'Miami Thrice' and King James

No, I do not live in a cave. I followed the adventures - through New York Times headlines - of Lebron, and watched with everyone else as he did what in retrospect seems obvious, signing with Dwayne and Chris and (here's the significant and) Pat Riley.

But I still, over the last few days, have been guilty of a cognitive disconnect. I kept on seeing tweets, about 'hating King James,' and I'm thinking to myself: why the sudden animus for the King James Bible? Maybe, I found myself thinking, public culture is not in such a sorry state. True, I myself prefer King James, especially to the polemical and fussy Geneva Bible, but hey: I'm open minded. In any event, feeling myself not so irrelevant to discussions of the day: first one of the World Cup organizers refers to Donne's Meditation 17 - 'no, man is an island' - and now the greatest English Bible translation trending on twitter.

But then I realized: oh, that King James.

A twitter-quaintance - is that a word? - noted how 'all of the yeshiva guys' he knew were in the parsha of King James, but this time, the right one, or the wrong one, depending on your perspective.

So why does the 'Torah only' world tolerate a love of basketball, but not King James (the real one), Aristotle, and Shakespeare? Talk about the King James Bible translation to yeshiva guys, and after a long blank stare, they will probably wonder if Art Scroll got a new donor. I'll quote Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein: why do people think it is 'perfectly legitimate to labor long and engrossing hours in order to eat lamp chops, drive a Volvo, or vacation in St. Moritz, but illicit to devote those hours instead to exploring, with Plato and Goethe, new vistas and experience?'

Yes, Rav Aharon's references are dated (a Volvo!), but why do so some of us tolerate Torah and entertainment, and not pursue Torah u'madda? or pay lip service to the latter while pursuing the former?

First the Blog, Now the Book: Can you Judge a Book by its Cover?

Open Minded Torah: Of Irony, Fundamentalism and Love

Yes, that is the now official title - coming in the spring of 2011 to a book store near you.

And for an OMT interview, as well as chulent recipes and lots of other interesting stuff, check Ilana Davita here.

Faceless

'And I will dwell upon you' - so God says to the people of Israel, and He dwells among them, first in the sanctuary in the desert and then in the center of Jewish worship the Temple in Jerusalem. The ninth day of the month of Av commemorates the destruction of the Temple, the day to which future Jewish tragedies are linked - exile, pogrom and holocaust. 'I will hide my face from them' - and so God - Jews know this too well - withdraws his presence when he turns his face from his people. Not only is the face of God absent, Primo Levi writes out of Aushwitz, but also the human face. 'I do not know who my neighbor is. I am not even sure that it is always the same person because I have never seen his face.' Auschwitz is the faceless world without the presence of God or man.

The first Temple, built in the merit of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was destroyed on the ninth of Av because of the sins of the people of Israel: illicit relationships, idolatry and murder. Abraham's hesed - the outward excess of generosity - turns into vulgar indulgence; Isaac's subjugation of his will to God - bound on the altar by his father - turns to idolatrous ritual; the peace established by Jacob - through the tribes of Israel - transforms into murder. When the attributes of the patriarchs that had distinguished the Jewish inheritance are overturned - and turned into their opposite - says the Maharal of Prague, the first Temple falls. The temple is rebuilt, not because of the merits of the patriarchs - the first and second Temples are different - but because of the people of the unity of the people of Israel. In the Purim story, Esther calls a day of fasting for the Jewish people: 'go and gather all the Jews of Shushan.' As a result of their heeding her call for unity - the story of Esther takes during the Babylonian exile - the second Temple is built. As the Maharal writes, the sustenance for the first Temple came from above - the relationship that God initiates with the patriarchs; while that of the second Temple came from below, from the people of Israel. But when the Roman general Titus destroyed the Temple hundreds of years later, also on the ninth of Av, the sages say that the people of Israel were Temple service, studying Torah, and performing acts of kindness - what Simon the Just later calls the 'three pillars upon which the world stands.' So what went wrong? On the surface it seemed like great times of the people of Israel: there was scrupulous observance to the Torah, and even shows of care for others - acts of kindness - but beneath it all, baseless hatred. And so the second Temple fell.

'You shall not harbor hatred for your neighbor in your heart' - b'lavavcha. So God commands the people of Israel in Leviticus. There is another command which must be fulfilled with all 'your heart': when God commands me to love Him with all my heart - the doubling of the letter bet in the Hebrew word for heart means, the sages say that I must love God with both my good and bad inclinations, with the energies which I am happy to publicly own, and those about which I am less inclined to acknowledge. I need to love God even with the self which at times may seem a stranger to the self I proclaim to myself and others. One of the sixteenth century sages of Safed, the Alshich, applies the words of the sages about love of God to the command to refrain from hating one's neighbor. Just as I can love God with both good and bad inclinations, I also hate with good and bad inclinations. To hate with my bad inclination is, paradoxically, 'better' - for after my perception of having been wronged or injured, and turning towards another with hatred, I may, in a moment of calm, come to my senses and experience regret. 'It was a bad moment; I had a bad day: the part of me that hates is not the part of me that I embrace.' Out of regret comes repentance. But I can also hate with my yetzer tov - my good inclination, or rather with that part of my personality which I see as upright, and even moral. But from such hatred, repentance rarely follows. For as I'm hating the other, I tell myself that I am justified in my hatred - the hatred in fact is my duty, a sign of my moral rectitude. And if anyone questions me - I will do my best not to condescend to them as I explain to them - 'how could I do otherwise? how could anyone? don't you know that it's a mitzva to hate?' 'We are obligated to hate evil!' - and I may even show you a verse in the Torah, as I prove that hatred is my religious obligation. But devotion to hatred of this kind that, or the strident adherence to any position, Jonathan Lear writes, is one way I may keep myself 'in the dark about who I am.' My unconscious - the part of me that feels ambivalent about my own choices and actions, causing me to lash out at others - acts out not through my 'evil inclination,' but through my so-called 'good inclination.' This may explain why in our generation, we do not fulfill the mitzva of hating evil in our fellows. Not just because it's hard to distinguish good and evil - as Milton wrote, 'good and evil grow up together almost inseparably' - but also because our 'good inclination' is suspect. So one of the great sages of the twentieth century, the Chafetz Chaim says, if you are looking around for mitzvot to perform - hatred is not among them - you will have to find another. Not only is the hatred projected outwards likely doing psychic work for me about which I am not fully aware, but it is also a hatred from which I will never recover. I repent of what I acknowledge I did wrong. It is hard - if not impossible - to repent of something which I consider to be a mitzva.

Already at the time of the second Temple, the people of Israel were doing hesed, performing acts of kindness with the wrong kind of 'good inclination.' They put a good face on things - the Temple service was flourishing, the houses of study were full, and the hesed organizations - groups devoted to charity - were thriving. But through these acts of kindness - their 'good inclination' - they showed what they were really about. For their acts of hesed were selective: 'We are the the genuinely God-fearing' - each group boasted. And: 'the way they serve God is not to my liking.' 'I don't like the shul where he prays'; and 'I don't care for how she dresses.' 'They may look like Jews, but they are not' - so each group claimed of the other. Acts of kindness did not serve as a way to come together, but to divide. Kindness becomes a way of expressing exclusivity; hesed, paradoxically, the way to show hatred for others. The baseless hatred is not just an external cause for the destruction of the Temple; without the unity of the people of Israel, the Temple had, writes the Maharal, no further reason to exist. The Jews may have been doing mitzvot; but they did not make themselves present to others in doing those mitzvot. Just the opposite: the performance of the mitzvot - hesed as a form of hatred - allowed them to be absent to others, because absent to themselves.

The sages say: 'Any one who has da'at - knowledge - it as if the Temple is rebuilt in his days.' Man is like the Temple in the way that he brings together different worlds. Like Betzalel who constructed the sanctuary in the wilderness uses his da'at - his power to connect - to bring the Torah and the divine presence or shechina - down to earth. The sages bring together my knowledge or my sensibility - another word for 'da'at' - with my face. For I show my individuality in my face; it is the place where neshama and guf - soul and body - upper and lower worlds come together. The sage Shammai's injunction - 'always show a good countenance, panim yafot, or literally a beautiful face' is not just a call for good manners. The beautiful face, the face that glows or shines, is like the Temple - which is called hod or beauty - where the physical yields to the spiritual, where God's presence rests. The second Temple was built in the merit of the people of Israel, in their making themselves present one to another. A person who has da'at who is present to himself and present to others participates in the Temple's rebuilding; he joins higher and lower worlds in himself.

When God's face is absent on the ninth of Av, it is not just a seeming absence; on that day we experience it as such. On other days - holidays and fast days like the ninth of Av all provide different lenses on experience - we may speak about happy endings and redemption, but on the 9th of Av evil is palpably, irredeemably real. And in the face of destruction - and trauma - man's face is also absent: 'I could not see his face.' Absent in Auschwitz, absent in the traumas that make us unable to show ourselves or be seen. Though the Temple was rebuilt, it lacked, the sages of Babylonia say, the divine presence, the holy spirit, and ark of the covenant - all aspects of the divine connection to man. The sages of Palestine, however say that there was, in fact, a divine presence even in the second Temple. They acknowledge that the divine presence that comes from above was gone, but that the second Temple was built because of a different kind of divine presence, one with origins from below. Someone with da'at, who is able to join upper and lower worlds, who brings the Torah down to earth through his actions, is like one who builds the Temple. He is present to himself, and others. Though there is no compensating for the sufferings of destruction, exile and holocaust, there is the possibility of repair, through bringing the shechina down to earth, by letting it show itself in the human face.

Would You Buy This Book?

In essays as likely to turn to baseball, Denzel Washington, and the NASDAQ as to Macbeth, quantum physics and psychoanalysis, William Kolbrener provides powerful –and often surprising – insights into how open mindedness allows for authentic Jewish commitment in an age otherwise defined by fundamentalism and unbelief.

Open Minded Torah presents – on topics ranging from parenting a son with Down syndrome to Biblical criticism to Talmudic interpretation of dreams – a perspective on Torah which emphasizes skepticism, creativity and the need to embrace difference. Through a personal synthesis of Western and Jewish learning, popular culture and philosophy, Kolbrener offers a compelling new vision where being open minded allows for a non-dogmatic and committed Jewish life. Informed by Kolbrener’s considerable erudition, but always accessible, the essays of Open Minded Torah show that skepticism informs belief, commitment grounds creativity, and non-defensive receptivity makes individual autonomy possible.

For every person, it is said, there is a corresponding letter in the Torah: this innovative collection shows Kolbrener writing his letter, and providing the inspiration for others to write their own.

The Summer Game: Baseball and the Jews

“What is it with you and baseball?” my wife asked recently after I emerged late for breakfast from my basement office. “It’s a Jewish sport,” I told her. Not because there may be a disproportionate number of baseball players in that classic volume, Jews in Sport. There is rather something about the sensibility of the game that makes for the connection between baseball and the Jews.

Bartlett Giamatti, the former Yale professor of comparative literature and Baseball Commissioner, had written of the Greek not Jewish nature of the game. The goal to “come home” places baseball in the epic traditions of the West, beginning with the heroic Odysseus whose desire to return home to his native Ithaka is at the primordial roots of the game. Perhaps, I considered, since Odysseus is really the Greek version of the Jewish b’aal tshuva—the one who returns—there is a hybrid Hebraic and Hellenic provenance to the Great American Game. But Giamatti’s meditations are too abstruse and allegorical, somehow missing the point. Baseball, rather, is a game of stories, complicated, intertwining, entangled—which is what makes baseball the Jewish sport.

There is not only the story told by the standings, the win and loss columns, or the rivalry between teams etched in baseball’s collective memory; there are the unfolding stories of individual players. Unlike the synchronized beauty of pro football’s violence, these stories can be watched as they develop in the luxuriating slowness of the 162 game season. After a few games, just a highlight can alert to the latest nuances of the story-lines; for the true initiates even a box score is redolent with cues to their progress (there were once, after all—hard to imagine for our image-centered generation—fans who followed the whole season through box scores).
It’s not only the narratives that evolve over the course of the season. The games of the “endless summer” provide, if watched carefully, cerebral stories of the moment. I remember the magical season of 1986 of the Mets’ World Series victory when I first tuned into the broadcaster, Tim McCarver, with his elaborate explanations of the permutations that make up the confrontation between pitcher and batter. And so the position players factor in dozens of variables, for every pitch, every batter, every developing scenario. There are those that compile baseball’s ever-growing number of statistics. But the numbers, of course, tell a story.

Before Odysseus even thought of leaving his hometown, Jews were telling stories. From the first Passover seder in the desert, the year after the Exodus from Egypt, we have been following the divine command to recount the formative moments of our creation as a people—connecting the present to the past through story-telling. How strange, if you think of it, a mitzva, a divine command, to narrate! But not only that, we are always already enmeshed in a life-long cycle of story telling: the weekly Torah and Haftorah portions that tell the stories of Jewish history. Or the sabbath itself—the prayers and meals of which implicate every Jew in the story of the longest duration which stretches back from the present to divine creation. Or the cycle of holidays in which we find ourselves part of the stories that have already been told, and are not only told but re-enacted, with words and through actions—with each reading of the megillah at Purim time, with each lighting of the candles on Chanuka, with each blintz on Shavuot.
From the very first seder in the desert, there were already variations and embellishments. As the Passover hagadda enjoins, the person who adds to the narrative of the Exodus is to be praised—enriching himself and others through the telling of tales. The stories that unravel over time are experienced and told differently in every home: that the famous four children of the seder each recquire a different approach becomes a lesson for parents for all generations to tell the stories so that that their own children can hear them best. And since, as the sages say, there are “seventy faces of the Torah,” there will be an endless multiplicity and variation, ever-unfolding opportunities for narration. Jews are probably not, as the old saying goes, people of the Book, but rather people of the telling—the telling and living of stories.

OMT Classic: Thoughts for Shavuos: Why I Gave Up Biblical Criticism and Just Started Loving...

My title is a bit misleading. For to tell the truth, I never was much for the Biblical criticism--that academic discipline founded in the nineteenth century, promising to tell the truth about Biblical authorship. There's been a lot of talk about Biblical criticism recently, with a new book claiming once and for all to provide a vision of the Bible "as it really was." The assumptions upon which Biblical criticism are based is that the methods of the sciences can be brought into the humanities, and that if we just occupy the right perspective, we can sift through all of the facts and evidence and have an objective picture of things. I'm a scholar, and I love evidence as much as the next guy, but I've never been compelled by the readings of Biblical scholars with their alphabet soup of authors--J, D, P--which in my view is just their way of not facing the complexities of a Biblical text with which they don't truly engage or understand. I certainly wouldn't want a Biblical scholar to help me read Milton's Paradise Lost; where Milton argues through paradox, they would just see contradiction and evidence for multiple authorship. Now is probably not the time to go into the way in which enlightenment beliefs in reason are also faith-based practices (Stanley Fish has written brilliantly on this as a columnist in the New York Times). Nor is it the time to cite those scholars in various academic fields (in both the humanities and sciences) who have called into question the whole conception of objective neutrality upon which the Biblical Criticism is founded.

When my wife and I began our paths to Torah, I remember someone (I think it was my father-in-law) saying that if G-d wanted to give a handbook to humanity, he would have given it in binary code. To him, this would have been a form of revelation that could be objectively understood, a crystal clear revelation requiring no interpretation at all. But the Torah in it's very first verse asserts itself not as an objective knowledge, but one that is based upon relationship--the relationship between G-d and His people, Israel. As Rashi explains the בראשית--"In the Beginning"--of the first verse is a contraction of ב-שביל ראשית b'shvil reshis, 'on behalf of the first.' And 'the first,' as Rashi shows from other passages in the Holy Writings refers to Torah and Israel. The world was created for the sake of the divine revelation through Torah and for Israel, the nation through which the divine revelation comes into the world. Torah and Israel are together the purpose of creation; without one, the other could not exist.

G-d did not choose Israel to be an objective observer, but he founded a relationship with Israel based upon love. "With an abundant love you have loved us"--so begins the second of the two blessings which precede the recitation of the Sh'mah in the morning. And in the evening blessings preceding the Sh'mah: "With an eternal love, you have loved us"--a love expressed through G-d's bestowing of "Torah--and mitzvot, decrees and law" to His people Israel. Torah and love are thus linked together. The morning blessing continues with an entreaty "to instill in our hearts to understand, to elucidate, to listen, learn, teach, safeguard, perform and fulfill all the words of Your Torah's teaching with love." That we ask that G-d grant understanding to our hearts (and not, for example, to our minds) emphasizes again that Torah founds a relationship based upon love. So the morning blessing concludes with the praise of G-d who brings Israel close to Him so that they can "praise his unity with love," and the benediction of "G-d who chooses Israel with love." A reciprocal relationship of love: the numerical value (or gematria) of the word אהבה is equivalent to that of אחד--love is based upon unifying. In this sense, the act of receiving the Torah is an act of union or love.

Our sages refer to the giving of the Torah as yom chasanatu, the day of our chuppah or marriage. The blessing from the marriage ceremony includes five קולות or sounds--the 'sound of joy and of gladness,' the 'sound of joyful wedding celebrations,' and the 'sound of youthful feasting and singing'--which correspond, the Talmud tell us, to the five 'sounds' that accompanied the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. That the sages compare the giving of the Torah to marriage is not merely a poetic embellishment; it expresses a deep philosophical truth. G-d chooses Israel with love, and we respond with acts of love. There is no external perspective, no possibility of disengagement, but rather learning Torah is an act of love. The Sh'mah begins: "And you shall love the Lord your G-d..." How, our sages ask, do we follow the injunction to love the G-d? For the answer, they turn to the continuation of the verse, "let these words which I command you today be your hearts." It is through 'these words'--learning Torah--that I express my love for G-d.

But even more than this, as Rav Yitzchok Hutner writes, the continuation of the verse in the Sh'mah further refines the definition of learning Torah: "Let these words...be upon your hearts, and you shall teach them to your children." The act of Torah study is only fully realized through teaching. Torah study then is an act of love which connects me to G-d, but is consummated in the teaching of children and students. There's a vertical relationship, a double connection, where with love I strive upwards to the divine, and complete that act of love through a corresponding downward movement--bringing Torah into the world through teaching the next generation. My love of G-d, realized through Torah study, reaches its perfection with the love expressed in "you shall teach your children." A double movement of connection and love.

In this dynamic, there is no external place of objectivity. As Jonathan Lear, the Chicago classicist and psychoanalyst, writes the position of objectivity and the so-called "neutral perspective" is just a myth, and attempting to occupy it leads to "developmental failure and pathology." We've all been there, even if not as Miltonists or Biblical critics--who forestall genuine engagement with texts through their flat and preachy readings. We've more likely occupied that perspective in bad moments as spouses, or equally bad moments as parents where we flee to a place of disengaged complacency and crabbiness (or self-righteousness) instead of engaging with those whom we love. So this Sunday night--z'man matan Toraseinu, the time of the giving of our Torah--we should give up that very contemporary and Western desire for objectivity and cool disengagement, and start loving a little--by renewing our efforts to connect, to make the Torah our own.