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.
How do you say “Arrr!” in Ladino?
Edward Kritzler’s Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean is a mediocre book about a fascinating topic.
The topic is the Jews and conversos (Jews who converted, generally under duress, to Catholicism) who, despite official bans, joined the Spanish conquest of the New World and who, when the Inquisition caught up with their relatives, helped other European powers pillage the Spanish. (“Jewish Privateers of the Caribbean” would be a more accurate title, albeit less marketable.) When the Church’s interest in the conversos outweighed their usefulness to Spain, they assisted the Portuguese; when Spain and Portugal united and the Inquisition swept the Portuguese colonies, they teamed up with the Dutch (some fled to New Amsterdam) and the English. (According to Kritzler, the British conquest of Jamaica was assisted by the Jewish community there; Columbus’s heirs, the owners of the island, had protected them from the Inquisition, and when it looked like that protection was about to run out, they invited Cromwell to invade.)
The most interesting figure in the book is Rabbi Samuel Palache, who served the Sultan of Morocco as a privateer and served Amsterdam’s Jewish community as the president of Neveh Shalom, the first non-clandestine synagogue in Holland, founded in 1612. (By 1620, the Neveh Shalom congregation had split into three factions. Some things never change.)
Alas, this book could have used a better editor. The narrative seems to jerk from one colony or European state to another, from one decade to another, cramming in details at the expense of narrative flow. The overall effect is like listening to a garrulous older relative fill you in on some seamy family history; it can be entertaining to listen to, but the next day you can’t remember if Uncle Murray was a bagman for the mob and Uncle Moishe ran guns for the Irgun, or vice versa.
Furthermore, the book could have used a better historian. A great deal of the evidence Kritzler provides regarding Jewish activity in the Caribbean comes from the files of the Inquisition itself. Maybe the Inquisition’s informants were absolutely correct when the talked about secret Jews conspiring with their foreign co-religionists to undermine the rule of Spain in the Americas; they certainly had motive, means, and opportunity. Then again, as recent history reminds us, a confession extracted under torture reveals more about what the torturing regime wants to be true than about what actually happened. A more careful writer would have not only collected all the claims made about Jews in the Caribbean but also weighed the credibility of each source, and made it clear which of the most lurid claims were actually corroborated.
This topic really deserves a better book, or even two or three better books. Perhaps Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean would be of higher journalistic quality if the author were not using it to tout his other enterprises. Within the book, he claims to have identified the location of THE LOST GOLD MINE OF COLUMBUS, and on the Web page, he seems more interested in promoting himself as a tour guide ($1250/week, plus expenses) than as an author. Well, as Rabbi Palache may have told his mother at one point, it’s a living.
Rediscovering Talmudic logic
[The following is based on a tikkun leil Shavuot talk that I gave at my synagogue last week.]
There is a mishnah in the tractate Nazir that I first learned from The Big Book of Jewish Humor, of all places:
Someone sees a koy [an animal that the rabbis were not sure whether to classify as wild or domesticated] and says
- “I swear to be a nazirite [see Numbers 6:1-21] if this is a wild animal”; [others say]
- “I swear to be a nazirite if this is not a wild animal”;
- “I swear to be a nazirite if this is a domesticated animal”;
- “I swear to be a nazirite if this is not a domesticated animal”;
- “I swear to be a nazirite if this is both a wild animal and a domesticated animal”;
- “I swear to be a nazirite if this is neither a wild animal nor a domesticated animal”;
- “I swear to be a nazirite if one of you is a nazirite”;
- “I swear to be a nazirite if none of you is a nazirite”;
- “I swear to be a nazirite if all of you are nazirites”;
the law is that they are all nazirites.
But the rabbis, it turns out, may have the last laugh.
If this mishnah sounds “illogical” to contemporary ears, it’s because to us, “logic” is a particular system of deduction that we learned in school, a tradition going back to Aristotle—what mathematicians call classical logic. But in the early twentieth century [isn’t it great to talk about “the twentieth century” as an era receding into history?], after classical logic had been reduced to axioms, some mathematicians began experimenting with other axioms, just as a chess master might entertain alternative rule sets for chess. One of these alternatives is intuitionistic logic, which is just like classical logic except that it lacks the law of the excluded middle—the axiom that every proposition must be either true or false.
(If you’re a geek who works with databases you may be familiar with “three-valued logic”, in which Boolean values may be true, false, or NULL. Intuitionistic logic is not three-valued logic. Nor is it fuzzy logic, in which a statement’s truthiness can be measured on a continuum from zero [totally false] to one [totally true]. The axioms of intuitionistic logic neither admit the law of the excluded middle nor define any third alternative to truth and falsehood.)
Let us assume that if you make a conditional oath, the condition is presumed to be true, and if you want to wiggle out of the oath later, you have the burden of proving the condition false. So if P is some statement that can neither be proven nor disproven, “I am a nazirite if P” renders you a nazirite, and so does “I am a nazirite if not-P”. By that principle, the first six oath-takers are uncontroversially nazirites, and there are several ways, depending on your logic system, to prove that the seventh one is as well.
By the time that we get to the eighth man, though, we have to consider what “I am a nazirite if none of you is a nazirite” means. If it means “I am a nazirite if the law would not declare any of you to be nazirites”, then the eighth man is off the hook, because, as we see, all seven of his predecessors end up nazirites. But since the halakhic judgement comes at the very end of the mishnah, maybe we are not allowed to interpret the eighth statement this way; perhaps, at the time the man took an oath, he had no idea what the law would declare, and therefore we cannot recursively apply the law’s judgement to interpret the validity of the oath.
So alternatively, we could interpret it as “I am a nazirite if none of the conditions that you imposed on your oaths are true”. And in order to wriggle out of the oath, the eighth man would have to prove that at least one of those seven conditions are true. Under classical logic, this is easy: “either the koy is wild or not-wild, so either the first or the second condition is true, so hand over the Manishevitz”. But under intuitionistic logic, the eighth man is stuck: he can’t assume “either the koy is wild or not-wild”, so he has to prove which of his predecessors swore by a condition that turned out to be false, which he can’t do.
For a reason that will become clear in the next paragraph, I think the mishnah considers “I am a nazirite if X, who swore another conditional oath, is also a nazirite” to have an ambiguous interpretation, and therefore considers both of the above possibilities and chooses the stricter one. Which is why the eighth man is also rendered a nazirite.
Now let’s consider the ninth. If we interpret “I swear to be a nazirite if all of you are nazirites” as “I swear to be a nazirite if the law would declare all of you to be nazirites”—look, that’s exactly what the law does, and he’s stuck. But if we interpret it as “I swear to be a nazirite if all of the conditions that you imposed on your oaths are true”, then he’s off the hook, because under both intuitionistic and classical logic, a statement cannot simultaneously be true and false, so the koy cannot be simultaneously wild and not-wild. But by the interpretive principle that I suggested in the last paragraph, the law interprets the ninth man’s statement conservatively, and he cannot use the axiom of non-contradition to escape. Thus he, like his eight fellows, is a nazirite.
(Note that none of the characters in our mishnah say “I swear to be a nazirite if this is a wild animal and not a wild animal.” Such a statement would not render you a nazirite, although it would earn you a flogging for the sin making a pointless oath.)
And so, seen through the lens of intuitionistic logic, our mishnah is a little more reasonable, but, I hope, no less funny.
Is this common thread between second-century Jewish law and twentieth-century mathematics a mere coincidence? I think not.
The early intuitionists were not merely tweaking the rules of logic out of whimsy; they had an agenda. Classical mathematics assumes that “the truth is out there” and a mathematician’s job is to discover the timeless properties of some Platonic realm of numbers, triangles, and so on. The intuitionists believed that the truth is in here (he said, tapping his own forehead); mathematical objects are constructed in the mathematician’s mind, and you can only prove things about objects that you can construct.
This attitude has a lot in common with halakhic decision-making. If you have a piece of meat that may or may not be kosher, at a certain point you may need to decide whether or not, in fact, you may eat the meat. If the meat’s status is confined to some ideal realm where all we can do is speculate “there exists in this slaughterhouse at least one side of beef such that…”, it does us no good. Jewish law gives us procedures by which, based on the incomplete information before us, we can make a decision one way or another. And by using these procedures, we are not merely discovering metaphysical facts about the physical world; instead, we create them.
Can you serve humanity on your kosher china?
Every once in a while, I am in a conversation where an obscure issue of kashrut comes up. I refer to the delicacy that our earliest rabbis refer to (when they must) as basar me-holchei shtayim, “biped meat”. At first glance, this seems like a simple question to answer, because as we read last Shabbat:
Speak to the Israelite people thus: These are the creatures that you may eat from among all the land animals: any animal that has true hoofs, with clefts through the hoofs, and that chews the cud—such you may eat. The following, however, of those that either chew the cud or have true hoofs, you shall not eat: the camel—although it chews the cud, it has no true hoofs: it is unclean for you… [Leviticus 11:2-4, NJPS]
[N.B.: I’m going to follow the NJPS’s lead in the rest of this essay, and translate tahor as “clean” as tamei as “unclean”, even though they’re really technical legal terms that have nothing to do with hygeine.]
People have no hoofs, therefore they’re not kosher. Case closed, right?
But wait! The oral tradition reads the text closely and expounds:
You might think that even biped meat and biped milk are covered by the prohibition against eating [non-kosher animals]; isn’t it logical? Since, regarding a [non-kosher] land animal, the rules for its abstention [see below] are lenient but the rules for its milk are strict [such milk is not kosher], then regarding a biped, where the rules for its abstention are strict, shouldn’t the rules for its milk be strict? [To forestall such an interpretation,] Scripture teaches: “this” [in Leviticus 11:29, “this shall be unclean for you”]: this is unclean, but the milk of a biped is not unclean. Suppose I exclude the milk, which not apply to all [i.e., males don’t produce it], but I do not exclude the flesh, which applies to all. Scripture teaches: “the following … is unclean” [in 11:4 above]: the following are included in the prohibition against eating, but the meat and milk of a biped are not included in the prohibition against eating. [Torat Cohanim, Shemini 4:4]
![scan from Mishnah Bechorot [Hebrew]](http://ropine.com/img/long-pig/b2.png)
(The stuff about “abstention” refers to other ritual-purity laws. For example, if you touch a live human being who is in a state of ritual impurity, you become ritually impure yourself; the laws are much more lenient regarding touching a non-kosher animal.)
The prohibition against eating non-kosher animal species does not apply to human meat; therefore, it’s kosher. Case closed, right?
But wait! Torat Cohanim was making a very narrow point: this particular negative commandment of the Torah is not infringed when you eat your neighbor. The text doesn’t explicitly say it’s allowed. So we have to dig deeper.
The Mishnah, discussing such cases as a donkey giving birth to a cow, mentions an important principle:
…what comes from something unclean is unclean, and what comes from something clean is clean. [Bechorot 1:2]
Judging from what Nachmanides says below, this is the source for the principle that milk from kosher animal species is kosher, and milk from other species is forbidden. So… Jewish mothers can breastfeed, which implies that their milk is kosher, which implies that their meat is kosher… right? Maybe.
Let’s turn for a moment from breastfeeding to vampirism. The Gemara says:
From “you shall not eat any blood…” [Leviticus 7:26] I would learn that even biped blood, egg blood, kosher-grasshopper blood, and fish blood were all included. Scripture teaches: “…of fowl or land animal”. Just as fowl and land animals are distinguished, because they have both lenient and severe uncleanliness and they have prohibitions and permissions [Rashi: they are prohibited from being eaten before they are properly slaughtered, and permitted afterward], and they are in the category of meat, so to with anything that has lenient uncleanliness. I exclude biped blood because [a biped] has severe uncleanliness but not lenient uncleanliness. [Keritut 20b]
On the other hand, the Tosefta says:
…Biped blood and egg blood and insect blood are forbidden, but one is not punished for it. Fish blood and kosher-grasshopper blood are permitted. [Tosefta Keritut 2:12]
Another Gemara harmonizes these sources and quotes something resembling our Torat Cohanim excerpt above and lays down the law for both infants and vampires.
The Rabbis taught:
One keeps nursing a baby up to twenty-four months; from then on, it is like nursing a lizard—says Rabbi Eliezer. Rabbi Yehoshua says: even four or five years; if he weans after twenty-four months and goes back, then it is like nursing a lizard. The Master says: from then on [after age five?], it’s like nursing a lizard.Contrast:You might think that biped milk is unclean; isn’t it logical? Since, regarding a land animal, where the rules for its abstention are lenient but the rules for its milk are strict, then regarding a human, where the rules for abstention are strict, isn’t it logical that the rules for its milk be strict? Scripture teaches: “…the camel, although it chews the cud… it is unclean for you”—it is unclean, but the milk of bipeds is not unclean, but rather, clean. Possibly I should exclude the milk, which is not the same for everyone [the kashrut of the milk depends on the species that produced it], but I should not exclude the blood, which is the same for everyone [the blood of any land animal, even a kosher species, is forbidden]. Scripture teaches: “it”—it is unclean, but biped blood is not unclean, but rather, clean. And Rav Sheishet said: There is not even a [rabbinic] commandment to separate from it.There is no contradiction: this [human milk being clean] is when it is separated [from the body] and that [“like nursing a lizard”] is when it is not separated. And with blood, it’s the reverse, as we learn from a Baraita: Blood that is on the surface of a piece of bread [because someone with bleeding gums bit into it]—he scrapes it and eats it [the unbloody part], and sucks what is between his teeth, and we are not concerned. [Ketubot 60a; see also Keritut 21b-22a]
So for milk and blood, the Gemara learns that there is a distinction between drinking it directly from the source and drinking it from a cup; it’s only OK to drink blood from the source and only OK, once you’re beyond nursing age, to drink milk from a cup. (My wife pointed out that from the same pre-Gemara sources, one could argue that it’s OK to drink your own blood but not anyone else’s. I’m not sure why the Gemara didn’t interpret the sources that way.) But somehow, amid all the discussion of milk and blood, the question of meat has been lost. To recover it, we must jump forward to the medieval sources.
Rabbeinu Asher (the “Rosh”), in his commentary on the above Gemara, opines:
Blood on the surface of a piece of bread—he scrapes it and eats it, because it could be confused with other blood, because it is separated. For what is between his teeth, he sucks it and swallows it; biped blood is permitted. The reverse is true of milk; if it is not separated, it is forbidden, because one might come to confuse it with the milk of an unclean land animal; but separated, it is permitted. And so it seems with biped meat: to bite it off and eat it is forbidden, because one might come to confuse it with the meat of an unclean land animal, because this is not the way of eating it; perhaps its uncleanliness changes [translation uncertain]; but separated, it is permitted. [Rosh s.v. Ketubot 60a]
The Rosh explains the rules for human blood and milk as a matter of marit ayin. If I were seen to drink human milk directly from a woman’s breast, an observer might think that it’s also OK to drink the milk of a non-kosher animal, as long as one does so in this unusual fashion. To prevent this, the rabbis forbade adults to drink milk from the breast, but human milk from a cup is still OK. He then extrapolates to meat. If I go all Mike Tyson on my neighbor, bite off his earlobe, and swallow, an observer might think that it’s OK to do the same to a pig’s ear. But if I have a slice of “long pig” from a deli plate, no similar confusion would occur.
Maimonides, however, takes a completely different approach.
A human, even though it is said regarding him “…and the human became a living (chayyah) soul”, is not included among the species of wild animal (chayyah) that are food. Therefore, it is not covered by the prohibition [against eating non-kosher animals]. And one who eats human meat or milk, whether from the living or from the dead, is not flogged. But it is forbidden by a positive commandment, because behold, Scripture counts seven species of wild animal and says “these are the wild animals that you may eat”; behold, everything outside of them you shall not eat, and a prohibition classified as a positive commandment is [punished as a] positive commandment. [Mishnah Torah, Hilchot Ma’achalot Asurot 2:3]
What does the last part, “forbidden by a positive commandment”, mean? The default punishment for a physical action (as opposed to, say, speech) violating a prohibition of the Torah is flogging, but by default there is no punishment for failing to observe a mandate of the Torah. Even though “don’t eat human flesh” sounds a lot like a prohibition, Maimonides is classifying it among the positive commandments, as an implication of “only eat animals from the following species”. So if your plane goes down in the Andes and you, on the brink of starvation, have to choose between eating a pork chop from the galley or one of your dead fellow-passengers, you could make an argument that it’s better to forego the pork chop. (You could also make an argument that eating people is so self-evidently disgusting that God didn’t need to explicitly forbid it.)
Nachmanides, in his commentary on last week’s parsha, argues against Maimonides:
The teacher Rabbi Moshe says that this is to exclude human flesh… but the matter is not so, because the Sages explicitly permitted biped blood and biped milk, so there is not even a rabbinic commandment to separate from it. And if its meat were forbidden, what comes from something unclean is unclean, and the Sages excluded insect blood and human blood from the prohibition against blood, and they said “the blood of an insect is like its meat” and one is flogged for it on account of its insect-ness and not on account of its blood-ness, and they made it like meat. But what they said—that eating [human flesh] is not covered by the prohibition—is to say that they are not excluding it [from the list of permitted meats] and they are permitting it. But according to my opinion this is meat from someone alive, but regarding a corpse, we learn by a textual similarity from the law of the heifer whose neck is broken that we are forbidden to derive benefit from it. [Nachmanides s.v. Leviticus 11:3]
Nachmanides makes the inference from Torat Cohanim that we were afraid to make earlier: if the prohibition against eating from non-kosher animals does not apply to human meat, then human meat must be permitted. But he points out that there is a completely separate commandment against deriving benefit from a human corpse. So if some poor fellow died to provide our deli plate, Nachmanides and Maimonides would forbid the meat, even though the Rosh would permit it. Meat à la Mike Tyson is kosher according to Nachmanides, even though both Maimonides and the Rosh forbid it. And placenta stew is OK according to both the Rosh and Nachmanides, even though Maimonides forbids it.
How do we resolve this three-way split? There’s a very long Nimukei Yosef on Ketubot 60a, evaluating all of the above interpretations, that is beyond my translation skills, although Gil Student might be summarizing it here. (He also brings down a fourth opinion, from the Ritva and the Re’ah: that since the Torah never explicitly permitted eating human meat, as it did for the meat of animals, it must be forbidden and punishable by flogging.)
Rabbi Yosef Karo, curiously enough, does not address the question of human meat in either the Shulchan Aruch or its longer predecessor, the Beit Yosef. But the Rema, in his emendations, says:
Eating human flesh is forbidden by the Torah. [Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh Deah 79:1]
The Shach, commenting on this line, says that if the meat comes from a live human it’s forbidden according to Maimonides’ logic, and if it comes from a corpse then it’s forbidden according to Nachmanides.
So the bottom line is: if you’re Ashkenazi, anthropophagy is strictly forbidden, although placenta stew might be less strictly forbidden than pork. If you’re Sephardi, consult your rabbi.
Based on a tikkun leil Shavuot talk that I gave in 5760 [2000]. Images are scanned from my handout at that talk. I apologize to the non-visual readers for not having accessible transcripts of the Hebrew and Aramaic texts, and I apologize to the excessively visual readers for leaving some of the images tilted.
Middle matzah mystery
It’s a good sign when your son asks you a question at the Seder that you need to go all the way to the Mishnah Berurah to answer.
The question: why do we break the middle matzah?
The answer (MB 473:57): “…because the blessing on the [mitzvah of the] eating of matzah principally applies to it, and the blessing of hamotzi [the generic blessing on eating bread] that is made first applies to the top one that rests on it.”
A big squishy center
According to the latest news from Israel, the Labor Party has decided to join Likud in a coalition government. “680 of Labor Party central committee members voted in favor of joining the coalition, while 570 voted against. The voter turnout stood at 78 percent of the committee members.”
By comparison, according to the Britannica, back when there was a Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that party’s Central Committee had “300 or so members”. Wikipedia reports that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China is about the same size.
I have complained about my synagogue’s oversized board of directors in the past, but clearly, when it comes to top-heavy management, we are pikers.
Rambam, repentance, and racism
As you may have heard, there’s a massive…words fail me…going over the fannish segments of the Internet, particularly LiveJournal, that some have dubbed “RaceFail ’09”. (See here for a chronological and comprehensive list of links. Note that despite the “Fail” in the topic as a whole, the content is a mix of the thought-provoking and the cringe-inducing.) I have been reading a lot of the stuff posted under this heading, commenting a little, reading a lot, commenting a little, reading a lot, thinking a lot… I think I’m ready to post a little now.
Let me start by quoting Maimonides, Laws of Repentance 7:3.
Do not say that one should only repent of sins involving deeds, such as lechery and robbery and theft. Just as one has to turn away from these, so too does one have to search for bad character traits and turn away from them—from anger and from hatred and from envy and from strife and from mockery and from chasing money or honor and from gluttony, and so forth—from all of these, one must penitently return from. And these corruptions are harder than the ones involving deeds, because when one becomes embedded in them, it is hard to separate from them. And so it is written (Isaiah 55:7): “Let the evildoer abandon his way and the corrupt man his thoughts.”
A bad character trait is not a sin. (Maimonides uses different Hebrew words—avonot and aveirot—to refer to the two things.) People usually don’t decide to be angry or envious in the way they decide, say, to eat a cheeseburger. But Maimonides teaches us that no matter how those bad traits got into us, we have a duty to take them out, and he warns us that it’s not going to be easy.
We might see the improvement of our own character as a form of prudence. Anger leads to assault, envy leads to theft, and so on, so if we control the roots of bad character we can prevent the weeds of overt sin from surfacing. We might even notice that bad character makes it harder to repent of our overt sins and easier to rationalize them. (“OK, I hit her, but she deserved it, and I didn’t leave any bruises…”)
Maimonides teaches us to go further. Even if we know with perfect certainty (as if we ever could) that our character flaws have not led us to do anything wrong, we still have to work on uprooting them. The flaws are bad in and of themselves, not just bad for what they do.
Moreover, we have an obligation to look for those bad traits—to turn over the wet rocks in our own souls and see if anything slimy and ugly has made a home there. It’s not enough to leave them all untouched until someone else says “dude, I think you have some envy issues you need to work on”. It’s certainly not enough to wait for that “someone else” to phrase his or her critique in a given way.
This is great news, because it means we will always have something to do. If God set a standard of human virtue and said “get up to here”, then anyone who reached that standard would have little motivation to go higher, and anyone who found that standard impossible would have little motivation to rise at all. But the commandment of repentance focuses on our direction, not our position.
Almost all of us are tainted by the corruption of racial prejudice, but we can repent of it. I am a racist, but if I make the right effort today, I will be less of a racist tomorrow than I was yesterday. That’s a capability I can be proud of… if I use it.
OK, back to reading a lot.
