters when lives are at stake. If a witch doctor in Queens started practicing unsaniary female circumcision and was endangering the lives of girls in the city, would the government say it couldn’t interfere? Alas, there are few witch doctors who vote in New York City.

• And keep in mind, no matter what the charedi rabbis say, the practice violates basic Jewish law. When they wrote the Talmud they didn't know about viruses.

Then again, it is an election year. He is a very wealthy man, and he got wealthy by character and intelligence. He seems to have parked it when he became a politician.

By the way, Christopher Hitchens, with whom I disagree often but also read often, has a column on this is Slate and he is absolutely correct this time.

Flying over Kansas

2005-08-18T18:29:00.000-04:00

For those of you following the creationism and intelligent design stuff, here is another website worth bookmarking, along with Panda's Thumb. It's here, CSICOP's Creation and Intelligent Design Watch.

If you live in Kansas, you get a discount.

Let us pray for little Jimmy

2005-07-19T15:25:00.000-04:00

Study indicates that prayers for the sick from strangers doesn't workat least for the stranger. July 19. 2005.

Let us pray. It will make us feel better. You, were not so sure aboutWeve all read about it, or even participated in it. Someone is sick, usually a child, and people are asked to pray for the patient. The unspoken assumption is that God will listen and perhaps intervene. Trying to prove religion and faith scientifically is a futile exercise, but every once in a while, someone tries. The most recent, published in Lancet out of North Carolina tests whether those community efforts make any difference. The answer is no. The study, MANTRA II, involved 748 heart patients. Mitchell W. Krucoff, a cardiologist at Duke, took area patients undergoing two heart procedures, and enlisted 12 religious congregations from all faiths around the world to pray for them, giving the prayers the names, ages and descriptions of the disease. They divided the patients into four groups: one had people praying for them, the second received a non-traditional treatment like music, imagery and touch (M.I.T.), the third received both and the fourth, nothing. Toward the end of the test period, the researchers brought in even more congregations to increase the power, I guess. Neither the patients or their doctors knew who was in which group, or more importantly, perhaps, who was being prayed for and who not. The result: virtually nil. It didnt make much of a difference which group a patient was in. There was a slight advantage in lower stress levels for those receiving M.I.T., and the group receiving both prayer and M.I.T., were slightly less likely to die, but nothing statistically significant. Most religious people were predictably skeptical, mostly claimingnot irrationallythat the powers of faith cant be studied scientifically. It also doesnt address whether prayer makes a difference if a patient does the praying directly as opposed to having well-intentioned strangers do it. Krucoff said the slight differences they seemed to find may be a field for further study. [The Lancet articleclick aboverequires registration. For the WP version, click here.

The Naso graduation speech

2005-06-20T14:07:00.000-04:00

The following d'var Torah was presented to Congregation Chevrei Tzedek in Baltimore on June 11, 2005.

This is a propitious day for me for many reasons, which is why I volunteered to do this d’var torah. For one, tomorrow is my birthday.

This also is the Torah portion I believe I had when I was bar mitzvah. I am not sure; we’re talking the Truman administration here. When I was bar mitzvah, the U.S. was in the middle of the Korean War (Truman had just fired General MacArthur), the first color television sets had just been introduced and the first baseball game was televised nationally. They picked a good one. A New York Giant named Bobby Thompson hit a home run with two on and two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning to beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in the final game of National League Playoff, possibly the most famous home run in baseball history. So I think this is the Torah portion. I remember I shared the day with a boy named Jerry Jentis--I have no clue what every happened to Jerry Jentis--I remember the roses in our backyard at the party. I remember my father in absolute glory—I did a very good job after a great deal of work, most of which I hated—and my grandmother, watching her first grandchild become bar mitzvah, floating through the air without any visible means of support. I learned the meaning of the word “kvell.”

I did not realize, however, when I volunteered for this d’var Torah, that this was going to be the graduation shabbat. Now, it turns out, I get to do a graduation speech too. I’ve always wanted to give a graduation speech. How I tie it into this week’s Torah portion will be a challenge.

But first, the graduation part. By tradition, the speaker at a graduation tells the graduates how splendid their life lives are going to be (they will be, I’m sure), their responsibilities to the world in general (they are great), to themselves in particular (ditto), and they always wind up quoting Shakespeare’s advice: “above all else, to thine own self be true.” By all means. I would rather quote Woody Allen who said: “80% of success is showing up.”

For those of you going to college, a quick word. If the next three or four years are not the happiest of your life, you are doing something wrong. They should be that good. Your responsibilities are limited, you are probably away from your parents, you have the whole world laid out before you, and you will have multiple chances to find out who you are and what you stand for. You will, in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, eventually come to a fork in the road. Take it!

One of the things those of you who are graduating from college will discover soon enough is that life is full of secrets. You will keep discovering there are things you don’t know how to do, you suspect other people do know how to do and they won’t tell you. For instance, how do you assemble Ikea furniture? They won’t tell you, but for a fee someone who knows will come to your house and do it. How many deductions are you supposed to take out of your wages? How do you open a shrink-wrapped package in less than three minutes without big scissors? How do you get ketchup out of a bottle without banging the bottom? Other people know how to do this but they won’t tell you. OK, if you see me at the kiddish, I’ll tell you the ketchup secret.

Which brings up the real secret they are keeping from you, the one thing you will have to learn the hard way because you parents haven’t told you. Here’s what no one else will tell you in a graduation speech: Being a grownup is vastly overrated. It is a lot more trouble than it looks, is full of all kinds of complexities and aggravations, and at least three times in the coming years you will want to give it all up and return home to mother. You can’t. For one thing, she won’t have you; she’s probably rented out your room, and for another, she’s trying to figure out how to do that as well

So now we get, believe it or not, to the d’var Torah. Naso is one of the most interesting--and incidentally, it is the longest of all Torah portions. I’m glad I didn’t have to read it. I would like to mention two parts of the parsha--neither of which are in the third we just read. Believe it or not, there are answers to some of the secrets there and can help you get through adulthood.

One section is the restrictions on the Nazarite, the person who abandons the pleasures of life to an existence of asceticism, to naked piety. They vow not drink anything made of grape juice because wine is part of the sensual pleasure of life. They can’t cut their hair or even comb it because that might make them sexually attractive and lead them to temptation and to breaking their vows. They can not touch or even go near a dead body, even their mother’s or father’s, because they were supposed to emulate the holiness of the priests at prayer. Both men and women can become Nazarites and the vows could last a month, a year, or a lifetime. If they broke their vows, there was a special ceremony in the Temple and at the end of which the vows started all over again. Samson, who is born in today’s Haftorah, was a Nazarite, but he wasn’t very good at it. Samuel was a Nazarite and he did it properly and became a judge of Israel. We have them today. The father of the current chief rabbi of Haifa was a Nazarite and once taking his vows, he remained one the rest of his life.

Judaism makes allowances for such practices, but actively discourages it for several interesting reasons. For one thing, some rabbis considered it a mark of arrogance, it means you are trying to rise above everyone else. The other reason, I find, more interesting, and relevant to our little chat. Judaism spends very little time worrying about life after death. It is concerned with this life. This is the life you have, the one God gave you, and part of your responsibility to Him is to live it fully and happily--at least within the rules. A Nazarite does not fulfill that obligation.

I’ll show you how that is. The Artscroll siddur has a page and a half of blessings of praise and gratitude, including brachot for seeing lightning or hearing thunder; seeing a rainbow, a comet, high mountains or great river; an ocean, exceptionally beautiful people, trees or fields; especially strange looking people or animals; fruit trees in bloom; great scholars—Torah and secular—and seeing 600,000 Jews all in one place. The clear implication is that you are supposed to enjoy or at least experience all those things and then be grateful to God who created them.

In a wonderful and beautiful place in California, the Big Sur, there is a restaurant called Nepenthe. Nepenthe is not remarkable because of the food, which is mediocre. It is notable because of where it is. It sits high atop a cliff jutting out into the Pacific Ocean. Location. Location. Location. It was built on the land Orson Wells bought as a wedding present for Rita Hayworth. Half of the restaurant is outdoors, a series of long tables facing west. The tradition at Nepenthe is to get there just before sunset, have a few drinks and wait. The sunset over the ocean is a lot different than one that sets over the land. On most days it is spectacular, complex, full of changing colors and intensity. Sunsets on the California coast are a miracle. When the sun finally dips below the horizon and the colors in the clouds are at their deepest, the custom was for everyone in the restaurant to applaud. They even did a New Yorker cartoon about it once, a full page with a huge, intricate and obviously gorgeous sunset and people applauding and shouting “Author! Author!” That is a very Jewish reaction, and the reason why Jews discourage Nazerites.

Rabbi Nachman of Bratslava said that the greatest mitzvah is to be happy.

The second thing I want to talk to you about is the priestly prayer, which comes toward the end of Naso. It is the prayer that parents say to their children every Shabbat. In some homes, the parent goes to each child, puts a hand on the child’s head and whispers the prayer in their ear. It is the one that goes: “May god bless you and keep you; May God cause his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; May God turn his face toward you, and grant you peace.”

It is likely one of the oldest prayer in the world, or at least one of the oldest prayers said verbatim in the world. The words have not changed in at least 2,700 years, and probably for longer than that. The prayer—in those exact words—was found etched on silver scrolls in tombs from the seventh century BCE, two hundred years before Ezra committed it to writing. In the Torah, God commands Aaron and his sons, the priests, to use the prayer to bless the Jewish people in the Temple. By the time of the Second Temple, the prayer was used regularly in the morning sacrifice and may have become the basis for the Amidah.

How was it done? The priests took their shoes off—as everyone did in the Temple—and the Levites washed their hands—as they did before every ritual. Then the priests shrouded themselves with their talit, held out their hands and gave the ritual hand sign. And yes, as most of you know, it was the same salute Leonard Nimoy used when he played the character Spock in StarTrek.

We had a friend in California—a convert—who once said that she learned early on in her conversion class that the answer to every question was “because of the suffering of the Jewish people.” It didn’t matter what the question was, the answer worked. Actually, she is wrong. The correct answer to all Jewish questions is: “because of the destruction of the Temple.”

Why do we now say the priestly blessing at home on Shabbat? Because of the destruction of the Temple, of course. The prayer, essentially, was outsourced. We don’t need priests—or rabbis—to be our intermediaries. It requires no minyon. There are no special rules. It is a heartfelt prayer, from an individual Jew to the God of the Covenant. We ask God to bless our children, to show His face to them and to grant them a life of peace.

Why do I find it that important for today’s d’var Torah? One, because it is too beautiful to be ignored, both in words and in sentiment. And two, as an historian, I am moved by the fact it is so old, an ancient prayer from almost time out of mind, the exact same words our ancestors spoke for perhaps 3,000 years. Word for word.

You see, we belong to a people, an ancient and honorable people. And a most remarkable one.

Last week two scientists at the University of Utah released a study that claimed to explain why Jews are so smart. The scientific question was interesting: they were looking at the four Ashkenazi genetic diseases (like Tay-Sachs), all four of which appeared at the same time, around 900 CE, and they wanted to know why. Their conclusion was that the diseases were the unintended consequence of the oppression the Jews were suffering through the Middle Ages (remember our friend in California). Only the smartest Jews would survive the oppression of the time, and they were driven to careers that required managerial skills and mathematical prowess—banking and commerce. Those were the people that were most likely to reproduce. In the selection for the best and brightest, the four mutations occurred. It was evolution’s way of tending to a crisis—selecting for intelligence—effective if a bit inelegant.

But what really interested me was the whole premise that apparently triggered experiment in the first place. It was hidden in the text. They noted that Jews represent three percent of the population of the U.S., and have won 27 percent of America’s Nobel Prizes, which certainly is notable. I can add more. Jews represent less than one quarter of one percent of the world’s population and have won 22 percent of all the Nobel Prizes ever awarded. Indeed, more than half of last year’s winners were Jews. Had there been a few more prizes, they could have held a minyan on the stage in Stockholm. Name the three most important people of the 20th century and you may very well wind up with three Jews: Einstein, Freud and Marx.

Now some of this is perfectly silly, but my point is not that we may be smarter than the average bears. As I said, we, you young folks and I, are part of a people, an ancient, illustrious, imaginative and creative people, with a religion that has stayed true to its core—that adapted and changed as needed in order to survive (remember the destruction of the temple?). You’ve heard the motto: they tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat.

You will find, I think, that all of this is in your DNA, your heart and your soul, whether you recognize it or not. You will find it harder to abandon than you may think; and you will find it easier and more profoundly important to immerse yourself in it as you get older than you could ever imagine.

Be happy. Do us proud. Gut shabbos.

We thank you for your persecution--sort of

2005-06-06T14:43:00.000-04:00

Utah researchers say that Ashenazi genetic diseases is what makes Jews so smart.
June 6, 2005.

I blush. I had second thoughts about running with this, but what the hell. Nick Wade of the New York Times says it’s legit and it is about to be published in a real journal.

Researchers at the University of Utah say that the pattern of genetic diseases that afflict Jews of eastern European (Ashkenazic) background is the result of natural selection for intelligence. Winning the coveted award for the most politically incorrect scientific paper of the year, the researchers (none of whom appear to be Jewish) said that because the Jews of the Middle Ages were locked in ghettos and forced into professions that required mental agility, natural selection selected the brightest.

For decades, going back to eugenics and William Shockley, scientists have erupted over the notion that intelligence was inheritable. Shockley, among others, destroyed his career by pointing out the obviousness of that claim. It still isn’t acceptable in polite scientific company.

The paper will be published in the Journal of Biosocial Science, (Cambridge University).

The diseases are similar evolutionary reactions to sickle cell, which occur in populations threatened by malaria. Evolution was forced to counter the threat by favoring any mutation that protected against it, even if it had side effects.

The notion derives from an theory propounded by Jared Diamond that Jews who were smarter than their fellows were more likely to survive the repeated persecutions brought on them. They also were more likely to succeed at the professions imposed on them, usually commerce, which required managerial and mathematical skills. They reproduced at a faster rate. In other words, your persecution made us smarter. I love it.

The Utah researchers said that the four Ashkenazi diseases—Tay Sachs, Niemann-Pick, Gaucher and mucolipidosis type IV, all manage chemicals called sphingolipids, which promote the growth and reproduction of brain cells.

I humbly point out that Jews represent 0.25 percent of the world’s population and have won 22 percent of the Nobel Prizes. The Utah researchers added that we represent 3 percent of the U.S. population and have won 27 percent of America’s Nobels. It can’t be the cuisine.

Bush looses an ally as Orthodox bail out of the stem cell debate

2005-05-31T22:04:00.000-04:00

Wait a m inute, didn’t I have some Jews behind me?—One of more interesting political alliances of the time is that between observant (mostly Orthodox) Jews, President Bush and the evangelical wing of the Republican party on many social issues. Since Jews are supposed to be all liberals, that intrigues people, but the right wing of the American Jewish population is socially conservative. On the issue of stem cells, however, they are taking a walk. The Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, the umbrella group for the most conservative (that is a small c), which sides with the Christian right on Terry Schiavo, same sex marriages and federal support for religious activities, has broken ranks, applauding the U.S. House of Representative bill that Bush threatens to veto. The "potential to save and heal human lives is an integral part of valuing human life," it said. "Moreover, the traditional Jewish perspective does not accord an embryo outside of the womb the full status of humanhood and its attendant protections." Liberal Jewish groups, the vast majority in the U.S., agree completely, and that unanimity is rare. Stem cells are a unique issue.

The Jews of Kansas and the 2nd Scopes Trial in their own backyard

2005-05-08T21:07:00.000-04:00

Jewish leaders in Kansas are appalled at the current evolution trial
May 8, 2005

The Kansas School Board last week began a "trial" on whether to teach "Intelligent Design" as an addition to Darwinian evolution in the public schools, and the Jewish leaders of Kansas want none of it. Jeff Stone, writing in the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle, says that the state's rabbis and the community watchdogs on inter-faith relations are "looking askance" at the hearings, which the scientific community is boycotting. They all agree that there was some supernatural force behind the Creation, but it ain't "Intelligent Design," which most scientists consider a stalking horse for Creationism.

Rabbi David Fine of the Orthodox Congregation Beth Israel Abraham and Voliner said his thoughts on the debate are best summed up quoting Alan Mittleman, director of the Louis Finkelstein Institute for Religious and Social Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary:

"It doesn't seem to me that intelligent design theory really lives up to scientific standards. Having said that, I don't think science is the ultimate explanation of our world. Science is an elaborate conceptual game, but it's not the only game."

"I believe in intelligent design," said Rabbi Mark Levin of the Reform Congregation Beth Torah. "But it isn't science; it's theology." The rabbi said he believes in a divine intelligence behind the creation of the world and its natural laws.

And yet he sees the attempt to introduce the notion of "intelligent design" into schools as one that breaches the constitutional principle of separation of church and state.

"It is clearly objectionable to teach theology as though it is science," said Rabbi Levin, "because ... it misinforms children and introduces religious faith into the public school system under the guise of science."

Morris B. Margolies, who is rabbi emeritus at Congregation Beth Shalom, said that intelligent design is "simply a phony renaming of creationism that has fallen out of favor even with some creationists, because they feel very susceptible to attack right now."

To him, Darwin's "illuminations" are no more subject to debate than Newton's Laws.

Rabbi Margolis said the push for Intelligent Design was being fostered by a "pack of fanatics" trying to discredit proven science.

The vote wasn't unanimous. Richard Nadler, a locally well-known Republican operative and self-described Orthodox Jew, thinks Darwin is bunk. He said that if parents are concerned that their children will be taught evangelical Christian beliefs in science class, they can always go to private school. "I'm a private-school advocate," he said. "If you are concerned that Jewish kids are going to be educated in non-Jewish ways, send them to a Jewish school."

Blogs devoted to the Kansas debate quoted the Chronicle story widely. See Panda's Thumb, the best known. Since science is a Jewish plot anyhow, what the hell. Get on with it.

God, the Big Bang and government scientists

2005-04-18T13:58:00.000-04:00

What happens when science and the Bible seem to agree?
April 15, 2005
Every year, on the Saturday after the Jewish holiday of Simchas Torah, an astrophysicist from the University of California Santa Cruz campus would come to synagogue just outside of town, and deliver the dvar Torah, the dissertation of that weeks reading from the Torah (the first five books of the Bible). The reading was Bresheet, the beginning of the first chapter of Genesis, wherein God creates the universe. The astrophysicist was appropriate because the similarities between the description in Genesis and the current cosmology, the Big Bang, are spookily similar, even though the former was written more than 2,000 years ago. If you make allowance for metaphor (the word day does not mean day but a discrete block of time), there is not only no conflict, but the two seem in many ways simply different lenses on the same story. One has a supernatural origin, the other doesn't. Having an astrophysicist do the dvar Torah, as an astrophysicist (he was Jewish), always amused the congregation. But he was always good at it, he never made too fine a point of specifics so he did not try to define things like string theory. He wasnt representing anyone but himself and we loved having him join us. How things have changed.

Now, with the new emerging theocracy in America, scientists need to be really careful about that kind of stuff. One man who demonstrated that is Raymond Orbach, director of the office of science at the Energy Department. At a brown bag lunch someplace (not sure exactly where) Dr. Orbach did something like what the Santa Cruz astrophysicist did, except, he of course made a Powerpoint presentation. (My idea of hell, by the way, is spending an eternity watching Powerpoint presentations). Titled Genesis, Science and the Beginning of Time, Dr. Orbach also pointed out the striking similarities between Genesis and the Big Bang. His problem, of course, is that he works for the government and the Powerpoint images were government issue. It might have even been at a government office. I dont now. You can find it here, a pdf file. Whether he should have done so or not, is now the topic of a commentary battle on Technology Reviews blog. [Thanks to Jonathan Beard for point me to this]. By this afternoon, there were 38 comments posted about the presentation, with most of them unhappy about the talk. The fact he quoted President Bush, was noted by many. The issue, however, goes back to the ancient battle of whether you can be a scientist and believer. Clearly the astrophysicist at Santa Cruz didnt think there was a problem, but many of the correspondents on the Technology Review blog did.

Orbach takes science back to its limits, something like string theory and the first 10^-44 seconds, but in going back further then seems determined to inject religion into the discussion by quoting Genesis and by quoting others who invoke God as part of the process that explains the beginning of time. Not exactly what you would expect of a man of sciencea science that has succeeded in going back further and further in time towards the Big Bang, and which shows no signs of suddenly stopping or of needing to invoke God at any point.

Is Orbach pandering to the religious right or devaluing science as is already underway in the Administration? In any case, I dont think its appropriate for a man of his position.

Some writers were fervent atheists, which they presume to be the proper mindset for a good scientist. And others thought it was fine, except that it seems to be part of a growing religiosity that ought to be a concern to everyone. (Religiosity and being religious are not necessarily the same thing.) Some were merely amused.

There are people who do not understand the inherent separation of religion and science. I am not as well versed on the subject as the experts, but the short version is that religion can accept science as a study of God's universe and science cannot comment about God. The statement of religions position about science is pretty clear and historically supported (even, by some historians accounts, in the case of Galileo). The statement about science's view of religion is less obvious. Science is the study of the world around us. It is not based on opinion but on evidence. Ideas in science change as this evidence comes to the scientific society (we like to think). By the nature of what God is (supernatural), we cannot gather evidence about him/her. Therefore science cannot, and probably doesn't want to, comment on God. Science cannot prove or disprove God and as all the scientists reading this know, you can only disprove a hypothesis.

P.S. Scientists know that God is separate from science. People who claim science disproves God really do not understand either. They state opinion as fact without evidence or legitimate support. Such statements are very unscientific.

It is an interesting and ancient dispute, made more interesting by the times we live in. Would Dr. Orbach felt comfortable making such a presentation before the era of George Bush and the rise of fundamentalism?

And by the way, the similarities in versions of the creation get better if you use the Hebrew version (and its translations) rather than the Christian versions, which are based on the Greek and contain numerous errors. For one thing, the tense used to describe creation is different in the Hebrew. From the Jewish Publication Society Translation:

When God began to create heaven and earth, the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water--God said Let there be light; and there was light.

Bang.

The "Heresy" of Chabad

2005-04-14T13:26:00.000-04:00

By Joel N. Shurkin

No one talks about it in public. The Jewish press tries to ignore it. Most Orthodox Jews probably wish it would go away. But, in a dispute virtually unprecedented in 500 years, a major and well-known movement in traditional Judaism either is or is not guilty of heresy, a sin that usually brought excommunication.

In Baltimore, the head of Ner Israel, one of American Orthodoxy’s most prominent yeshivas, has declared that some members of the the Chasidic Lubavitch (Chabad) movement can no longer be counted in a minyan (the gathering of 10 Jewish men reqired for certain prayers), give testimony, act as ritual slaughterers or determine the kashrus of food because they are apikoros (unbelievers).

In New York, a prominent Orthodox scholar has fought a lonely, public battle against Chabad and has earned petulant silence for his efforts. Others who have stood up against Chabad have been vilified and attacked, and the whole Orthodox community seems to think any public discussion is bad for the Jews.

It will not, however, go away.

"The shock of losing a man of such singular distinction led some in Chabad to mistakenly lend him immortality not by furthering his vision of Judaism as the light of the world, but by declaring him to be the long-awaited Messiah," said Rabbi Shmuleuy Boteach.

A letter written by Rabbi Aharon Feldman of Ner Israel on June 24, 2003, widely distributed in Orthodox circles but unnoticed elsewhere, was as close to an excommunication as Judaism follows these days. The letter was aimed at those members of the Lubavitcher movement who consider the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson to be both the Messiah (Moshiach) and an incorporation of pure divinity. Those who do not accept the pure divinity of Schneerson but still believe him to be the Messiah (perhaps most Lubavitchers) are not subject to his declaration, Feldman wrote quietly, but are considered dangerous because their beliefs may dig “beneath very foundation of Jewish belief in the Moshiach.”

“It is still forbidden to support them or publicize their opinions for it is forbidden to support falsehood. All the more so in this case, where there exists the danger that their belief might spread to the general Jewish community and thus the Torah itself could be erased from Israel, chas v’shalom.”

While Feldman’s letter will have little practical effect—it applies only to Ner Israel and its students and faculty, however prestigious—it has touched off a predictable brouhaha in the Orthodox community. Members of Chabad responded with fury to an accusation of heresy. The letter also exposes a chasm of belief within the Lubavitch community that is tearing the wealthy, ubiquitous group apart.

At first, local Chabad leaders in Baltimore agreed to be interviewed for this story but as the meeting approached, Rabbi Schmuel Kaplan, Maryland director of the movement, said he had changed his mind. He did not want to further divisiveness, he said. Other rabbis, who had also agreed, also backed out. In an e-mail message, Kaplan wrote:

“The Rebbe, of righteous memory, gave us a mandate to devote ourselves to Ahavat Yisroel [love of all Jews] and to spreading the knowledge and practice of Judaism to all segments of our community. Though, with the help of G-d, Chabad Lubavitch of the Maryland region today operates 12 outreach centers, there is still much to be accomplished to fulfill this mission. We cannot afford to part icipate in any kind of discussion or dispute that may divert us from this noble objective.

“Furthermore, the Rabbis and leaders of our community have invested much time and effort over the years to maintain the peace and harmony that characterizes our community. We will not engage in any activity that may jeopardize this unique communal atmosphere.

“As always, we are eager to answer questions from any interested individuals, about any aspect of our movement.”

Kaplan himself has gone out of his way to keep extremists out of his facilities.

"Chabad is a movement, nearly every member of which is passionately devoted to the most minute observance of Jewish law," Rabbi Boteach said. "This is often especially true of Chabad messianists. I debate them vigorously. But I do not doubt for a moment their immovable commitment to every iota of Jewish tradition."

The argument has historic proportions. David Berger, an Orthodox rabbi and professor of history at Brooklyn College, says that with the exception of followers of Shabbatai Zvi in the 16th century, “Lubavitch messianists have already generated the largest and most long-lived messianic movement in Jewish history since antiquity.”

The most famous movements before that were the rise of Christianity and the false messianism of Shimon Bar-Kokhba, who was killed by the Romans in 135 C.E., a defeat that led to an unmitigated disaster for the Jews. Berger's 2001 book, The Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference, stunned the Jewish world, not so much for what he said but that he said it all.

That Chabad is still commonly accepted within Orthodoxy despite its heterodoxy, and that its rabbis operate fully within the Orthodox community—sitting on Jewish courts and running non-Chabad yeshivas—infuriates Berger and others. Lubavitchers also run community day schools, act as outreach facilitators to non-observant Jews or Jews who live in or visit remote areas. A Lubavitch family owns the largest glatt kosher meat packing plant in the world, AgriProcessors. Lubavitch often act as semi-official representatives of the Jewish community at public ceremonies.

Previous attempts to get the Orthodox community to shun Chabad—or at least face the problem—have largely failed.

Chabad is a vast organization and much of its support comes from non-Orthodox Jews. It does not use the money on personal luxuries.

At the Chabad synagogue Baltimore, a visitor is welcomed warmly just as one would at any of the Lubavitch synagogues and out-reach centers. The Clark’s Lane synagogue is a small, shabby white building just off Park Heights Avenue. It in no way reflects the extensive wealth of the organization.

One December shabbos eve, about 40 men and boys, all dressed in black and wearing black hats, fill a plain room filled with tables covered with plastic table clothes and worn books. The walls can kindly be described as off-white, the floor, worn. They davened at their own speed, joining only for the various kaddishes [prayers that delineate parts of the service] and a roaring version of the song L’cha Dodi, which inspires a march around the tables in true Chasidic fashion, complete with foot stomping and hand clapping. There are no decorations; clearly few resources have been spent on aesthetics. The only decoration visible is a poster of the Rebbe in the entrance hall, but the faces of other rabbis surround him.

The synagogue is in marked physical contrast to the new outreach center on Old Pimlico Road in Pikesville, donated by a supporter and meant to be as attractive as possible, and to Lubavitch centers elsewhere. Kaplan is in charge there and he has kept supposed heresy from its door.

The great battle

Lubavitch is a perhaps the best known of the Chasidic sects.

Chasidim was founded in the 18th century by Israel ben Eliezer, better known as the Baal-Shem Tov (“master of God’s good name”) as a reaction to hard times in the Jewish communities of eastern Europe and what many thought was a ritual-bound, scholar-ridden yeshiva Judaism. He advocated a Judaism of joy, music, dance, mysticism and an ability to communicate directly to God through tzaddikim or righteous men. Being happy was a major commandment for a Jew.

Chasidim was furiously opposed by the mainstream community led by Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, the legendary Vilna Gaon, in one of the greatest religious battles of Jewish history. Despite the excommunication of many Chasidic leaders, Zalman lost the war as Chasidim spread throughout Poland and Lithuania. The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1900 states that half the Jews of the world alive then was Chasidim. In the ensuing centuries, many Chasidic sects have altered their practices toward the mainstream while normative Orthodoxy has adopted some Chasidic practices and customs, a kind of necessary accommodation that apparently goes only so far.

Opponents to Chasidism are called the mitnagdim and while they have become reconciled to the existence of Chasidim, the battle still continues at some level and has some echoes in the current dispute, with Chabad the most frequent target.

The Chabad sect of Chasidim was founded in the 1770s by Rabbi Shneur Zalman and takes the name Lubavitch from a town where many of its leaders lived. Chabad is an acronym for the Hebrew words for conception, understanding and realization, according to Rabbi Tuvia Bolton, assistant dean of Yeshiva Orh Tmimim, a Lubavitch academy in Israel. The yeshiva is located in Kfar Chabad, the main Lubavitch settlement in Israel.

Chabad is famed for its outreach program to bring non-observant Jews back to the fold and provide Jewish food and services for travelers. It has taken its mission literally to the ends of the earth, from Kansas City to Katmandu. Indeed, one of the largest Passover Seders anywhere is the annual service in Nepal’s capital, run by Chabad, mostly for traveling Israelis. Looking for a kosher meal in Boise? Chabad just opened an outreach house in Idaho. Shabbos in Beijing? Lubavitch has a center, catering mostly to the business community., Need bar mitzvah instructions in the Congo? Try Chabad on Avenue Lukusa in Kinshasa. They have “Mitzvah tanks" that roam the streets of New York, stopping men who seem Jewish to encourage them to wear tefillin (phylacteries), While the outreach program was controversial in Orthodoxy when it began, even critics now acknowledge that a large percentage of Jews returning to observance (Baalei Tshuva or BTs) was sent there by Chabad.

Asked why Chabad is so widely accepted and why many knowledgeable Jews would prefer to avoid the theological problems with Chabad, a Conservative rabbi said, “Because they do good things.”

The movement is centered at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, revered as the “Rebbe’s shul." An exact duplicate of “770” was built in Israel, identical brick by brick, so that if the Rebbe ever wanted to visit, he would feel at home. He never visited. It is one of the most controversial of the Chasidic sects, shunned even by other Chasidim, especially the Satmars, the largest Chasidic group (“Jews didn’t wait for a messiah whose wife drives a car”).

A prominent Torah sage, Rabbi Eliezer Menachem Shach, was once asked which non-Jewish religion was theologically closest to Judaism. He famously replied:

“Lubavitch.”

Like most Chasidic sects, the Lubavitcher rabbinate was a hereditary position, but Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitch rabbi, died in 1994 without an heir, leaving the huge and wealthy movement without an obvious future. Many critics believed the messianic movement was a way of keeping Chabad going. Stunned by his death, many in the group either denied it was true (he was buried in Queens and his grave has become a shrine, complete with a nearby fax machine in case someone wants to forward a prayer), or predicted his imminent resurrection as the Messiah.

Schneerson never actually claimed to be the Messiah, but critics say he did nothing to discourage talk of it while he was alive and never denied it. A “white-bearded figure with a brisk, almost military gait and kindly, penetrating blue eyes,” with unquestioned charisma and recognized scholarship, he predicted the imminent coming of the Messiah, one of the prerequisites for the messianic age, and greeted claims that it was he with a wink.

Enter Rambam

As is fitting for a bitter theological dispute in Judaism, the controversy centers on the interpretation of one sentence in the writings of Maimonides—the Rambam—written in the 12th century.

While many Jews are not acutely aware of it, Judaism has a long history of messianism, and in his Mishnah Torah, Maimonides lays out how you can tell the true Messiah when he comes along.

“If a king arises from the House of David who studies the Torah and pursues the commandments like his ancestor David in accordance with the written and oral law, and he compels all Israel to follow and strengthen it, and fights the wars of the Lord—this man enjoys the presumption of being the Messiah. If he proceeds successfully, builds the Temple in its place and gathers the dispersed of Israel, then he is surely the Messiah.”

Then the crucial sentence:

“But if he does not succeed to this extent, or is killed, it is evident that he is not the one whom the Torah promised….”

Under the almost universally accepted interpretation of Maimonides, Schneerson can’t be the Messiah because he died. According to mainstream Judaism, the Messiah must redeem the world and live to tell about it. That belief, among other reasons, disqualifies Jesus. It also leaves messianists among the Lubavitchers with a serious problem: the body buried in Queens.

The late Rebbe “can’t be the Messiah—he is not living—a Messiah has to be living, a living Messiah, not a dead Messiah,” said Rabbi Aharon Solovetchik, one of the greatest Talmudists of the 20th century.

The problem of the Rebbe’s apparent demise also explains why some messianists insist the rabbi did not really die. They took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times asserting there cannot be a yartzeit (memorial service) for him since he is still alive, and recently several dozen of them were arrested for rioting in Brooklyn because a plaque placed in honor of the Rebbe contained the Hebrew abbreviation used to signify someone who has passed away. Many still speak about him in the present tense.

Berger points out that only two messianic movements in Judaism lasted after the supposed Messiah died: Shabbatianism, which also survived the conversion of Zvi to Islam and still has a few followers in Turkey, and Christianity. Both are considered Jewish heresies.

The criticism is unfounded, say Chabad rabbis.

“Maimonides was referring to J.C. [Jesus],” says Bolton. Bolton says that traditional Judaism has always permitted the death of the Messiah because in tradition, the dead will rise again.

If that belief is legitimate Jewish thought, counters Berger, then the only difference between Chabad and Christianity is a case of “mistaken identity.” Christians think it was Jesus; Chabad thinks it was Schneerson.

How many Lubavitchers actually think Schneerson is the Messiah is unknown. Berger says he first thought it was a minority but now thinks otherwise. Bolton says he may be right. The messianists say that all Lubavitchers agree he is Moshiach. No one knows if that is true.

Chabad services regularly include the prayer, the Yehi, in which they pray to “our Master, the King Messiah” in honor of the Rebbe. Lubavitch children regularly chant “We Want Moshiach Now!” at school, and it is clear whom they are chanting about.

The Godhead

But the issue gets more complicated. Some Lubavitchers now believe that the late rabbi has so subsumed his human essence to God that he is now pure divinity, the godhead. They add the word borainu (our Creator) to the Yehi prayer. God.

It is that concept that seems to have stirred Feldman to the battle.

Ner Israel is not a newcomer to the dispute with Chabad. Feldman’s predecessor, Rabbi Schmuel Yaakov Weinberg, was one of the most prominent of the mitnagdim and like the heads of several other yeshivas, put the messianic aspects of Chabad beyond the pale of Jewish thought.

Ner Israel is the second largest Orthodox yeshiva in North America and one of the most prestigious. Its presence in Baltimore is one of the reasons for the high concentration of Orthodox here. Indeed, Weinberg’s opposition to Chabad maybe why Chabad’s presence in Baltimore is weaker than in many other places. About 80 people daven at the Chabad Center on Old Pimlico Road, and not all of them are Lubavitchers. Bolton says it is not possible to count the actual membership.

In response to a student’s question on how to deal with Lubavitchers, Feldman divided Chabad into two groups, those who believe that Schneerson will be resurrected as Moshiach, whom he called the “meshichistim,” and those who believe that “the essence of the Divine is enclothed” in the Rebbe, the “elokistim.”

“In my humble opinion,” he wrote, “the belief of the elokistim runs counter to one of the Thirteen Principles of Faith [of Maimonides] and indeed, the Rambam rules that such people are in the category of heretics. Therefore, their shechita (ritual slaughter) and testimony (including that relating to kashrus [kosher laws]) are invalid and one may not include them in a minyan. Even if their belief is inadvertent, it is already well known (from R. Chaim Soloveitchik of Brisk z’’l) that one who holds an opinion of non-belief inadvertently is considered a non-believer nonetheless.”

Since many in Chabad have not publicly stated their beliefs, Feldman wrote that the presumption should be that they are not elokstim. (Berger, on the other hand, will not eat a meal for which any Lubavitcher provided the kosher certification because one never knows. At least one major caterer in New York City refuses to handle meat from Lubavitch sources as well.)

As for those who profess their belief in the Rebbe as the Messiah without the divinity aspect, the meshichistim, he said “they remain within the category of ‘your nation,’ and their testimony and shechita are valid and it is permitted to include them in a minyan. However, great danger surrounds their belief, for it digs beneath the very foundation of the Jewish belief in Moshiach.” However, he wrote, even though they cannot be considered non-believers, they are obviously lacking in “Torah understanding,” and their opinions should not be relied on, “even in issues that do not relate to Moshiach.”

There are no sources in either written or oral law to support the possibility of Schneerson being the Messiah, he wrote. What sources they present, he wrote, are without substance.

“Therefore, one who finds himself among Lubavitchers who observe customs aimed at strengthening their faith…is required to leave, or, if possible, to offer rebuke.”

The letter is not quite the equivalent of excommunication, a practice that went out of style in the 19th century. The most famous excommunication was that of the rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza in 1656. Most educated people still read his works while the names of the Amsterdam rabbis who excommunicated him are long forgotten. More than 100 years later, traditional rabbis excommunicated the leaders of Germany’s Reform movement and others influenced by the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment, but after a few generations, when it was obvious the ban had no effect, abandoned the practice.

Nonetheless, the Feldman letter and the opposition of others in the traditional Orthodox community, essentially de-legitimize Chabad. The movement itself seems torn on how to respond in public.

“About 20 percent want to advertise the belief,” Bolton says, “about 20 percent think it would be a mistake to publicize it, and the other 60 percent aren’t sure.”

The Central Committee of Chabad Lubavitch, caught in the middle, also issued a statement.

“The deification of any human being is contrary to the core and foundation of the Jewish faith. The various Talmudic, Midrashic and other sources which seem to ascribe superhuman spiritual attributes to certain righteous people, were never meant to be deification and great care must be taken when quoting them,” the statement said.

“Belief in the coming of Moshiach and awaiting his imminent arrival is a basic tenet of the Jewish faith. It is clear, however, that conjecture to the possible identity of Moshiach is not part of the basic tenet of Judaism. The preoccupation with identifying the Rebbe z’’l as Moshiach is clearly contrary to the Rebbe’s wishes.”

The statement, however, may very well represent a minority opinion within Chabad and it is not clear the messianism is contrary to the Rebbe's wishes.

Raising the dead

Bolton says the requirements for the Messiah are simple and basic to Jewish belief: a Jewish male from the House of David, preferably on his mother’s side. He must be versed in Torah and must encourage others to study Torah by force of his logic and loving explanations. He must fight God’s battles, meaning any influence that weakens Judaism.

“The Rebbe had every quality.”

Every generation has its potential Moshiach, and he was the candidate for his generation. His father-in-law, the Lubavitcher rebbe before him, was the candidate for the previous generation, Bolton says. That he is of the seventh generation is particularly telling, many of his supporters say, seven being a number of great significance.

It is written that before the Messiah comes, he must be preceded by a messianic age and Schneerson announced that age was here before he died.

So what about the body buried in Queens?

That he died only amplifies his qualifications. Rambam, among others, Bolton says, wrote that the Messiah must come from the dead and that the resurrection of the dead is central to Jewish messianic belief. To say otherwise, he says, is to misunderstand him.

“Moshiach is the essence of Judaism, as is the raising of the dead. The two concepts do not contradict one another.”

As to the Rebbe, now in his grave 10 years, “The Jewish body has no connection with death whatsoever. The physical is eternal. Now it seems the spiritual is higher, that the body dies and decomposes. That’s what seems to us, but it is not true. The body is eternal and will be reconstructed,” he says.

“The Rebbe, before he went to cheder [religious school], before he was two, weaved in his mind that the Moshiach will come and make understandable the suffering all the Jews have suffered all these years.”

And the divinity of the Rebbe? “Every single Jew incorporates divinity.”

Rabbi Jonathan Seidemann, a spokesman for R. Feldman said the letter “speaks for itself.”

© Copyright 2004, Joel N. Shurkin. All rights reserved.

Terri Schiavo dies and confusion still reigns

2005-03-30T14:23:00.000-05:00

Terri Schaivo is dead and you can blame the videotape for much of the confusion surrounding her lamentable story

By Joel N. Shurkin
Terri Schiavo, 41, died this morning at her nursing home in Florida. She died 13 days after her feeding tube was removed and one day after her parents lost yet another futile legal manuever to have the tube replaced. An autopsy is scheduled.

What is usually a private matter amongst family members, became a major news event when the family split over her treatment. Her husband, Michael, wanted life support removed so she could die; her parents wanted her to be maintained on life support despite the fact she had virtually no chance of even a partial recovery.

She became the political symbol of craven and in some cases, hypocritical politicians and of social conservatives from the anti-abortion fringe. Her parents became the tools of extremists ranging from the demented Randall Terry to quacks making diagnosis from videotapes so they could get on television. By the time of her death, Congress had challenged the separate powers concept of the American constitution by intervening, and extremists were threatening the independence of the judiciary, even insisting that the governor of Florida send troops to rescue her, contrary to the rulings of both state and federal courts, essentially a coup. In the meantime, she served as the fulcrum for a serious and important debate on how to treat people who lie at the cusp between life and death. Thoughtful people were forced to confront their definitions of mortality, of the existence of a soul, and the powers of government. We owe her for that.

She knew none of this. Ms. Schiavo had been in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) for 15 years.

What that condition means, has been the topic of fervent debate, usually by people who have no clue what a persistent vegetative state is. Extremists have used those misconceptions and ignorance as weapons in their battles to enforce their religious views on everyone else.

The news networks--especially the cable networks--have been running a video tape for weeks that may be responsible for many of the misconceptions. It is a question of confusing coma with PVS. Had she been in a coma, we wouldn’t be paying much attention.

The tape, edited down from hours, shows her moving, seemingly smiling and reacting to stimuli from her family. Her eyes move, parts of her limbs tremble. It is not hard to assume, looking at the tape, that Terri Schiavo is in there somewhere. She probably isn’t.

"It confuses people who look at her," says Dr. Tom Raffin, the Colleen and Robert Haas Professor Emeritus of Medicine/Bioethics, Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care, and director emeritus of the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University. "She does these things, but that doesn’t mean she can think."

There is a huge difference between a person in a coma and a person in a persistent vegetative state, Dr. Raffin says. A person in a coma is "locked in." If they recover--and many do--they may have cognition. Until then, they are unconscious, unmoving. Their brain has essentially shut down.

A person in PVS is not locked in.

"Their eyes are wandering and it looks as if something is going on, but nothing is," he said. "It is common for loved ones to think there is contact even when there isn’t. The patient reverts to primitive reflexes, the reptilian part of the brain. They can track people with their eyes without cognition. She [Ms. Schiavo] does those things. That doesn’t mean she thinks. She will have reflexes, be startled, but there is no cognition going on."

Brain scans show remarkably slowing brain waves, he said. Scans of Ms. Schiavo's brain also show the middle section almost scooped out, with the brain matter replaced with fluids. Any communication between her brain and her body is likely in one direction, the reflexive motions.

A person with PVS looks exactly as Ms. Schiavo does.

Her chances of recovery are "as close as you can get to zero," and any doctor who says she can recover with rehabilitation is "a liar."

Dr. Raffin said that if he were judge and there was evidence she was not in a PVS, he would not let them remove the feeding tube. But she clearly is.

The rulings by the Florida courts, which seem to so enrage a vocal minority of the population, are perfectly consistent with the law and precedent.

Two doctors in California were charged with homicide several years ago for withdrawing life support. A nurse complained to the district attorney. Charges were eventually dropped. There are cases in which doctors have refused family instructions to pull the plug, fearing malpractice suits, although they are very unlikely if the family wants the procedure.

In the "Baby Jane Doe" case in New York, a case with some parallels to the Schiavo case, parents of a severely retarded and crippled child born with spina bifuda refused to permit surgery that would have kept her alive, although still severely retarded and crippled. New York courts ruled in their favor. But an anti-abortionist doctor from Vermont took them to federal court to force the surgery, claiming the parents had no right to decide if the baby should die. Encouraged by the Reagan administration, he asked a federal court to intervene and order the procedures.

"These people have no right to be here at this time in our lives," the father said.

"What the parents want is not a factor here," the lawyer said.

The court ruled it was, and the surgery was never performed.

In the Karen Ann Quinlan case in New Jersey (1975), the courts ruled that without a directive from the patient herself, the family (she was unmarried), the doctor and the hospital’s ethics committee had the right to decide her fate. The respirator was turned off, but Ms. Quinlan lived another 10 years in a PVS before dying.

New Jersey courts and many others have ruled that what the patient wants, trumps all other considerations, and those desires "are not to be decided by societal standards or reasonableness or normalcy[emphasis added]. Rather, it is the patient’s preference--formed by his or her unique personal experiences--that should control." If the patient can’t decide, members of the family or whoever the physician thinks most appropriate decides. In most cases, that would be the spouse.

The Schiavo case fits well within that ruling law.

What did she want? According to the testimony of her husband, substantiated by others, she did not want to live as a vegetable. The judge believed the testimony--that she was in a PVS and she did not want to persist in that state--and ruled, as almost very other court would rule, that the husband has the right to decide, and if he says she should be taken off life support, that’s what should happen.

Dr. Raffin has seen this all before.

"It’s a very tragic situation," he said. "You have parents and siblings who want her alive. It’s not unusual.

These situations happen every day in hospitals, and no one says anything. It only becomes the lead story on CNN and Fox News when others get involved for reason that go well beyond the welfare of the patient.

"If I were King Solomon, I would say to Michael [Schiavo], why don't you divorce her and let her family decide. But things are too polarized by now for that to happen."

Ms. Schiavo likely felt no pain.

She was long since gone elsewhere and is, one hopes, at peace.

Angels on needles, embryos in the lab

2005-03-14T13:13:00.000-05:00

Is there a compromise in the stem cell debate?

March 14, 2005.
No issue is so wrought with profound ethical considerations as the stem cell debate, the cloning of human embryos to produce stem cells that might—might—help in the amelioration or cure of some seriously awful diseases. The issue was brought to the fore a week ago at the President’s Council on Bioethics in Washington. In a deeply thoughtful discussion of that meeting and another in Rome called by the Vatican, Slate’s William Saletan points out the complexity and also the philosophical-religious differences. “It was like Socrates trying to carve up a bowl of chicken soup,” he wrote. How you stand could depend on whether you are Catholic or Jewish. (The presumption is that Protestants are all over the place). Catholics are more certain about things (Is there life after death? Of course and here’s what it’s like) than are Jews (Unless someone dies and come back how could we possibly know, but if there is one it might be like this...), yet more attuned to reason, while Jews are more often happier with intuition. Catholics give answers; Jews raise questions. Hairs were split and Saletan found himself surrounded by white-robed monks with Ph.D.s in biology from M.I.T., and discovered that the head of the Vatican office that used to be called the Inquisition is named Charlie Brown. The Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer, a physician (a psychiatrist, actually), who happens to also be Jewish and a member of the bioethics commission, wrote thoughtfully in the Post of a compromise that might bridge the theological gaps. No creating human embryos for experimentation—which would require growing embryos that were designed not to develop further—but using left-over embryos from fertility clinics. In other words, we should be able to use embryos created for the potential development of human life but not those created to be destroyed. Krauthammer, a conservative, separates himself from President Bush’s position banning federal funds for these experiments, pointing out that, however, it only is a ban on federal funds, not the experimentation itself.

Evolution and the Zoo Rabbi

2005-02-28T16:47:00.000-05:00

The People of the Book ban a book
Feb. 28, 2005

By Joel N. Shurkin

Literalist Christians are not the only ones who have trouble with cosmology and evolution. Everyone who thinks the Bible is to be taken literally does as well, including the Haredi, the most fervently observant Jews.

A month ago, a group of the most esteemed Haredi rabbis, both in Israel and in the U.S., banned three books written by a well-known Orthodox rabbi because the books assert the world was not created in six days 5765 years ago, and because it accepts Darwinian evolution as the accepted scientific theory.

The books were, they said, unfit for Jewish homes.

The banning caused a furor in the usually private and quiet world of the Orthodox Jewish community, prompting a prominent head of a rabbinic school (or yeshiva) to fly to Israel to try to get them to back down. He only partially succeeded.

The author of the books, Rabbi Nosson Slifkin, the so-called “Zoo Rabbi” was accused of being a heretic and of writing books containing heresy because they contradicted a literal reading of Genesis. He made the situation even more contentious by suggesting that perhaps some of the great rabbis who commented on the Bible (the Jewish Torah) in the Talmud, got their science wrong, based as it was on the knowledge of the time. Having serious support from some of the most famous Talmudic scholars in history did him little good.

Rabbi Aharon Feldman, head of Ner Israel in Baltimore, the second largest yeshiva in North America, flew to Israel two weeks ago to “end the confusion,” and managed to get at least one of the rabbis attacking Rabbi Slifkin to agree that he was not himself a heretic. However, what he wrote still was verboten.

The Haredi community, distinguished often by their attire and disregard for the outside world, represent only a small part of Orthodox Judaism, itself a minority within world Jewry. Most Orthodox Jews, many of who are scientists and physicians, reject their position.

The banning caused a blistering debate on the Internet and in Orthodox publications.

It was the only topic of discussion on various Orthodox web sites but after two days the conversation was replaced with what one web site editor called “stunned silence.”
“The prestige of the rabbis is so high, we don’t know what to say and we are waiting for clarification,” he said

That may have been the reason Rabbi Feldman went to Israel.

The rabbis involved in the banning are among the most prominent in the ultra-Orthodox world, called gedolim, or giants. Most are Israeli, but Rabbi Uren Reich, head of the huge yeshiva in Lakewood, N.J., joined in the attack.

“These same scientists who tell you with such clarity what happened 65 million years ago—ask them what the weather will be like in New York in two weeks time,” he scoffed.

Born in Manchester, England, Rabbi Slifkin, 29, is yeshiva trained and now lives in Israel. A self-taught zoologist, he lectures around Israel and elsewhere on the animals of the Torah, “The Jewish Approach to Zoology,” and on science and religion. He is an advisor to the Biblical Zoo in Jerusalem and often lectures to children with a boa constrictor wrapped around his neck, which he cheerfully asserts, is not the usual image of an Orthodox rabbi.

The books that upset the rabbis include The Camel, the Hare & the Hyrax, The Science of Torah, and Mysterious Creatures.

Announcement of the ban was published in a letter to a Haredi daily newspaper in Israel. In explaining their decision, a Haredi web site quoted the rabbinate as saying the books were “filled with heretical ideas.”

“When these books reached the hands of English-speaking [observant readers] they were shocked and dismayed at the contents,” it continued. It quoted Rabbi Yitzchok Sheiner as calling the contents “hair-raising.”

“He [Rabbi Slifkin] believes that the world is millions of years old—all nonsense—many other things that should not be heard and certainly not believed. In short, these books cannot be brought into the home of one who believes in Hashem [God] and His Torah,” Rabbi Sheiner said.

Rabbi Moshe Sternbuch wrote: “I do not know whether all those who accept the view of the scientists — that the world is very ancient — are heretics. However, I do know that only heretics have such views against our Sages.”

Rabbi Sternbuch has written extensively that scientists minimize miracles, therefore commit a form of heresy.

After the ban, one publisher dropped one of Rabbi Slifkin’s books, but the publicity caused a run on the remaining copies, with one going for at least $100 on E-Bay.
Rabbi Slifkin declines interviews, but in a lengthy defense posted on his website, www.zootorah.com/controversy (which he took down later in an effort to calm the situation), he wrote: “It goes without saying that if there is anything that is shown to be incorrect or, God forbid, heretical, I will remove it in future editions of the book. But, as far as I am aware, all the significant points in all three books are solidly grounded in reliable sources. In addition, I carefully followed proper procedure in having everything checked by many Torah scholars of high standing and possessing familiarity with these topics.”

He pointed out that many of the most prominent Jewish scholars in history support his position that they may have the science wrong, including Maimonides, himself a 12th century physician.

Rabbi Slifkin’s best-known work, The Camel, the Hare & the Hyrax, takes one of the most intriguing and contentious passages in the Torah, and tries to resolve the ancient text with modern science.

The book centers on the passage, repeated twice in the Torah, listing the animals that can be eaten under the laws of kashrus, the rules of eating kosher: those animals that chew their cud and have split or cloven hooves—cows, deer, buffalo. The Torah then lists four animals it says have one or the other attribute but not both and are hence forbidden: the camel, the hare and the hyrax (a small Mediterranean-area mammal), which chew their cud but do not have cloven hooves. Most famously, it adds the pig, which has the hooves but doesn’t ruminate.

The Talmud, the authoritative commentary on the Torah, asserts that the list is inclusive—those are all the animals in the world having only one kosher sign.
For centuries, those were indeed the only animals any Jews knew that appeared to have those attributes, a fact often used to prove the divine origin of Torah. If men wrote the Torah, how could they possibly have known that?

(Orthodox Jews believe that the Torah was given to the people of Israel through Moses from God and contains His infallible words.)

Modern science, however, has found that the hare and hyrax don’t actually chew cud but use different methods of digestion. Further, the Jews of Babylonia who wrote the most authoritative Talmud—and those wandering in the Sinai—never met a hippopotamus, a llama and its relatives, or any of the mammals of Australia, which use similar methods and should have appeared on any inclusive list. The implication is that if the Torah is accurate, then the Talmud authors are wrong; if the Talmud is accurate, there is an error in the Torah. It then became an argument for proving the fallibility of the scriptures. Didn’t God know about kangaroos?

“The Torah is neither proved nor disproved by the camel, the hare and the hyrax,” Rabbi Slifkin asserts.

As with all his books, this one begins with several approbations (sanctions) by various respected Talmudic scholars. The text itself is supported by frequent quotations in Hebrew and English of Torah sages such as Rashi, the 11th century scholar who is considered the most commanding commentator as well as documentation from accepted scientific experts.

Rabbi Slifkin’s conclusions include the idea—taken partly from Rashi—that the list in Torah wasn’t really intended to be inclusive, but might just be a list of those animals the Israelites might encounter on their sojourn in the desert. Neither they, nor the Talmudic authors were likely to run into a koala. (If Torah was written by humans, even divinely inspired—as most Jews believe—then the authors would never have seen one either.)

It is more complicated than that—involving how the Hebrew words are interpreted and the varied anatomy of the animals, he wrote—but he uses traditional sources and authoritative science to try to reconcile the differences, which appears to be what got him into trouble with literalists.

He is not alone.

Recently, the ultra-Orthodox website, Aish Hatorah, withdrew an essay written by Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder, an expert on relativity, on the age of the universe. The essay was replaced only after Dr. Schroeder added a disclaimer saying that maybe the world really is only 6,000 years old and God is playing with us by planting distracting evidence.

Dr. Schroeder, author of Genesis and the Big Bang Theory, wondered publicly when the rabbis became experts on Einstein.

One Orthodox rabbi, familiar with the controversy but who asked that his name not be used, said he thought the tone of Rabbi Slifkin’s books was part of the problem. They accept the conventional scientific explanation as an article of faith, “always a dangerous thing to do in the world. Things change,” he said.

“He may realized that now,” the rabbi said.

He also suggested that the ban was really aimed at households with children, that adults would know how to compartmentalize the information but children would not.
His publisher didn’t help things by putting a picture of a dinosaur on the cover of one of the books.

“Dinosaurs make these rabbis crazy,” a bookseller in Jerusalem said.
Posters on Orthodox web logs (blogs) also speculated that the fight was really an internecine battle between Haredi rabbis with one group trying to prove it was stricter than the other. Nevertheless, criticism of the ban on the Internet appeared to have created a backlash, and Rabbi Slifkin was not without passionate defenders.
The dean of a noted graduate school in Jewish studies sent a private e-mail to his colleagues, charging that the critics were shaming Rabbi Slifkin in public, in clear violation of Jewish law and contrary to the rulings of the sages, and that their statement was a disgrace. In words clearly written in fury, he said he would publicly challenge anyone who repeated the slander that Rabbi Slifkin had committed heresy.

That charge may have impelled Rabbi Feldman to fly 8,000 miles to Jerusalem to calm the debate.

Rabbi Feldman got one critic to agree that Rabbi Slifkin isn’t a heretic, but couldn’t get him to budge on the issue of whether what he wrote was acceptable. It wasn’t, he insisted.

Rabbi Charles Arian, a rabbi in the Conservative movement, pointed out that Jews lived behind ghetto walls for more than millennia. The walls were intellectual as well as brick and mortar. Nothing of the outside got in besides oppression and violence, not even the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. In 1789, Napoleon brought the walls down, not just in France, but everywhere Napoleon’s army went.

For most of the Jews of the world, he said, the time of enlightenment came, called the Haskalah. But for a tiny majority, Napoleon and the Haskalah never happened.
So Rabbi Slifkin learned.

Debate in the Middle: The Future of Conservative Judaism

2004-12-31T16:22:00.000-05:00

Debate In The Middle

Joel Shurkin
June 25, 2004

Laura Shaw Frank should be the poster child for Conservative Judaism in America. A Jersey girl, she was an active participant in a Conservative synagogue, attending Solomon Schechter day schools, United Synagogue Youth meetings and the movement's esteemed Camp Ramah. She was about everything Conservative Judaism wants its young men and women to be, dedicated to a Jewish life, comfortable with tradition, kosher, Sabbath-observant.

So why is she now a member of an Orthodox synagogue in Baltimore?

Mrs. Frank is an example of a conundrum facing what once was the largest Jewish denomination in America: The movement loses many of its successes. According to the latest statistics, she is not the only one out the door. The entire Conservative stream is losing members.

Mrs. Frank's jump to Orthodoxy was not without turbulence, however, and that too is part of the story.

Last winter, a Reform rabbi predicted the death of Conservative Judaism within 10 years. Perhaps not even he actually believes that, but is the movement, formally known as the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism (USCJ), in trouble? Is Laura Frank the future of the movement?

Questioning within the community began in the open last summer with an essay in the Conservative Judaism Journal by Rabbi Edward Feld. The group is staring at an existential crisis, he wrote.

Rabbi Feld wrote that Conservative Judaism, faced with declining membership, now is torn by two opposing philosophies. He called them "in-reach" and "outreach."

"In-reach" favors requiring a higher level of observance and knowledge by Conservative Jews even if it means driving away congregants to the Reform. Narrowing its core membership to those who share its values is how the American Orthodox community reinvigorated itself, he wrote. As Orthodoxy slides to the right, the more liberal wing may find a home among Conservatives, offsetting at least some of the attrition, he wrote. In the end, however, Conservative Judaism would be smaller but more observant.

The other idea, he wrote, favors acceptance of broad levels of observance in hopes of luring people from the other streams and bringing in converts and the intermarried to offset the attrition, a position he clearly favors.

"The heyday of the Conservative movement was the time when it was able to hold on to both poles," Rabbi Feld wrote. He apparently believes it can no longer do so.

The two factions represent a schism between the academic core of the movement in New York, which feels that Conservative Judaism needs to emphasize more observance to survive, and rabbis in the field who, confronted with the reality sitting before them at shul, feel abandoned by the establishment. The split even encompasses the two coasts, with most of those who believe in the smaller core centered on the Jewish Theological Seminary and USCJ in New York, in contrast to the more liberal University of Judaism in Los Angeles.

"If I had the choice of a serious if smaller movement or what we have now, I would opt for a halachic, conservative, serious movement," said Rabbi Joel Roth, the Louis Finkelstein professor of Jewish thought and Halachah at JTS, a firm proponent of the "in-reach" theory.

"I think it is important never to turn anyone away," said Rabbi Susan Grossman, of Columbia's Beth Shalom Congregation. "The challenge is to set a very high bar, have authentic expectations and not be cowered by the lack of observance of lay leaders."

It is that lack of observance that is at the core of the debate.

Conservative Judaism believes in observing the laws of kashrut, praying three times a day, putting on tefillin and keeping the Sabbath traditions. It is no secret that few Conservative Jews actually do that.

Orthodoxy and the Reform streams have unifying strengths Conservatives lack.

In Orthodoxy, the clergy and the laity live under Halachah. Nearly everyone keeps kosher and is Sabbath observant (shomer Shabbat).

In the Reform movement, neither the clergy nor the laity feels formally bound to Halachah. On a percentage basis, fewer Reform Jews either keep kosher or attend services regularly.

In the Conservative movement, the clergy is halachic, generally keeping kosher and the Sabbath, while the laity generally is not and is just as likely to be off at the malls as perhaps their Reform neighbors on Shabbat. The clergy lives one way while the laity lives another.

Rabbi Charles Arian, now of the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies in Baltimore, but once a pulpit rabbi in York, Pa., remembers when congregants of his synagogue invited him to drive over for lunch on Shabbat. It wasn't just that they themselves drove around on Saturday afternoon that bothered him, but that they saw nothing amiss in inviting the rabbi to join them.

"They volunteered countless hours, gave significant amounts of money, schlepped an hour or more to buy kosher food. Yet there was not a single member of the congregation who would have declined to go right to the mall or the golf course after shul on Saturday morning," he wrote in response to Rabbi Feld.

According to the National Jewish Population Survey of 2000, only 50 percent of Conservative Jews who belong to synagogues light Shabbat candles and 30 percent keep kosher at home. An unscientific survey of Baltimore Conservative synagogues matched that picture: Based on interviews with local Conservatives rabbis, about 20-30 percent of congregants keep kosher, but very few walk to synagogue.

One strength in the movement is the broad diversity in practices. Conservative synagogues in Baltimore run a gamut from the left (Beth El Congregation with its organ music during Shabbat services) to the stylistic traditional wing (Chevrei Tzedek and Beth Shalom).

In some cases, the diversity is internal. Chizuk Amuno Congregation, for instance, has a monthly service separate from the main sanctuary for those who want a more traditional, participatory Shabbat service. It's needed, according to Rabbi Joel H. Zaiman, the Stevenson synagogue's rabbi emeritus, because the multiple b'nai mitzvah in the main sanctuary — kids often doubling up — makes it almost impossible to get an aliyah or participate in the services.

The conflict is not necessarily obvious. Baltimore has Conservative synagogues that give every appearance of prosperity and vitality. Most are in huge, beautiful, expensive buildings, bustling with activity, full of people and life. While some of the larger, more impersonal synagogues are losing members here, Beth Shalom in Columbia is bursting the seams of its 7-year-old synagogue building. Beth Am, which just affiliated with the movement a few years ago, is planning a multimillion-dollar building campaign to handle increased demand on its building. Chevrei Tzedek is reorganizing to handle its growing pains.

Nationally, the movement has 66 Solomon Schechter schools (including in Pikesville), five in Canada and two in Israel. It has eight high schools. Although changing demographics and the recession have adversely affected some, most schools are full and some have waiting lists in the lower grades. Its Ramah camp system is renowned in the Jewish community and is usually fully enrolled. Even the organization's Masorti affiliate in Israel seems to be expanding, and its 10-year-old yeshiva in Jerusalem is bustling with young people — both Israelis and visiting Americans.

Yet with all that, what was once the dominant stream of American Judaism, reaching its apex as Jews moved from the cities to the suburbs after World War II, now is clearly shrinking. According to the NJPS, 40 percent of American Jewish households belong to synagogues and of them, one-third are Conservative — about 1,077,000 men, women and children. Reform accounts for 39 percent. Among those who were raised Jewish, identification with Conservative Judaism has declined. In the survey, of almost 1 million people raised Conservative and who still consider themselves Jewish, almost half no longer identify with Conservative Judaism. Twenty percent have become Reform, 3 percent Orthodox and 11 percent "just Jewish."

The prototypical Conservative Jew was a first or second generation American who had been brought up Orthodox but attended a Conservative synagogue because he did not want to feel forced to the Orthodox lifestyle but was reluctant to abandon tradition. This is no longer true as the generation has largely died off.

To some extent, the decrease in membership reflects the problems of the entire Jewish community in America, a declining population, assimilation and intermarriage. The Conservative movement's brotherhood is launching a program to do outreach to intermarried families. Yet, intermarriage is not responsible for most of the decline in Conservative synagogues; the rate is down to 19 percent from 26 percent two decades ago.

Part of the problem may be philosophical. To a large extent, Conservative Judaism has always defined itself by what it is not — it's not Reform, it's not Orthodox.

Contrary to popular belief, the movement is not an American invention. Like Reform, its origin goes back to Germany in the early part of the 19th century, a direct result of the haskalah, the Jewish face of the European Enlightenment, when Jews became introspective about their lives in an enlightened Europe.

The first Reform "temple" was created in Hamburg in 1817, and by the 1840s, much of German Jewry was taken up in the reformation.

At an 1846 conference of Reform rabbis, Zacharias Frankel, the chief rabbi of Dresden and a widely respected scholar, tried to hold back some of the extreme changes, particularly the exclusion of Hebrew from services. Out-voted, he walked out, formed his own movement called "Positive-Historical Judaism," and created a Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau in 1854.

Frankel was a halachic Jew, meaning that he believed in the primacy of Halachah, but he also believed that life and changing environments had an impact on how that law was interpreted. He believed in both revelation and historical development. He did not believe in the sacredness of the Oral Law or that the Torah was dictated verbatim by God to Moses, as does Orthodoxy.

The movement remained a small element in the community until the end of the century when German Jews by the hundreds of thousands immigrated to the United States, bringing with them their various faces of Judaism.

History repeated itself here. At a famous — some would say infamous — dinner in Cincinnati in 1883 in which the Reform movement pushed its beliefs to an extreme (the menu included clams, shrimp and crab), a group of more conservative rabbis walked out. In 1898, they established the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and in 1902, the institution was put under the leadership of Solomon Schechter, an intellectual disciple of Frankel and a widely respected scholar.

Schechter at first tried to lure the modern Orthodox in America to his seminary, even hiring first-rate Orthodox-born scholars. In the coming decades, Orthodox-raised luminaries such as Abraham Joshua Heschel and Mordecai Kaplan came to JTS. Kaplan (his famous line being "tradition gets a vote, not a veto") would later spin off his own theology, which became Reconstructionist Judaism.

Conservativism thrived in America in the 20th century. After World War II, most urban Jews lit out for the suburbs and the Conservative synagogues followed them and prospered. The gorgeous Reservoir Hill building now used by Beth Am was Chizuk Amuno before it moved to Stevenson. Barry Levinson's Park Heights spread to Pikesville, Randallstown and Owings Mills.

In 1950, aware that few of their congregants lived within walking distance of those shuls, the movement ruled that it was permissible to drive to synagogue on Shabbat if that was the only way you could get there, as well as use electricity. (Baltimore's Rabbi Jacob Agus of Beth El was one of the decision's authors.) Those rulings widened the schism with Orthodoxy, but reflected one of Conservative Judaism's main strengths: the ability to make changes within a halachic context.

That flexibility now is what is getting it into trouble.

The ruling on driving made no allowances for trips to the mall or to a baseball game, but the slippery slope proved slick indeed. Some Conservative scholars in New York, most of whom live within walking distance of their synagogues in upper Manhattan, now publicly suggest the ruling should be reversed.

"Undo driving? That's crazy," said Rabbi Mark G. Loeb of Beth El. "That's absurd. That's not going to happen. People wanted to spread out and they are not all going to live in a neighborhood like Brooklyn. The country changes, the world changes."

Echoed his colleague, Rabbi Steven Schwartz, "You can say you can't drive to the malls, but they will do what they want."

But it was exactly that issue that convinced Laura Shaw Frank to leave.

Influenced by USY, Ramah and Schechter schools, she became shomer Shabbat in high school and then found she was totally alone.

"At my parents' synagogue, there was nobody except the rabbi and his wife. At Ramah it lasted eight weeks. Eight weeks does not a community make."

She longed for a community that essentially practiced what it preached, that lived according to Halachah all the time as Conservative clergy said it should. Even living near JTS didn't provide what she needed. She found it at modern Orthodox communities in New York and Israel.

"The Conservative movement claims it is committed to Halachah and it is binding us as Jews, yet communities don't live that way. It's a lonely existence.

"I owe a great debt to the Conservative movement," she added sadly. "They educated me and taught me to love Judaism."

Life, however, is never simple.

An ardent feminist and co-founder of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, Mrs. Frank ran right into the women's issues haunting the edges of Orthodoxy and finds herself pushing the tradition. This spring, the alliance sponsored programs saluting the role of women in Torah study; her own synagogue, Suburban Orthodox, declined to participate.

While there are no data to prove it, anecdotal evidence indicates that a large number of Conservative Jews who were once Orthodox have daughters or feminist wives and left Orthodoxy over that very issue, so Mrs. Frank may have been going against the tide. Nonetheless, she was faced with a choice between a movement more attuned with her feminist instincts and one more in step with her level of observance, and chose the latter.

That is enough to make rabbis like JTS's Rabbi Roth cry. "Our successes become so uncomfortable with us they decide to leave us. If we were what they were taught at Ramah, they wouldn't leave us," he said. "They were driven out because they sit in Conservative shuls and everyone tells them they are [really] Orthodox and they go to be with people to whom their behavior is not abnormal."

Rabbi Roth suggests that if the Conservative movement became more halachic, it would draw people like Mrs. Frank and other modern Orthodox to Conservative shuls, especially with the current shift in Orthodoxy toward the right.

So the Conservative movement has an identity problem.

"It's always easier to define the extremes — the left and the right — than it is the middle," said Rabbi Elliot Dorff, rector and distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Judaism. "The problem is that the ends are not real. The real world doesn't come in these boxes. The real world is much messier.

"The core of the movement is much more cohesive," said Rabbi Dorff. "Through the middle of the 20th century it was a very big tent, perhaps too big, including too many people who didn't agree with each other, but there was a broad center. No one wanted to articulate what the principles were so they wouldn't leave anyone out. It was politically correct for that generation. Not too Jewish; not too goyish, like Goldilocks."

Not every rabbi agrees there is a serious problem. Rabbi Jay Goldstein of Owings Mills' Beth Israel Congregation thinks the Conservatives are coalescing toward the middle. Fifteen years ago, he said, the differences among synagogues would have been much greater. As to the gap in observance between clergy and laity, he said: "If I allowed it to trouble me it would cloud my ability to help people to become more seriously observant. I've always operated on the principle that it happens one step at a time."

Nor do the negative definitions impress everyone as being a bad thing.

Most Conservative rabbis believe Reform goes too far in its reforms, and mainstream Orthodoxy ossified 200 years ago in reaction to the Haskalah.

For instance, Reform congregants have too many children who are not halachically Jewish. No problem, we'll change the definition. Women rabbis? Sure. Gay rabbis? Not to worry, we'll take them. The lack of anchor to Halachah permits Reform rabbis to be unfailingly politically correct. Most Orthodox rabbis confront the same issues by trying to ignore them.

The Conservatives, however, wedded to Halachah yet aiming to be a bridge with the real world, can confront major social changes and adapt even if it takes an infuriatingly long time to its more activist members, many of its rabbis feel. Rabbi Dorff and others have been trying to get the movement to face the issues surrounding homosexuality unsuccessfully for years. It took 20 years to get JTS to agree to ordain female rabbis and even then, some synagogues split off in protest. But they will sooner or later get there, he said.

Rabbi Loeb bristles at this slowness and the seeming irrelevance of the movement's establishment.

"I get more people to a brotherhood breakfast than they do to their annual convention," he said. While the Reform get famous speakers and discuss current public policy issues, the Conservatives get no one and talk about nothing most people care about, he said.

But the Conservative movement, more than the Reform, is synagogue-based and decentralized. Its strength is local, in places like Rabbi Loeb's prosperous Beth El, not national. If it is to hold to its interpretation of Halachah, it has to move slowly.

The rabbis, however, unabashedly believe that Conservative Judaism is the truest form because — however slowly it moves — it moves.

"I argue that Conservative Judaism is the true rabbinic Judaism," said Rabbi Arian.

"I've said it 1,000 times. If I thought true Judaism were Orthodoxy, I'd be an Orthodox Jew," said Rabbi Roth.

Echoed Rabbi Grossman: "Conservative Judaism is the true heir of rabbinic Judaism. It is uniquely positioned to act as a bridge between modernity and tradition."

So what will happen to this once-dominant denomination? Who will win the history, the in-reach or the outreach people? The answer may already lie in the NJPS survey.

Dr. Rela Mintz Geffen, sociologist and president of Baltimore Hebrew University, pointed out a little-commented finding in the study. While the various streams of Judaism are loudly moving toward the right, toward more observance, essentially toward Orthodoxy, the American Jewish population is quietly moving the other way, and has been for 50 years.

The survey found that of present Conservative Jews, 21 percent were raised Orthodox, far more than the percentage of Conservative Jews who became Orthodox (3 percent). In fact, the only reason Orthodoxy is holding to its percentage of the population may be its very high birth rate. Additionally, more Conservatives are becoming Reform (26 percent) than the reverse (6 percent).

Many sociologists have predicted that eventually, the Jewish population in America will be considerably smaller than it is now, but more observant, dedicated and educated. Dr. Geffen said that is already happening and that the current American Jewish population is by far better educated Jewishly than their parents and grandparents were. There are just fewer of them.

If so, "in-reach" may win by default.

"What is now called Conservative Judaism is hardly going to disappear," said Rabbi Zaiman at Chizuk Amuno. "I'm not concerned what label it gets if you forget about labels and deal with its approach to Judaism, God and revelation."

Copyright ©2003 the Baltimore Jewish Times

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2004-11-12T17:21:00.000-05:00

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2004-11-12T16:41:00.000-05:00

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