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A View from the U Page 7 of 9 pages « First < 5 6 7 8 9 >
Martin Jaffee
We have all, I'm sure, been scratching our heads at the Islamic outcry unleashed in response to Pope Benedict XVI's recent theological speech at the… Posted October 12, 2006 |
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Martin Jaffee
This year, the High Holidays come not a moment too soon. Who can wait to get rid of last year's burdens, not to mention the… Posted August 31, 2006 |
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Martin Jaffee
Among pulpit rabbis, I suppose, this is the challenge that separates the pros from the pretenders. Friday afternoon, July 28, was two weeks into the… Posted August 3, 2006 |
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Martin Jaffee
Lately I've started lecturing at Christian monasteries. Monks, you see, are interested in 'spirituality.' And, since 'spirituality' requires humility, my monastic hosts are just humble… Posted July 6, 2006 |
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Martin Jaffee
Have you ever shared a long flight with a guy demanding proof that Theresienstadt was not a research center serving Hitler's quest for the Final… Posted June 8, 2006 |
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Martin Jaffee
By now, anyone who cares about Conservative Judaism has absorbed the news about the controversial change at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the movement’s main educational institution.
In brief, the seminary’s chancellor, Rabbi Dr. Ismar Schorsch, has announced his intention to retire after 20 years. He is to be succeeded by Prof. Arnold Eisen, long-time chair of the Religious Studies department of Stanford University.
What’s the big deal, you ask? Well, according to the Internet schmoozers and mainstream Jewish news agencies, the big deal is buried in the titles of the retiring Schorsch and the succeeding Eisen: namely, “Rabbi Dr.” versus “Professor.” That is, Schorsch, like all but one of his six predecessors as chancellor of JTS, holds both rabbinic ordination within the Conservative movement and a research degree in Jewish history (Columbia). He embodies the ideal Conservative intellectual — learned in traditional rabbinics and thoroughly at home in the historical study of Judaism as the evolving culture of “Catholic Israel” (klal Yisrael).
Eisen, by contrast, is a brilliant and widely read intellectual historian and sociologist of American Judaism. But he apparently has no rabbinics training beyond what is necessary to “cover” a few lectures in a general undergraduate course in the history of Judaism.
Eisen’s lack of rabbinical training has raised a few eyebrows. I wonder why. After all, JTS has always been torn between its two missions: the training of Ph.D.s in the history of Jews and Judaism to fill academic posts, and the training of rabbis to serve the religious needs of American Jews. And, in point of fact, the intellectual prestige of JTS has always rested more upon the research of its doctoral faculty rather than in the quality of its rabbinical program.
What this has meant for recent generations of Conservative rabbis, quite simply, is that they take graduate-level seminars in academic theories of rabbinic literature while remaining relatively inexperienced in the study of Talmud and Midrash. The result is a synagogue environment in which Talmud Torah is more likely to include academic books about “Judaism” than classical Jewish texts.
In this sense, at least, Eisen’s appointment honestly acknowledges the seminary’s actual privileging of academics over rabbinic studies. I see no reason to kick up a fuss about it. But, that said, there remains something truly odd in the choice of a professor of Religious Studies to represent the public face of JTS.
Prof. Eisen is an acknowledged master at what sociologists of American religious and ethnic groups do best — probing the most sensitive and crucial inner-contradictions and, at times, self-deceptions of the group, in order to expose “how the culture really works” in concert with the larger American order of things.
His first major book, for example, charted the discomfort mid-century American Jews felt at professing the idea of “Jewish Chosenness” in an egalitarian democracy. His more recent work traces the emergence of “private” definitions of Jewish identity that are rather more indebted to American individualism than to traditional Jewish values.
As a scholar of religion, then, Prof. Eisen is committed to unmasking the origins and logic of the self-presentations and misconceptions that structure popular expressions of American Jewish identity. He is fully aware that professors of Religious Studies go home in the evening without having to pick up the pieces of the worldviews they shatter. I wonder if he is fully aware that chancellors of JTS are charged with promoting and marketing precisely such a religious worldview.
One of his first and most crucial tasks, after all, will be to articulate and administer — as the Conservative movement’s “First Cheerleader” — the mass-marketing of an institutional ideology of American Judaism. Prof. Eisen of Stanford, of course, has never had to market American Judaism; I wonder how Chancellor Eisen of JTS will ultimately manage the necessary compromises his role will require.
But even if the new chancellor finds a way to harmonize his intellectual convictions with the needs of movement ideology, there is one last problem, missed by journalistic comments on Prof. Eisen’s lack of rabbinic education: what is surprising about the appointment of an academic with no rabbinic expertise to the chancellorship of JTS is precisely how “conservative” it really is.
Far from being a radical departure, Eisen’s appointment merely ratifies the shape of JTS’s long-standing institutional culture — namely, at JTS, the academic-historical tail has always wagged the rabbinic-halachic dog. And the dog, certainly since the early 1950s, has been fed and walked, it must be said, by a laity notoriously oblivious to the halachic pronouncements issued by the Seminary’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards.
The future of Conservative Judaism does not depend upon who serves as the chancellor of JTS. It depends, rather, upon the ability of the synagogue rabbinate to inspire the laity in the paths of traditional Jewish learning and devotion.
But, as every sociologist of American Judaism knows, the Conservative laity is increasingly indifferent or even hostile to the religious sensibilities that inspired the movement’s founders. The founders imagined an American Judaism that would blend traditional Talmudic wisdom with the most pioneering insights of modern historical studies to produce a supple, evolving tradition, aware of the authority of the past even as it was open to the call of the future. They did not imagine collaborating in the production of a mass-market religion geared to the coarsest trends of popular religious taste.
In an ironic sense, then, the appointment of Prof. Eisen to lead the Conservative movement reflects a kind of providential logic. Perhaps this superb unmasker of the pretenses of American Jewish suburban religiosity has in mind to deconstruct the popular pieties of the movement’s laity and force it to confront the enormous religious vacuum at the center of the system? If so, Conservative Jews may be in for a “spiritual renewal” they hadn’t quite bargained for!
Martin Jaffee teaches in both the Comparative Religion and Jewish Studies programs at the University of Washington. When not masquerading as a journalist, he writes on the history of Talmudic literature as well as theoretical problems in the study of religion.
Posted May 11, 2006 |
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Martin Jaffee
Daddy’s kuck
Kids love to hear stories about “when I was little.” Sometimes they even demand stories about “when you were little.” Both of my girls, Lilah (now almost 20) and Aviva (approaching Bat Mitzvah), especially liked the one called “Daddy’s Kuck.”
My mother told it often when I was growing up. As a kid, I never really got the point of the story. I report it here in part because, even 18 years since my father’s death, just after Pesach of 1988, it is still the first image of him that comes to mind. We’ll get to that image, and its meaning, in a moment. But first, as always, some context.
Anyone out there remember bungalow colonies? These refuges from the heat of a New York or New Jersey summer dotted Westchester County and points north for several decades from the 1940s until the late 1960s, when the Jewish tourist dollar turned a corner and went in for more ambitious gratifications.
Some of my family’s earliest 16mm home movies were scenes of my brother and I, and our cousins, toddling around in diapers in some pastoral paradise dotted with white bungalows and punctuated by chaises longues supporting amazingly young and spry versions of parents, aunts and uncles, and even grandparents enjoying an American summertime, when the livin’ was easy. “In our prime,” as they said years later, with a scolding glance at us.
Okay, back to my story. These bungalow colonies were virtually devoid of dads, except on weekends. During the week, while moms played mah jongg and the kids swam and found ways to torment each other, dads were stuck in the sweaty city, “bringing home the Beefry,” as my dad would chuckle, alluding to the ersatz bacon we Jews ate that, he claimed, was “better’n the real t’ing (and I should know!).”
That’s why Friday afternoons were so special. A caravan of dads would wind its way up Route 17 toward our colony carrying the great treasures of the far off Metropolis — challahs, bagels, chickens, deli, appetizing, cream cheese and other delights — destined for Shabbos feasts and huge Sunday morning breakfasts. And then, by early Sunday afternoon, the inevitable letdown as the dads climbed into their Chevy and Plymouth sedans, turned on the ignition, and, in a cloud of hot exhaust, motored back to a steamy week in the City.
The story of “Daddy’s Kuck” takes place on one of those Friday afternoons, fraught with anticipation and longing and over-determined by contrary expectations on all sides. Burned-out moms needed some help from Dad with the kids, exhausted dads longed for the pleasure of an undisturbed doze in the shade on a summery afternoon, and, of course, boys expected what their therapists would one-day label “quality time” with their “male role models.”
So here we go. I am, let’s say, about two-and-a-half years old. It’s Friday afternoon and Dad is late. The freezer at a Bronx bakery needs the professional attention that only Tri-County Refrigeration & Cooling can provide under its “No Exceptions Service Contract.” All the other dads — white-collar office clock-punchers-have pulled up to their bungalows, been smothered in hugs and kisses, and are already in their swim suits heading for a late afternoon dip in the lake before dinner. I am sulking, perhaps already at this tender age vaguely anticipating that freezer crises on Tremont Avenue will combine with other economic emergencies to force Dad to miss what I define as my life’s major moments.
But, wait! Standing on tippy-toe, my eyes barely peeking over the screened-in window sill, I see it. Dad’s long, dark, windowless Ford van, filled with clanging canisters of freon gas, clapping with the echo of metal tools banging against the sides of the van, bumps along up the dirt road from the highway. The cacophony that makes the Jaffee way of life possible — music to my ears!
Dad is behind the wheel, his cap at a jaunty angle, wearing his sweat-stained green workshirt with “Abie” emblazoned on the pocket, a cold White Owl clenched in his teeth. With a rush of wind and a blasting of horns worthy of Ezekiel’s chariot, Dad pulls up to our bungalow. “HEY!” he roars out. “Anybody home?? Front ’n’ centah!!”
Dad hops from the driver’s seat, prepared for a greeting worthy of returning warriors (one he well remembered from a few short years earlier, before I was part of his world). Spying his little boy bursting out the screen door, he crouches down low to receive “the fruit of my loins” (as he called me) back into his paternal embrace.
But, the idyllic reunion is not to be. Little Martin — that paskunyak!! — hasn’t read the script that governs Hollywood’s happy endings. Oblivious to the swelling crescendo of studio violins in Dad’s ears, I run right past him without a glance, embrace the overheated grill of the magical van and, broadly smiling, proclaim the source of my joy: “Daddy’s Kuck!!”
As I said earlier, I’m not sure why Mom told this story so often. She never helped me to interpret it.
Was this evidence that, from the tenderest age, I already was what I always would be: “a rotten kid”? Or, was it more about how all kids take for granted the love and sacrifice of parents, scarcely imagining how meaningful a small word of simple thanks might be? I’m not sure.
But the years since Dad’s death stretch now nearly to two decades. And as my own experience as a father reaches exactly to that mark, I find it ever-easier to imagine the scene from Dad’s position, crouching on his aching feet, exhausted from schlepping to the “country” after a week of schlepping in the City, wanting only what he must already have intuited he would never receive — an expression of unqualified delight from the boy he loved without any equivocation.
Martin Jaffee teaches in both the Comparative Religion and Jewish Studies programs at the University of Washington. When not masquerading as a journalist, he writes on the history of Talmudic literature as well as theoretical problems in the study of religion.
Posted April 6, 2006 |
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Martin Jaffee
As the solar system works its magic on the planet, the dark days of winter begin to lengthen, and the wisdom of the Jewish calendar turns our attention to thoughts of… revenge.
Shabbat Zachor approaches, with its commandment to “blot out the memory of Amalek from under the heavens — do not forget!” And, a month later, Purim — a fun holiday for kids that, at its foundation, commemorates and celebrates the collective vengeance of Persian Jewry against a fanatical, highly placed, enemy. What were our sages thinking when they prepared us to greet the season of rebirth with grim imperatives of violence and death?
Beats me. On February 8 I shared my confusion publicly in a talk at the UW on the theme of Amalek in Jewish spirituality. Those who stayed awake till the end may recall that my point was that the thrust of Jewish thought — halachic, mystical, and Hassidic — has been to direct the fulfillment of the commandment to obliterate our enemies inward, toward our own selves. The real Amalek is obliterated through t’shuvah (repentance), not murder.
I was thinking about all this when I recently read the horrifying little story in the Seattle P-I about the Somali imam, leader of a Rainier Valley mosque, who had — until his detention for deportation hearings — been reported to have urged his flock to attack the synagogue “of a nearby Jewish community” as an urgent Islamic imperative. Those of us reading that story in Seward Park felt the hair on our necks prickle. “Hey, that’s us!!”
All of the sudden it made a certain kind of intuitive sense to read, in other news stories, about certain Torah scholars who suggest that, in our day, Amalek is none other than the entire Islamic world, or at least that part of it that lives in the Land of Israel.
Well, thank God the world is more complicated than that! Permit me to share with you key portions of an article written for a South Asian Webzine (Chowk.com) by Ms. Kyla Pasha, a former student in the M.A. program of Comparative Religion at the UW.
Kyla is a young Pakistani Muslim — ”a believing Muslim” — was how she introduced herself to me in our graduate seminar on “Theories of Religion.” She had come to the UW to study Islam academically, but took full advantage of our Jewish Studies offerings. It was my honor to introduce her to the beauty of Jewish mysticism and the intricacies of rabbinic oral traditions.
This past fall, Kyla returned to Pakistan, hoping to pursue a teaching career in Comparative Religion. Just yesterday I received from her the following thoughts. With her permission, I share them here as my contribution to upholding the traditional Jewish view that Amalek must be erased from inside of us before we can point our fingers at him in the form of our human Others.
Her essay is titled “Muslim Profanities.”
• • •
I don’t know why the sight of a broken dome makes me cry…. But I look at pictures of the ravaged Al-Askariyya dome, and I want to know: what is the religion of a mosque-destroyer?
The tenth Imam is buried there, with his sister. And the eleventh. The twelfth Imam, Imam Mahdi, hid there for a time, before disappearing, going into occultation, to await the end of days. His mother is buried there.
Did it matter that these were the Imams? Did it matter that they were the descendents of the Prophet, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him? Did it matter that they had been leaders of a whole community of Muslims? That swarms of Muslims pick up their lives and their dreams, their prayers and their anguish, and come to these graves to bless the memory of these dead, and their own dead, to pray for themselves and their loved ones, to commune?...
The penitential month of Muharram is about mourning. We’ve given ourselves much to mourn. Some bigot drew hateful cartoons of the Prophet and we rampaged across our own cities, set fire to McDonald’s restaurants (local franchises), broke windows on cars (local owners), and still made it home in time for supper. In Pakistan, whole livelihoods have been destroyed, Muslim livelihoods, in defense of the Prophet, may he still intercede for us on the Day of Judgment. Further west, Iran is offering financial aid to the Hamas government and drawing cartoons of the Holocaust. And then, Wednesday morning, someone set off a bomb in one of the most venerated Shi’a holy sites.
I don’t know what to tell you about us. Sometimes I think, Qayamat aa rahi hai. Namazein parrho. (Doomsday’s coming. Say your prayers.) And then sometimes I wonder if the world ends every generation. I’m 26 and Sunni, living in Lahore. Today my heart is breaking because the Golden Dome of Samarra is gone, kicked in the teeth by people who can’t see past the end of their politics, who have no sense of the cosmic and no faith in the world to come….
[W]e’re 23 days into the new year and already it feels like Aam al-Huzn. When the Prophet’s wife Khadijah and his uncle Abu Talib died in the same year, the year became known as Aam al-Huzn, the Year of Sadness. Cartoons, riots, protests, bombings. Hamas. Iraq. So many things in Pakistan. What will the next eleven months bring?
Does an impotent ummah (Muslim community), dying from the bombs of others and the bombs of its own, have the presence of mind to say inna lillah, all things unto God, and inna ileyhi raji’un, to Him is the return?”
• • •
With this thought, Kyla concludes her musings.
Let me add: in this season of Amalek and Haman, may the House of Israel merit the courage of public self-critique and private t’shuvah modeled by my young Pakistani colleague.
Martin Jaffee teaches in both the Comparative Religion and Jewish Studies programs at the University of Washington. When not masquerading as a journalist, he writes on the history of Talmudic literature as well as theoretical problems in the study of religion.
Posted March 9, 2006 |
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Martin Jaffee
For some 50 years my Jewish radar has served me faithfully. I've always been able to spot another Jew a mile away. Lately, though, I've… Posted February 2, 2006 |
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Martin Jaffee
What single gift could you have offered this Hanukkah that would have brought equal pleasure to:
1) your Talmud chavrusa
(study partner);
2) your spouse; and
3) your buddy, the Greek Orthodox monk from California, whose black robes make a Lubavitcher Hasid look — lehavdil — as snazzy as a hipster in a zoot-suit?
Obviously, my answer will come too late to have done you any good. But, since you asked, this year I gambled on The Rabbi’s Cat, a “graphic novel” (that is, comic strip) penned by the young French-Algerian-Jewish comix artist Joann Sfar. The “graphic novel,” of course, is the new genre of literature that seems to be taking the literary world by storm in the wake of Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust parable, Maus. But I had never even heard of Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat until I stumbled upon some copies at the HUB Bookstore one morning while cruising for a Snickers on my way to work.
Intrigued, I opened and began to read, totally drawn into the intricate religious musings of the house pet of a traditional Algerian rabbi, until I’d completed the first tale — of a self-righteous, unforgiving yeshiva student, cruel to both people and animals (especially a certain cat), whom the cat spies entering a house of ill-repute in the Muslim quarter of town.
As the cat confesses to finally liking this “jerk” (as he calls him), having discovered an endearing all-too-human weakness behind the façade of rigid piety, the young man emerges from the Garden of Hidden Delights, sees our cat, and delivers him a hearty kick in the behind that sends him into the next and final frame of the story.
There are two more “novels” in this collection, the contents of which I’ll not disclose. But on the strength of this first story, I bought three copies, one for each person close to me in the way that only one’s chavrusa, one’s wife, or one’s personal monastic confidante can be. I trust that each will find in this rich book the message that is waiting for them in particular!
I contemplated gifting one to my own rabbi’s wife, but thought better of it. There is one unfortunate frame in which the “F word” appears in the cat’s reflections on the superiority of feline carnality over the human variety. I decided that, while the rebbetzin — worldly in her piety — had no doubt seen this word in print and may even have heard it uttered, it was not up to me to bring it to her attention by means of a Hanukkah present!
Fortunately, I had no such reservations concerning my chavrusa, my wife, or my monk — from each of whom I have — halila! — heard much worse! Each has received his or her gift by the time you read this. And I’m eagerly awaiting the inevitable reviews.
What does The Rabbi’s Cat offer readers of this esteemed biweekly? Well, in the first place, for the parochial Ashkenazim among us (and is not the conjunction of “Ashkenazi” and “parochial” already a redundancy?), The Rabbi’s Cat draws us into the world of Sephardic North Africa more richly than 100 coffee-table books or even three Stroum Lectures by Aron Rodrigue. Within seven pages we are laughing knowingly at Arabic oaths we never heard (“Yala al moussi ba!”) and, by the third tale, we are savoring the subtleties of intra-ethnic tensions (between “modern” Jews from France and “traditional” Algerian Jews) to which our Ashkenazic memories of Yekkes and Galitzianers in Manhattan have only the most general approximations.
Secondly, Sfar’s novel addresses one of the grand themes of modern Jewish literature and thought — the puzzle of balancing tradition and change — in an utterly fresh idiom. The Rabbi’s Cat, through the voice of a house pet who learns to speak by consuming the family parrot and lying about it in his first sentence, pokes brilliant fun at religious authorities who try to use religious tradition, in subtle and unsubtle forms of deception, as a tool of power and manipulation.
This cat, you see, wants a Bar Mitzvah. I dare you to read his argument with the rabbi’s own rabbi over the fitness of a cat to become a Jew. Can you not fall on the floor in a breathless faint, as Cat deconstructs the rabbi’s rabbi’s halachic dicta, including a final appeal to Greek philosophy, to support the view that even a dog is more fit to become a Jew than a cat? Reports Cat: “I reply that the Greeks destroyed the Temple…, and if a rabbi ends up calling on them for help, it means he’s run out of arguments.”
Finally, for those who ponder the possibility of Arab-Jewish co-existence, let me recommend the dispute between the rabbi’s Cat and the Sufi Sheik’s Donkey. How the four — rabbi, sheikh, Donkey and Cat — happen to join up on this pilgrimage to the grave of a common miracle-working ancestor is a story in itself. But, discovering that rabbi and sheik share a common family name, Sfar, the dialogue between Cat and his new friend grows heated:
Cat: Wait, an Arab is called Sfar?
Donkey: Yes, Sfar’s an Arab name.
Cat: Are you kidding? Sfar comes from “Sofer,” which means “to write” in Hebrew. Sfar is a Jewish name.
Donkey: You ass, Sfar comes from “yellow” in Arabic. It evokes the sulfur flower used by coppersmiths. Sfar’s Arab through and through. Besides, we’re going to the grave of Messaoud Sfar, our ancestor.
Cat: That’s where we’re going, too!
Donkey: Messaoud Sfar was a great Sufi saint!
Cat: No way! Messaoud Sfar was a rabbi!
This dispute is itself unresolved at the level of Cat and Donkey. Rather, we are left to assume that, whoever Messaoud Sfar was, there is enough of his sanctity to spread around to all of his Jewish and Muslim descendants — who should figure it out, already!
Martin Jaffee teaches in both the Comparative Religion and Jewish Studies programs at the University of Washington. When not masquerading as a journalist, he writes on the history of Talmudic literature as well as theoretical problems in the study of religion.
Posted January 5, 2006 |
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A View from the U
Professor Martin Jaffee, who teaches in both the Comparative Religion and Jewish Studies programs at the University of Washington, muses on Judaism and its place in the world.
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