Being and nobodyness
The Talmud records the following deep philosophical debate:
For two and a half years, Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel had an argument. These said: It would have been better if man had not been created. These said: It is better that man has been created. They put it to a vote and decided: It would have been better if man had not been created, but now that he has been created, let him examine his deeds.
Eruvin 13b
This passage, I assume, is the inspiration for a classic Jewish joke:
It would be better never to have been born. But who among us has such luck? One in a thousand, perhaps.
If you want to study this matter in more depth, I have just the book for you.
A drash in honor of our 10th anniversary
כִּֽי־יִקַּ֥ח אִ֛ישׁ אִשָּׁ֖ה וּבְעָלָ֑הּ וְהָיָ֞ה אִם־לֹ֧א תִמְצָא־חֵ֣ן בְּעֵינָ֗יו כִּי־מָ֤צָא בָהּ֙ עֶרְוַ֣ת דָּבָ֔ר וְכָ֨תַב לָ֜הּ סֵ֤פֶר כְּרִיתֻת֙ וְנָתַ֣ן בְּיָדָ֔הּ וְשִׁלְּחָ֖הּ מִבֵּיתֹֽו׃ וְיָצְאָ֖ה מִבֵּיתֹ֑ו וְהָלְכָ֖ה וְהָיְתָ֥ה לְאִישׁ־אַחֵֽר׃ וּשְׂנֵאָהּ֮ הָאִ֣ישׁ הָאַחֲרֹון֒ וְכָ֨תַב לָ֜הּ סֵ֤פֶר כְּרִיתֻת֙ וְנָתַ֣ן בְּיָדָ֔הּ וְשִׁלְּחָ֖הּ מִבֵּיתֹ֑ו אֹ֣ו כִ֤י יָמוּת֙ הָאִ֣ישׁ הָאַחֲרֹ֔ון אֲשֶׁר־לְקָחָ֥הּ לֹ֖ו לְאִשָּֽׁה׃ לֹא־יוּכַ֣ל בַּעְלָ֣הּ הָרִאשֹׁ֣ון אֲשֶֽׁר־שִׁ֠לְּחָהּ לָשׁ֨וּב לְקַחְתָּ֜הּ לִהְיֹ֧ות לֹ֣ו לְאִשָּׁ֗ה אַחֲרֵי֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר הֻטַּמָּ֔אָה כִּֽי־תֹועֵבָ֥ה הִ֖וא לִפְנֵ֣י יְהוָ֑ה וְלֹ֤א תַחֲטִיא֙ אֶת־הָאָ֔רֶץ אֲשֶׁר֙ יְהוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ נֹתֵ֥ן לְךָ֖ נַחֲלָֽה׃
When a man takes a wife and marries her, and it turns out that she does not please him because he finds some indecent thing in her; and he writes her a bill of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her from his house; and she leaves his house, and marries another man; and the latter man hates her and writes her a bill of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her from his house, or if the latter man, who took her as a wife, dies; the first man who sent her away may not take her again to be his wife, after she has been disqualified, for it is a disgusting thing before the Eternal, and you shall not pollute with sin the land that the Eternal your God gives you as an inheritance.
Deuteronomy 24:1–4
Ki Tetze, the parsha that was read in shul this morning, is our aufruf parsha, and I think it’s the best aufruf parsha EVAR, because it talks about just about everything that could go wrong with a marriage. There’s the beautiful woman captured in wartime, there’s the man who hates one of his two wives, there’s the stubborn and rebellious son, etc., etc., etc… and there’s divorce. Which is what I want to talk about. It’s OK. I’m not about to deliver bad news.
In the Tikkun Olam anthology, Rabbi Michael J. Broyde has an essay in which he asks: should Jews, through persuasion and/or the political process, encourage non-Jews to be more observant of the seven Noachide commandments? One problem with such a project, he points out, is that we’re often not sure what those commandments entail. As a specific example, he cited a three-way controversy over the law of Noachide divorce. The rest of this post is basically the result of my chasing down Rabbi Broyde’s footnotes, with some help from my local Orthodox halakhic authority and besamim.
Before we can have divorce, we must have marriage
The Mishnah (Kiddushin 1:1) summarizes the ways that a woman can be married (through money, document, or sexual relations) and unmarried (through death and divorce). Surprisingly, while the plain text of this week’s parsha says a lot about divorce, it doesn’t say very much about marriage itself; when the Gemara looks for sources in the Torah to justify the Mishnah’s rules about how to get married, it relies heavily on indirect arguments from other verses. I would suggest that we can understand this asymmetry by looking at the Torah’s original audience. It’s safe to assume that when they arrived at Mt. Sinai, Jews were familiar with the laws of Noachide marriage, or at least, they had a traditional family law that was consistent with the laws of Noachide marriage. Therefore, the plain text of the Torah focused on what aspects of the law were new to them, rather than what was continuous with the old law.
The Jerusalem Talmud (Kiddushin 1:1) derives laws of Noachide marriage from Genesis 2:24—“therefore a man should leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife”. Rabbi Mana expounds on this verse that a man should cleave to his wife, and not to his neighbor’s wife. The Yerushalmi also declares that non-Jews do not have kiddushin, the first stage of Jewish marriage. Regarding gerushin, divorce, it says that either non-Jews do not have any divorce or they divorce one another (“או שאין להן גירושין או ששניהן מגרשין זה את זה”). Furthermore, the Yerushalmi cites Deuteronomy 24:1–4 (see above) and says because this passage concludes by mentioning “the land that the Eternal your God gives you as an inheritance”, it does not apply to Noachides. But there are so many laws packed into those four verses that it’s not clear what it means to negate them.
The matriarchal interpretation
Bereshit Rabba 18:5 covers much of the same ground as the Yerushalmi, and adds an opinion by Rabbi Yochanan: the wife divorces the husband, and gives him a דופורון (which, according to Jastrow’s dictionary, is a mistransliteration of the Latin repudium, the bill of divorce that the Romans used). Rashi unpacks Rabbi Yochanan’s logic as follows: since under Genesis 2:24 the husband is obliged to cleave to his wife, he can’t “uncleave” her by divorcing her. But since the wife has no corresponding obligation to her husband, she is free to send him away.
The no-fault interpretation
Maimonides, in the Mishnah Torah, states that before the Torah was given a man could simply marry a woman by taking her home and having relations with her (Ishut 1:1); for a man’s wife to become “like one of our divorcées”, she just had to stop living in his household, or alternatively, he could send her away. It’s interesting to note that when he talks about these laws, Maimonides, is careful not to use the Hebrew words kiddushin or gerushin to describe transactions between non-Jews, even in the “they divorce each other” sense that the Yerushalmi and Bereshit Rabba use. I haven’t studied this stuff in any depth, but note that for Jews, once a man and a woman enter kiddushin (e.g., he gives her a ring and says the magic words), even if they have not yet had chuppah, their relationship can only be dissolved with death or a get. So I would speculate that for Maimonides, kiddushin and gerushin come as a matched set; if you lose one, you have to lose the other, and without the change of legal status that these two actions generate, you’re left with mere cohabitation.
The more-than-Catholic interpretation
The Pnei Yehoshua, an early-18th-century German rabbi, offers a third interpretation. In the Bablyonian Talmud (Kiddushin 13b), there is an argument over how we know that a woman becomes free to remarry after her husband dies. Various proof-texts are brought and rejected; the one that sticks is Deuteronomy 24:3. The Gemara concludes that since that verse connects a husband’s divorce and his death, we can say that just as divorce frees a woman from her husband, so does the husband’s death. But wait! says the Pnei Yehoshua. We know from the Yerushalmi that this whole passage only applies to Jews. Therefore, the rule that a woman is freed by her husband’s death also only applies to Jews; Noachide women must remain in their marital state even after their husbands die.
Practical consequences for the reader
So, if you have a non-Jewish friend who approaches you for advice, because he or she is in an unhappy marriage and has moral reservations about how best to proceed… and this person thinks that since you are a righteous and caring individual, you might be able to counsel them about the most appropriate course of action to take… don’t nominate any of these worthy authorities to serve as your friend’s moral compass. Instead, you should take the position of the Ragamam (haRabbanit haGaonit Miss Manners) and just not say anything.
I am my blog's and my blog is mine
It’s Elul — a time to reflect on the past and prepare for the future, a time to concentrate (even more than usual) on turning away from sin, a time to renew and rebuild those things that have been neglected.
Such as, say, posting to a blog that’s been on a long hiatus.
So I hear we have a Presidential election coming up in a few months….
Bar sinister
Ha`aretz, covering the eviction of some Jewish families from an illegal settlement in Hebron, quoted Gershon Bar-Kochba, one of the residents who tried to resist eviction. The name also appeared in this New York Times article from 1989: “Gershon Bar Kochba, a seminary student from Hebron, was suspected of leading a group who opened fire on Palestinians in Hebron…” And this article on the Hebron Jewish community’s Web site laments that Gershon Bar-Kochba had to post a 25,000-shekel1 bond in order to bail out a 14-year-old settler, while Arab suspects were routinely released on their own recognizance2.
OK, this guy appears to be something of a macher in Hebron. What astounds me is that he carries the name of the leader of the last Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire. That revolt was thoroughly crushed by the Romans, after which all the remaining Jews were exiled from Judea, the province was renamed “Syria Palestina”, many Jewish practices (such as Torah study and Shabbat) were prohibited, and many rabbis were martyred. What kind of yeshiva bocher treats a guy like this as a role model? Does he learn from some Bizzarro-Talmud in which it says that God destroyed our Temple and exiled us from our homeland because we were insufficiently ruthless to our enemies?
via ongoing
1 Approximately US$6,000.
2 The article presented this as one example of how the Israeli government was treating Jewish settlers in Hebron more harshly than the Arabs. I mentioned this to my wife, and she said, “Well, they should. God Himself does.” After all, she went on, the Moslems only have the seven Noachide commandments to observe, while we have 613…of course, we can’t observe all of them today…and one of the reason we can’t observe all of them today is the misguided zealotry of Jews like the original Bar-Kochba.
Denial is not just where Moses got the frogs
Several folks on my LJ friends list have mentioned this charming piece, in which Noah Feldman, a Maimonides School alumnus, reflects on his school experience and the “Modern Orthodox” community surrounding it. I put scare quotes around “Modern Orthodox” because while he attributes certain attitudes to people he calls “Modern Orthodox”, and perhaps those people would call themselves “Modern Orthodox”, he does not mention the long string of Jewish thinkers, starting with Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch זצ״ל, who defined Modern Orthodox Judaism. Feldman refers to Senator Joe Lieberman; he refers to Rabbi Moshe Feinstein זצ״ל; he refers to Yigal Amir and Baruch Goldstein. But he never cites the life or works of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik זצ״ל, the pre-eminent Modern Orthodox philosopher of the 20th century, who founded of the Maimonides School and who was still alive while Feldman was a student there. That should tell you something about the lens through which Feldman sees the Orthodox world.
Feldman seems to believe that the most authentic expressions of Judaism are the most illiberal ones. Now, if I believed that, I would either join the charedi world, or I would never set foot in a synagogue again. But Feldman is married to a non-Jewish woman and takes his children to hear the Book of Esther read on Purim. “Isn’t everyone’s life a mass of contradictions?” he says.
The “Modern Orthodox” community offends Feldman because instead of letting us all bask in postmodern “I am large, I contain multitudes” playfulness, it tries to resolve the contradictions. At Maimonides, learning the theory of evolution is OK, but marrying a non-Jew is not OK. The Maimonides approach is certainly open to critique. Different schools of Jewish thought (charedi Orthodox, classical Reform, etc.) can argue for different approaches to being a Jew in the 21st century. But Feldman does not have a school of thought; he has emotions that he treats as entitlements. It is not enough for him to marry a non-Jew and continue to feel connected with his Jewish upbringing; he wants his Orthodox alma mater to endorse his marriage. And so he does not argue; he insinuates that there is something false about Modern Orthodoxy, that instead of teaching Jews a way of engaging with the modern world, it teaches Jews to disguise themselves for the sake of getting along in that world.
Feh.
It’s bad enough that the most reactionary elements of the Jewish world have appointed themselves the final arbiters of my religion and have declared that my own community’s practice is, at best, Frumkeit Lite. But why do people with no interest in accepting “the yoke of the commandments” give the reactionaries the same license?
Converting the unfaithful: a primer
Once upon a time when I was an undergraduate, I wrote a series of articles for the school paper (I, II, III, IV) about the Boston Church of Christ (BCC), a religious cult that had spread like dandelions across local campuses. Two key points of their doctrine were that the only real Christians were the ones baptized into their network of churches, and that the quality of a Christian’s relationship with God is directly proportional to his or her success at making converts. Motivated by those beliefs, organized in an Amway-style pyramid system, and using some high-pressure sales tactics, the church racked up exponential growth for about ten years, until attrition caught up with them.
One of the folks I interviewed for the series was a dean and a Christian pastor, who said that the BCC’s approach to making converts was all wrong. The early Christians, he said, attracted people by example. Flavius would see that Marcellus was good to his family, honest in business, etc., etc., and also hear that Marcellus worshipped some strange new god called “Jesus”; thus, Flavius became interested in Christianity. Imagine that—converting other people to your religion by your own exemplary behavior. What a tedious chore! You can’t just spend a few hours a week lecturing the heathen about how you are right and they are wrong, rattling off the talking points that you have carefully memorized in response to their well-meaning but ignorant questions. You have to earn respect from the people around you, and hope that respect for you as a person will lead to respect for your faith.
But, friends and neighbors, I am here to testify that the dean’s strategy actually works. I am an Orthodox Jew today, in part, because of some of the Orthodox and frum-Conservative folks I met: people I liked, people I respected, people whom I identified with. And none of those folks were stumping for Chabad, Aish ha-Torah, or any other “bring non-Orthodox Jews to frumkeit” organization.
By contrast, let me present a case study in how not to proselytize:
U.S. Navy veteran David Miller said that when he checked into the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Iowa City, he didn’t realize he would get a hard sell for Christian fundamentalism along with treatment for his kidney stones.
Miller, 46, an Orthodox Jew, said he was repeatedly proselytized by hospital chaplains and staff in attempts to convert him to Christianity during three hospitalizations over the past two years.
He said he went hungry each time because the hospital wouldn’t serve him kosher food, and the staff refused to contact his rabbi, who could have brought him something to eat.
...
Over the past two years, Miller said, he has been asked over and over by the Iowa City VA medical center’s staff within its offices, clinics and wards, “You mean you don’t believe that Jesus is the Messiah?” and “Is it just Orthodox Jews who deny Jesus?” He said one staffer told him, “I don’t understand; how can you not believe in Jesus; he’s the Messiah of the Jews, too, you know.”
If any of the Christians who made these comments think they were bringing Miller closer to their religion, they are deluding themselves. At best, they were annoying busybodies, like folks who lecture overweight strangers about what to eat. At worst, they were showing one another their loyalty to the “Christian” tribe by harrassing someone who was not a member. (And if Miller’s case ever turns into a lawsuit, we are sure to hear other members of this tribe wail and gnash their teeth about how they are being “persecuted”.)
It is not my place, of course, to tell those Christians how to interpret the tenets of their own religion. I’d just like to encourage my fellow frummies to hold themselves to a higher standard. If it’s too much work to act in a way that conspicuously brings credit to your religion, at least try not to make it look bad, OK?
via .common sense
Maybe if I wrote it in Hebrew...?
My wife, who is frum and supports the State of Israel but is in no way a “religious Zionist”, gets her dander up every time she sees a bumper sticker saying “The Bible Says the Land of Israel Belongs to the Jews” and such-like. So I had an idea the other day for a bumper sticker:
GOD GAVE THE LAND OF ISRAEL TO
(insert current occupants here)
From a Torah point of view, I think this statement is unassailable. As Yeshiahu Leibowitz ztz”l pointed out, just as God took the land from the Canaanites and gave it to us (cf. Rashi s.v. Genesis 1:1), He took it from us and gave it to the Assyrians, took it from the Assyrians and gave it to the Persians, etc., etc.
But from a “not getting our tires slashed in the parking lot next to the kosher grocery store” point of view, I’m not sure I’d want that sentiment on our car.
Priceless
We got a brochure in the mail for a Chinese auction sponsored by Oorah. Two of the slots in the auction caught my eye:
- Eretz Yisroel—round-trip airfare to Israel, seven-night hotel stay for two, and a one-week car rental.
- Priceless Bracha—round-trip airfare to Israel, seven-night hotel stay for two, and a blessing from a Gadol.
I must therefore conclude that a Gadol’s blessing has a market value equivalent to a one-week Israeli car rental. Who knew?
He also told the NAACP that he was a great dancer
Every once in a while, I hear someone remark, with sadness or frustration, that the GOP is more Good For The Jews™ than the Democratic Party, so why do Jews still overwhelmingly vote for Democrats?
Ladies and gentlemen, I present Exhibit DCXXII: Tommy Thompson, Republican, former Governor of Wisconsin, former Secretary of Health and Human Services, currently running for President, speaking to the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism:
I’m in the private sector and for the first time in my life I’m earning money. You know that’s sort of part of the Jewish tradition.
PS: Tommy Thompson, the former Governor of Wisconsin, should not be confused with Fred Thompson, the former Senator from Tennessee who plays the DA on Law and Order.
via Matthew Yglesias and TAPPED
The other "aish ha-Torah"
I know that the Chumra of the Month club always works overtime around Passover, but this just goes too far. According to the Jerusalem Post, some rabbis are considering treating marijuana as kitniyot. Israel’s Green Leaf party, which ran on a pro-pot-legalization platform, is advising its frum members to put away their stashes for the holiday.
Is there really a concern that people might mistake marijuana leaves (or even seeds) for chametz grains? Is it customary to grow or store marijuana in places where it might get mixed with chametz? And even if marijuana were classified as kitniyot—I thought the kitniyot ban applied to eating, but not to other forms of benefit. So smoking kitniyot should be OK, right? (At least, inasmuch as smoking anything is OK, what with the health risks and all. Not to mention that whole dina d’malchutna dina issue.)
I hope that our rabbi will devote some time on Shabbat ha-Gadol to expound on these matters. I will donate some brownies for the kiddush.
