Wednesday, February 16, 2005
My first (and thus far only) quiz was one of the most popular posts I've ever done. So, here's a small challenge to my readers:
Who is the earliest person mentioned in the Tanakh who is also mentioned in an archaeological source?
Points will be awarded to readers who can name anyone, even if not the earliest. Bonus points for expounding on the significance of any of the finds.
The points can be traded in at the end of the contest for precisely nothing. What, you were expecting a grand prize?
email me: [mis-nagid_AT_hush_DOT_com]
posted by Mis-nagid @ Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
In today's New York Times Theater section there's an article about Rachel Factor, a convert to Orthodox Judaism. It's written by Sarah Bronson, she of the blog Chayyei Sarah. It's a decent piece, but it's mostly fluff. There's not one tough question raised in it, and the unpleasant bits are couched in soft terms.
Why is the article so forgiving of open displays of sexism? It uncritically allows that her "audiences [are] filled exclusively with women, as her strict faith demands." Would the editors have been so breezily non-judgemental if her strict faith had required her to perform only for white people? Since when is brazen sexism so accommodable?
The article makes a big deal out of the fact that Ms. Factor is successful in her new guise, contrary to her expectations. Why is this such a surprise? She's playing for an audience without access to the wider world of entertainment. Sure, she does well -- in an artificially constrained environment, with significantly less competition. I'm not saying she has a bad show, after all, I've never seen it (I'm a guy, remember?). But where's the great trick? Sarah makes it seem like Ms. Factor was a big star who gave it all up, but the high point of her career on the open market was being a Rockette. At least fundamentalist Muslims have Cat Stevens, and Scientologists have Tom Cruise.
The audience she gets is not evidence that her act is a cut above, and Sarah tacitly admits as much: "[...]tickets sold quickly, particularly to American expatriate Orthodox women who felt validated by the story of a glamorous dancer who had chosen to join their community." That's a bit like how fundamentalists flock to hear the one or two "scientists" who explain how evolution is false. Gerald Schroeder never gives the keynote at a cosmology conference, but he fills up every Agudah he books. His lectures are not the actual consensus of science, but it validates what his audiences want to believe. So too, glamorous dancers do not want to enter a cult. One minor one did, but that doesn't make Orthodox life glamorous. One minor scientist thinks Genesis is compatible with the Big Bang, too.
Sarah quotes Michelle Luwish to explain Ms. Factor's allure. "For someone who had been on Broadway to give up singing in front of men, to give up the seemingly glamorous aspects of life to take on a seemingly restrictive lifestyle in such a joyous way," she said, "it's inspiring to anyone who is on a spiritual path."
Seemingly restrictive? What a lame equivocation. It's telling in contrast with her turn of words at the end of the sentence. It's not inspiring to people on a spiritual path, but to those who are in what she euphemistically called a "seemingly" restrictive lifestyle. There's no necessary connection between being on a spiritual path and living the extraordinarily constrained life of an Orthodox woman, any more than a burkah is required. She'd like it to vindicate the restrictive lifestyle she's living, but it says nothing about a spiritual life. It's a phony sentence that Sarah just lets pass.
Another disturbing undertone in the article is the ambivalence to bigotry. Ms. Factor was so affected by bigotry as a child that she felt compelled to try to disguise her eyes with makeup glue and tape. And yet, she "embraces her culture" by...dating Asian men. How about embracing the culture of disdaining dividing people by race? She perpetuates the very thing that wounded her, like a victim of child abuse passing on his lessons to the next generation.
Things don't improve when she leaves that discrimination behind and dates a Caucasian Jew. She just swaps overlooking racial discrimination for overlooking religious discrimination. There's no censure in the article for her husband's insistence that his wife be Jewish. Would someone get a puff piece in the Times for getting eye surgery to marry someone who insisted his wife be Occidental? As before, why is religious discrimination any more acceptable then racial discrimination?
It's bitterly ironic that Ms. Factor includes in her act her pain in face of bigotry, but gets an article in the New York Times for joining a extremist religious sect suffused with bigotry. My readers know it well: the attitude of Orthodox Jews to "goyim" is only a step above the KKK's feelings towards blacks. What Orthodox shul hasn't heard the words "goyishe kup" said with just the right amount of disgust? Every Orthodox person has heard the speech about how the world exists for Jews. The Orwellian attempts to explain how some people are more chosen than others does nothing to dispell the bigotry of a theology that portray some people as more important to God than others. Orthodox Judaism is built on bigotry, the dividing up of people by religion, and the culture reflects and amplifies it.
The article ends with an uplifting quote from an organizer from the Orthodox proselytization group Aish HaTorah. "It's important for people to see that you can be Orthodox and still use your talents in a powerful way." Still? She sounds like a crippled person, talking about how the loss of her legs hasn't slowed her down at all. The question is, why cut off your legs in the first place?
email me: [mis-nagid_AT_hush_DOT_com]
posted by Mis-nagid @ Tuesday, February 15, 2005
I lost, but I'm thinking of contesting Ohio. I heard that browsers were tampered with over there.
Thanks to everyone who voted for me.
email me: [mis-nagid_AT_hush_DOT_com]
posted by Mis-nagid @ Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Monday, February 14, 2005
Fabricating Fictions Fathers Further Fraud
There's an old saying that comes in a million and one versions: a lie begets a lie. It's the universal observation that a lie creates a tear in the consistency of the pastiche of claims, and the only way to paper over the breach is with another lie. Needless to say, the patch is no exception to the rule, recursively leading to a patchwork of lies. Nowhere is this clearer than the claims of frumkeit. The lies are piled so high, you'd need an archaeologist to date the layers. The truth has been stretched and sliced so many times that nothing remains but a gruesome mass of scar tissue.
This wreckage had to get started somewhere. What was the first lie, the one that precipitated the avalanche? I'd like to propose thats it was the genre mistake. A genre mistake is commited when someone mistakes what genre something belongs to.
Picture this: It's the year 2437, and archaeologists are digging up our era. Most of our paper has decomposed, so there's great celebration at the discovery of a complete set of Peanuts by Charles Schultz. They pore over the cartoons, taking copious notes. They conclude that in 2005, there were no adults, children had huge, misshapen heads, and life was predominantly melancholy. Clearly, they've not appreciated the sweet simplicity of Mr. Schultz's wry observations.
Why were they so deluded in their characterization of the era Peanuts depicts? Because they confused the genre to which it belong. Peanuts is not a history book, it's a comic strip. When viewing something through the lens of the wrong genre, not only do you get a distorted view, but you utterly fail to appreciate what a work of art you're studying. If someone sends you an email titled "Incredible Work of Art" and you open the JPEG attachment of the Mona Lisa in your MP3 player, you'll be hard-pressed to appreciate Da Vinci's genius in the painful noise emanating from your speakers.
So it is with the Torah. As a composite work of sacred literature, it's extraordinary. That's the genre to which it rightfully belongs, and in that capacity, it's a work of art without parallel. The lie that led to the shambles that is today's Orthodox Judaism is the one that confused sacred literature with revealed divine writ. As soon as that lie was put forth, huge rips appeared in the fabric of the Torah. The Torah became like the yellowing Peanuts of 2437, destroying what meaning it was written to convey. Delusionally mistaking its significance stripped it of its beauty and reduced it to a mere spellbook. The Torah has a meaning, the one its authors imbued it with. The genre mistake robs it of that meaning, and the dignity deserved of a work of art of such high calibre.
Of course, as prophesied in the saying that began this, a lie begets a lie. Much as the silly people of 2437 must create unending ad-hoc hypotheses to explain how their erroneous view coincides with other bits of historical evidence, the Torah's genre mistake led to ever-increasing absurdities in the futile service of covering inconsistency. For example, the unproductive efforts to reconcile the Torah's dual creation myths with evidential reality stems from the genre mistake. Just as today's children have normal heads, the eras depicted in the Tanakh were not populated by open miracles and flagrant violations of the laws of physics. It's only the genre mistake that makes someone hold of such inanity. Even something as seemingly trivial as explaining how the list of Edomite kings fits with the great lie motivated some people to come up with truly impressive (in a morbid way) new lies.
What's sad is that the genre mistake is relatively new. The Torah never says it was written by God, or that it was handed down on Sinai. Orthodox Jews mindlessly talk about Torah M'Sinai, but even a cursory look into the literature shows that there's no such authentic tradition. Even the traditional commentators argued about when the Torah was given, which some saying that it was given piecemeal, beginning in the midbar. Even though the Sinai legend was a very early addition to the religion, the Torah was not pictured as divine writ until later. It was at that point that the thread that led to Orthodoxy tripped on the lie that snowballed into today's nonsensical creation.
When I first discovered the truth about Judaism, my reaction was harsh. I was deeply hurt that I had been lied to for so long, and so extensively. For all the brave talk about unique access to truth, the set of beliefs that define Orthodox Judaism are incompatible with the evidence, which is why, despite repeated appeals to the contrary, ignorance remains the most popular option, enforced through the heresy taboo. That's why the vast majority of Orthodox Jews remain clueless, believing that the Torah is a spooky mystery, about which nothing is known outside of the holy seforim. When I learned how the truth had been carefully kept from me, I reflexively distanced myself from the object of their lies, the unfairly maligned Torah.
With time, distance allowed me to see it in less emotional terms. I asked myself why I enjoy reading works like the Epic of Gilgamesh. No honest answer I gave could exclude the Torah. I came to realize that my disdain for it was an overreaction. In the careless dismissal of my backlash, I forgot that the Torah can still be meaningfully studied, even if not the way I had been taught it. All that was necessary was to appreciate it for what it is: sacred literature. I forced myself to ask what it would have been like to learn it without the genre mistake. I had to admit that it would probably be great. I can still remember what it was like in 4th grade, when I was too young for the genre mistake to raise troubling questions for me. I enjoyed it immensely and blew my rebbi away with my enthusiasm. Furthermore, I have an unusual advantage in Torah study over my other intellectual pursuits -- I'm fluent in Biblical Hebrew. I can't read the Epic of Gilgamesh in its original form, but no such deficit exists in my study of Chumash. How many world-changing, 2500+ year old opuses of Near-Eastern sacred literature can I say that about?
Today, I enjoy learning Chumash, and the act is actually worthy of the term "learning." I learn with far more enthusiasm now, rather then when I was forced to; I also enjoy it for the first time since 4th grade. Every time I relearn a piece with fresh eyes, I savor the artistry of the founding document of my heritage. Correcting the genre mistake illuminates the Torah, revealing its beauty and superb form. There's no experience to compare with understanding Parshas Noach correctly for the first time, an intellectual orgasm of singular intensity. No person of even moderate intelligence should be forced to learn it as a historical event, missing out on the wizardry displayed by the combination of two tales into one. All the contradictions fall away, and the need for lies that began with the genre mistake disappears, leaving pure scholarship, worthy of the skills displayed by the authors and redactors.
I deeply resent the horrible waste of my childhood on pathetic lies. What would have been so bad if they had told me the truth about the Torah? Ok, I know the answer to that: Orthodox Judaism would wither and die. How long do they think they can keep the facade up? We don't live in the shtetl anymore, and we have easy access to the very information they fear the most. Sure, labeling it heresy, and creating the perception that it doesn't exist will work for some, but it won't work for all, or forever. To add insult to injury, all the time they prop up their damnable lies, they're disgracing the very thing they claim to respect: the Torah. After all, who is showing more respect to Schultz's material?
email me: [mis-nagid_AT_hush_DOT_com]
posted by Mis-nagid @ Monday, February 14, 2005
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