Tag Archives: New Voices

[New Voices] A Renaissance Man of Religions

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This week at Pardes we looked at issues of separatism in Judaism, from the extremely current issue of the letter banning rental of apartments to Arabs to the more theoretical ‘how should Judaism treat those outside of its (exclusive) community?’ We also had a guest speaker talk about how Jews have viewed other religions in previous time periods, specifically how Rabbi Jacob Emden (1697-1776) views Christians in relation to the Jewish community.

The key takeaway from our discussion of the story that took over much of the news during the end of Chanukah was not just that the halachik basis on which the rabbis who signed the letter based their arguments was spurious. More importantly, we must remember that no one has the right to make a claim on behalf of Judaism as a whole. The tradition is too complex, too multifaceted and containing too many values that can be put into tension with each other for there to be a single voice on almost any topic that represents all of Judaism.

Looking more theoretically at the same set of issues, it is clear to me that there is a serious ‘conflict of interests’ for many young North American Jews today being exposed to texts that purport that Jews are somehow special and deserving of recognition for that uniqueness, either by themselves or even by the wider communities in which they live. I have commented previously about my views on Jews being “a light unto the nations.” How one relates to that question says a lot about how one will think that Jews ought to treat non-Jewish populations, both locally and abroad. An more positive way to look at spreading wisdom is that Jews should try their best to improve the world, which hopefully would encourage others to do the same, rather than implying that others do not have as much to offer. The fact is that, for most of us, we will always be part of many overlapping and sometimes contradicting exclusive communities, and that is simply part of the struggle of living in the modern world yet maintaining deep ties to the Jewish community.

Finally, I learned a little bit about the work of Rabbi Jacob Emden for the first time, and was struck by two things. First, the concept of a renaissance man seems like a forgotten ideal for the most part – or just simply impractical given the depth of knowledge that would be required to become an expert in more than one discipline – but I think that it should be reinvigorated when it comes to religion. We lack today religious leaders who are truly well read in religions other than their own. Second, I was intrigued that I, nor anyone else who attended the lecture, had never heard of Rabbi Emden. The Jewish tradition has so many gems, even just talking on a textual basis, which are rarely discussed or studied. But I couldn’t help but wonder if his views on Christians – that they should be respected and thanked for helping to spread ‘morality’ much more effectively than Judaism ever did – have played a role in his not being included in the traditional Jewish ‘canon’ of rabbis and thinkers that the mainstream of Jewish students are exposed to.

Special thanks to Meesh, Rabbi Wayne Allen, and David Bookbinder, for teaching me (and others) about all the topics mentioned in this post.

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[New Voices] Hityavnut (Hellenization)

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I’d like to focus on something I mentioned very briefly in my overview of Chanukkah which has been coming up in my mind as I consider life back home: namely, Hityavnut or Hellenization, or what would today be called assimilation.

The word gives varied messages manifested in different languages. Hityavnut is an example of a word that I find to have a different and deeper feel to it in Hebrew than its counterpart in English. “Greekify” hardly implies assimilation, and yet that is what Hityavnut would mean, on an extremely literal level. But that is not the most noteworthy part of this Hebrew word. Rather the fact that, as far as I could tell being around Israelis discussing issues of modern assimilation, Hityavnut is a word that means not only Hellenization (only meaningful in the context of discussing the Chanukkah story) but its modern meaning is also assimilation. I guess this could just be me falling for the allure of a language whose words encapsulate the history I learned growing up in Jewish day school, but which had no connection to the language I was speaking. I find it fascinating that I can understand the meaning of Hityavnut without understanding what the denotation of the word ‘assimilation’ as long as I know the Chanukkah story; English has nothing like it.

Returning to the content of this appealing Hebrew term, I have what amounts to a simple concern about living in a Jewish and a secular world simultaneously. Can one live in both worlds without being swayed ‘too much’ by either? What is ‘too much’? Can one have purely secular, non-Jewish interactions as well as purely religious, Jewish interactions and still keep all the varying world-views and lenses together in one’s head? While such questions have undoubtedly been asked endlessly by anyone who is not content to live in exclusively Jewish surroundings their entire lives, each time, and for each individual, it is slightly different based on each individual’s circumstances.

What should one’s goals be in living simultaneously in both worlds? The discussion with Israeli teenagers mentioned the Westernization of Israel in ways exemplified by the prevalence of Gap stores and other Americanized companies, and the fact that they are in English for the most part. No doubt language is more than the sum of its parts, and losing a language means so much more than losing the words, as the example of Hityavnut shows. But if recent news is any indication, we need more people that are deeply aware of more than one culture’s needs and concerns.

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[New Voices] Texts and the Subjectivity of Language

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Being constantly surrounded by texts, and basing the vast majority of my education this term at Pardes on those texts, has made me think a lot about issues of how we understand texts. Specifically, I have reflected on just how much is lost from a traditional Jewish text (Chumash, Talmud, etc.) when it is read exclusively in a language other than Hebrew. This contrasts quite severely with how Western Analytic philosophy is taught at universities in the Western world these days (at least in my experience). As is the case with the texts we study at Pardes, most of the texts studied in the course of obtaining a degree in philosophy were not written in English. However, no time is spent learning to read and understand the original languages, and barely any mention is even made of the fact that much is undoubtedly lost through studying the texts in this way.

More recently, I have been considering a more removed aspect of the same issue, namely how we communicate with each other, not across millennia but with those we interact with during our lives. Language is such a tricky thing, not only deserving its own post, but probably a library-full of books. The language we speak is so culture-specific in today’s world of hyper-accelerated change due to the global nature of the communities with which we interact and the accessibility we all have to foreign communities because of the Internet and other technologies. This is so true that a given person probably speaks so many different languages over the course of one lifetime that, were it not for the fact that the same person lived both, it would be difficult for the same person to understand all of what the previous culture produced (textually) when rooted in a ‘later’ language.

If that were not enough, in order to interact with people at any given moment in time, one has to share a tremendous amount of shared language with them. Now I don’t want to be accused of saying that people living in culture x cannot interact with people in culture y. Rather, I mean this in a more (arguably elitist) academic sense, which is the world that I am immersed in; both at university back home and here at Pardes. It has become increasingly clear to me that, even given all the requisite similarities that I have mentioned, it is almost inconceivable that any given sentence (about a non-pedestrian topic) will be understood by those listening (or, even more so, reading written words years or centuries later) in the same way that the speaker intended it.

Not that any grand moral lessons need to be learned from this, but if anything, it is important to remember this and pause before jumping to conclusions of any kind that are based on verbal interactions (non-verbal interactions are another bucket of worms). Also, taken in this context, the amount of ‘translating’ that really goes into making a text such as the Bible accessible to an audience of Western 21st century students is extraordinary.

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Land, Birthrights, and Ownership

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In trying to figure out what I should write for my weekly New Voices post yesterday, it took me no more than five minutes to realize that a big part of my struggle with living in this country is best expressed (for me) in a series of interconnected questions about fundamental issues of humanity’s relationship to this planet and to each other. Hope it isn’t too philosophical…

My post-secondary education has consisted of a couple years of this and that, followed by two years of almost exclusive (Western analytic) philosophy. Just speaking for myself, I have learnt to ask pertinent questions, but articulating answers of a similar quality has not been part of my education. This is because philosophy teaches you how to argue and reason, but does not provide the extensive amount of life experience and education in many other fields that would be required to develop answers to the extremely ‘big-picture’ questions that philosophers are attracted to.

That is all my way of apologizing right from the start. I am going to lay out a series of related, meaningful, and terribly difficult-to-answer questions, with no real hope of providing even a framework in which to answer them – especially given the short nature of my posts here. So forgive me for raising more problems than I can resolve, but living in Israel has left me thinking about the issues of land as a commodity, the idea of a birthright, and whether one can meaningfully say that either can be owned.

I must say up front that there are many background assumptions operating behind all of these questions, but that is almost a necessary result of growing up embracing a certain set of values and priorities. So what follows is my way of trying to articulate these problems through a series of questions: Who owns land? Can one own land? What is a birthright? Do persons (defined in a morally significant way) have a birthright, and, if so, to what? Do Jews, or any predefined group of people, have a birthright? Do they deserve one?

I will now offer a few brief thoughts on these questions and in which direction I would point in order to answer them. First, I will say that by ‘person’ I mean to include a set of conscious beings that do not necessarily equal just those who are biologically human. This is most articulately explained in the writings of Peter Singer and for those who are interested, I refer you to his published works. Second, the idea of owning land in the 21st century can be meaningfully juxtaposed to previous times in the history of the world — examples important to me including the original Biblical division of the land of Israel and the theory of property rights expounded by John Locke — when it was perfectly feasible that each person, or nuclear family, could develop their own plot of land. Third, and particularly applying to the current State of Israel where, as I Jew, I can make aliyah more easily than someone who is not a Jew, is the idea of a birthright. I would like to argue — maybe overly idealistically — that all people are born with a birthright to a certain set of basic rights. The idea that a certain textual and cultural tradition would be an additional right bestowed to only a certain group of people is considerably more challenging. A defense of this very incomplete view would require a much fuller treatment of the issues, so I will leave this as an introduction to what I view as critical issues for Jews growing up in the 21st century.

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[New Voices] The Limits of Acceptable Democratic Legislation

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I have been writing weekly for a blog called New Voices which I found through MASA, and since I haven’t had enough time or ideas to come up with separate posts on any regular basis here, I have included my latest post from New Voices. I am well aware that this is a controversial topic; it has sparked some fairly critical responses on New Voices (if you’re interested, see this post and especially the comments that follow).

Browsing New Voices today, I see that I am not the only one that is seriously concerned by the legislation that passed the Knesset on Sunday. Since BrandonSpringer delved into the issue already (and it’s worth a read), I will skirt the politics as much as I can, and will instead focus on a more personal response.

Since the Knesset passed the Loyalty Oath, I have been trying to read as much as I can to try to understand how it can be spun positively, but to no avail (see The Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, and Challenge, as well as something closer to my home in Vancouver for examples).

What struck me when reading about this controversial bill is that this issue is different for me. It is not different because it irks me more than anything the Israeli government has done in the past, but rather because I am now living here. So long as that is the case, I cannot act like I used to at home, saying that no matter how aggravated I am about it, ultimately it is ‘their’ — the Israelis’ — problem, and I can continue worrying about issues that are closer to home, both literally and figuratively.

Given that realization, I have concluded that I cannot satisfactorily say that I am disappointed by this or that law and then do nothing about it. In order to make any difference — even the limited difference of one individual — I must change the way I behave towards a state whose laws (if passed) offend me tremendously and threaten to stretch the definition of a “Jewish and democratic state” to absurdity.

Towards that end, I feel that, if this legislation passes, I can quite easily take a stand by actively refraining from coming to Israel so long as such a Loyalty Oath is required only of people who are not Jewish. Speaking practically, I am not going to pack up my bags and fly home in protest, but after I return home, this seems like a reasonable measure of protest.

Making this decision public will undoubtedly result is criticism from fellow Jews, as it has always (in my lifetime) been extremely difficult to voice criticism of Israel and it’s policies – even if that criticism is meant to encourage betterment on Israel’s part and is made with the best interests of everyone at heart. However, I have spent too many years of my young life being inundated with facts about the start of the Shoah to not connect the dots here – and while that comparison is made all too often, it behooves everyone to realize just how sadly ironic it is that the Jewish state, in the year 2010, would be embarking upon the path of instituting legislation that applies unevenly based on religion.

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