Thinking outside the beis medrash
I’ve seen a lot of angst in the Jewish blogosphere over the ever-rising cost of day school tuition; this article, linked by someone on my LJ-friends list, is the latest example of the genre. The problem has a tragic dimension, because of a little-known wrinkle in economics called the Baumol effect.
James Surowiecki explains:
When Mozart composed his String Quintet in G Minor (K. 516), in 1787, you needed five people to perform it—two violinists, two violists, and a cellist. Today, you still need five people, and, unless they play really fast, they take about as long to perform it as musicians did two centuries ago. So much for progress.
An economist would say that the productivity of classical musicians has not improved over time, and in this regard the musicians aren’t alone. In a number of industries, workers produce about as much per hour as they did a decade or two ago….
The rest of the American economy functions differently. In most businesses, workers are continually getting more productive and can produce a lot more per hour than they could ten or twenty years ago. In 1979, workers at G.M. needed forty-one hours to assemble a car. Today, they need just twenty-four…. Because companies are producing more for less, they can hold down costs, and when times are good they can raise wages without hiking prices. So, in the late nineties, as productivity rose, wages did, too, though inflation lay dormant.
Generally, productivity growth is a boon, but it creates problems for non-productive enterprises like classical music, education, and car repair: to keep luring talent, they have to increase wages, or else people eventually migrate to businesses that pay better. Instead of becoming nurses or mechanics, they become telecom engineers or machinists. That’s why teachers are getting paid a lot more than they were twenty years ago. (The average salary for an associate college professor has risen almost seventy per cent since the early eighties, and that’s if you adjust for inflation.) To pay those wages, schools and hospitals have to raise prices. The result is that in industries where productivity is flat costs and prices keep going up.
So if we want to keep Jewish education accessible, instead of letting it consume an ever-increasing proportion of each family’s income, we have to think about ways to make it more productive. How could our community achieve at least some of the goals of Jewish day school without hiring one full-time teacher for every fifteen to twenty-five children?
I’ll offer one idea: A team that knows something about Judaism and programming could set up a Jewish-themed online role-playing environment, where Jewish kids from all across the country, whether or not in day school, could meet like-minded folks, socialize, and take lessons in Jewish religion and culture in the form of quests for honor and treasure. We could call it “World of Frumkeit”.
Dances With Monotheism
Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen some controversy in political and SF blogs regarding a certain Hollywood movie, in which a white American human takes on the form of a blue-skinned alien. I was reminded of this when I read last week’s parsha (Exodus 1:1–6:1), because one could argue that the young Moses is an Egyptian prince who has the form of an Israelite. Pharoah’s daughter describes him as “from the Hebrew children” in 2:7, and Jethro’s daughters describe him as “an Egyptian man” in 2:19. This dual identity gives us a new way to understand one of the most cryptic passages in the Torah, Exodus 4:24–26, which the new JPS version tentatively renders as follows:
At a night encampment on the way, the LORD encountered him and sought to kill him. So Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched his legs with it, saying: “You are truly a bridegroom of blood to me!” And when He let him alone, she added, “A bridegroom of blood because of the circumcision.”
Moses is on his way back to Egypt, to deliver his first “let my people go” message to Pharoah. And now God wants to kill him? What’s going on here? Rashi cites a midrash that Moses was condemned for not circumcising his son, but this explanation raises problems of its own. Given that Moses could have argued that circumcising an infant before taking him on an arduous journey is dangerous, and given that failure to circumcise promptly is not a capital offense in halakha, why did God suddenly judge Moses so harshly? Better scholars than myself have put forth a variety of answers to this question, but I’d like to put forward my own.
Let’s back up to 4:18, when Moses tells his father-in-law, “Please let me go and return to my brothers in Egypt, and see if they are still alive.” The phrase “my brothers in Egypt” is ambiguous; maybe even strategically ambiguous. Does he mean his Hebrew blood relatives, who are being worked to death as slaves? Or does he mean his adoptive Egyptian family, which might have suffered a purge when the new pharoah (2:23) took power?
After Moses takes up wife, children, donkey, and staff, God reviews his mission, but adds a detail (4:22–23) that He had not previously mentioned:
Say to Pharoah: “This is what the Eternal says: Israel is My first-born son. I am saying to you, ‘send my son so he can serve Me’, and if you refuse to send him, behold, I will execute your first-born son.”
I submit that this message is a veiled threat against Moses himself. God is asking: do you consider yourself a member of the nation that is My first-born son, or are you the first-born son of Pharoah’s daughter? Whose side are you on?
I would like to register a meta-complaint
Even before the news hit the New York Times, you may have heard about “complaints choirs”, Finland’s incomparable gift to world culture. Here you can see videos of choirs that have gathered all over the world to sing their particular grievances: ninety-one singers in Helsinki, twenty-three in Hamburg, fifty-four in St. Petersburg, eighty in Canada, seventeen in Jerusalem—
Wait a minute. Seventeen?!
Chevra, this is an outrage. I can forgive the Jerusalemites for not out-whining Russians and Finns, but to be bested by Canadians1 (sorry, besamim), chorusing about their cold feet and their ill-dressed Prime Minister, is an affront to the honor of the Jewish nation. This must not stand.
So if anyone is looking to assemble a Boston Jewish Community Complaints Choir, please count me in. Bonus points if you can find a catchy tune for “everyone on my right thinks I’m a heretic and everyone on my left thinks I’m a lunatic”.
1 Among the English-language complaints choirs whose videos actually ran on my browser, I think the only one superior to the CBC’s production is the Chicago choir, which includes the quintessentially Chicagoan complaint “my dead grandma always votes for the wrong candidate”.
The Internet interprets a cherem as damage and routes around it
It’s too bad there aren’t more Orthodox Jews working for Agence France-Presse, because this article, headlined “Ultra-Orthodox rabbis decry Internet’s ‘terrible impurity’”, buries the lede.
The reporter and editor don’t seem to realize that “haredi leaders denounce Internet”, in and of itself, is about as newsworthy as “evangelical Christian leaders denounce premarital sex”. The real news here is that the rabbis are calling out Internet sites run by other haredim that are airing out the community’s dirty laundry or otherwise lack, shall we say, the nihil obstat of the gedolim.
via jwz
Thank God we are free, unlike this poor sod
Twice in my life, I have attended Passover Seders1 in people’s homes in which we, as we celebrated our freedom, were attended by Black servants. Perhaps if I had been raised in a social class where “the help” was a constant presence in my life, I would not have considered this unusual, but I felt like the hosts must have been deaf to irony. What did those women say to their families when they got home from their jobs? I hope that at least they were well paid.
It turns out that Maimonides, who was not raised with even the illusion of living in a classless society, had a different approach to this kind of situation. He wrote, in Hilchot Chametz u-Matzah 8:2:
If [the son at the Seder] is young or of low intelligence, [the father] says to him, “My son, we all used to be slaves—like this maid, or like this slave—in Egypt, and on this night the Blessed Holy One brought us out to freedom.”
Fortunately, in this millenium, other people have come up with better ways to explain slavery to the very young.
1 One of them was not, technically, a Passover Seder, but rather a birthday bash held on the first night of chol ha-mo’ed in which the hosts decided to break out the haggadot. Don’t ask.
Cain’s best friend
The author of the “Everyone Needs Therapy” blog informs us that October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and highlights a program, co-sponsored by the American Humane Association, to help abused women take their pets with them into shelters.
And just a few days ago, in synagogues all over the world, we read Bereshit, which describes the first recorded instance of domestic violence. That story, according to the midrash, also involves a pet. Nachmanides (s.v. Genesis 4:13) cites Bereshit Rabbah 22:27 as explaining that the “sign” that God set for Cain’s protection was actually a dog; Cain would know that wherever the dog went, he could follow safely.
OK, it’s not a perfect parallel: Cain was a perpetrator of violence, not a victim. But unlike many other perpetrators since Genesis, he repented and, as far as we know from the text, didn’t do it again…
In which your humble servant strikes a blow for ecumenicism
ImHalal.com, meet Koshernet. Koshernet, meet ImHalal.com. Now that I’ve introduced you guys, I’m sure you can have a very fruitful collaboration.
via Hacker News
This is the season when Jews should reflect on traditional words of wisdom...
…such as the thespians’ maxim “never work with children or animals”.
via cellio
Down with Helvetian imperialism!
One of my pet peeves about discussion of Israel among left-wingers is the prevalence of the idea that the Jewish state is an illegitimate entity that should be eliminated, not just compelled to yield territory to a Palestinian state. Even if we assume for the purpose of argument that every complaint about the morality of Zionism is true, it would prove that Israel as a nation-state is born in sin, as it were—and similar complaints can be made about every other nation-state on this planet. (If you say “all those other countries committed their founding war crimes long long ago, before the international community even recognized them as such,” then I will respond with one word: “Serbia”.)
So I guess I have to give props to Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi, Revolutionary Leader of the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, for his proposal to break up Switzerland:
Gaddafi first mentioned the idea of dismemberment during the G8 summit in Italy in July. Switzerland “is a world mafia and not a state”, he said, adding that it was “formed of an Italian community that should return to Italy, another German community that should return to Germany, and a third French community that should return to France”.
Note that Gaddafi has also endorsed a single binational Jewish-Arab state in Palestine rather than the status quo or a two-state solution.
Peace between Jews and Arabs is the easy part
Many political figures itching for the elimination of the Jewish state are also fond of antisemitic pseudo-histories of the Jewish nation, e.g., Holocaust denial. If these leaders studied actual Jewish history, instead of tripe like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, they would be rushing to the negotiating table—not out of sympathy for Jewish suffering or an appreciation of the historical Jewish claim to Palestine, but as a hard-headed political strategy. They would realize that their best hope to eliminate the State of Israel is to make peace with it.
Some of my Jewish readers are probably nodding their heads at this point. For everyone else, I will elaborate.
Thousands of years of oppression, at the hands of virtually every sort of political system, has taught our people some odd habits. When the enemy is breathing down our neck, we can usually put aside our internal differences and find some expedient path to survive together. But when our lives our easy and our host country rules us with a light hand, we eventually turn on one another. It is as if we are so busy looking for the next enemy that when none appears from outside our community, we project its image onto our neighbors.
This cultural tic, as it were, goes back to Biblical times. The second half of Exodus through the end of Deuteronomy portrays a string of revolts against Moses’ leadership, revolts which occurred even as overt miracles were performed for the nation every day. King Solomon ruled a united, peaceful, and prosperous Israel for forty years, and his successor did not rule for a week before his kingdom was divided. Flavius Josephus’s The Jewish War does not begin with a Roman invasion of Palestine; rather, it opens by describing a struggle among Jewish factions for the high priesthood, in which one faction tried to gain the upper hand by inviting the Romans in.
If you consider these sources unreliable, consider more recent history, within the memory of most adults.
Popular anticipation of Middle Eastern peace hit a high-water mark in 1993, when the Oslo Accords were signed, and gave way to the usual pessimism at some point before 2000, when the Second Intifada began. Obviously there were some Jews who considered the Oslo process a disaster and wanted the state to renounce it as soon as possible, but they were a minority, especially in the early years. So where, in that optimistic age, did most Jews refocus their anxiety? On one another. Sephardic Jews tried to shake themselves free from the Ashkenazi political power structure. Liberal Jews, with strong support from the Diaspora, fought against the Orthodox state-religious establishment. Secular Israeli intellectuals began speaking of a “post-Zionist Israel”. Conflicts between labor and capital moved closer to the political foreground.
And now that Israelis of all persuasions expect missiles rather than peace to be just over the horizon, all these issues have gone to the back burner, and the range of political options has constricted. I remember when the Israeli political system was embroiled in controversy over “who is a Jew”, as representatives from the Reform and Conservative movements lobbied to have their converts given the same legal privileges as Orthodox converts. Now, the big controversy over Israeli conversion is within the Orthodox movement, as rabbis from the right wing of Orthodoxy invalidate conversions performed by rabbis whom they consider insufficiently Orthodox.
If the Arab and Muslim world eventually does forge peace with the State of Israel, and history repeats itself, what will happen? All those old fissures in the Jewish community—Israel vs. Diaspora, Ashkenazi vs. Sephardi, secular vs. religious, religious brand-X vs. religious brand-Y, rich vs. poor, nationalist vs. universalist—will have room to broaden and deepen. If the Israeli state (which is to say, whatever unstable coalition can get 61 votes in the Knesset) takes a side in any of these conflicts, the losing side will impugn the legitimacy of the state itself. Eventually, members of one not-quite-powerful-enough faction (it hardly matters which) will decide that they would rather ally with their Arab neighbors (or Iran, or some more distant power) than suffer defeat by their fellow Jews. And then new verses can be added to a very old dirge.
We as a nation have gotten very good at reacting to war, and in the lulls between wars, we are good at preparing for the next one. We would do well to prepare ourselves for peace, as well. We can prepare to make a different kind of history.
