Voyaging Into Jewish History

 

Previously, I explored Haredi education through an Abie Rotenberg song. I would like to continue to use Abie Rotenberg to better understand Jewish thought. The song "Journey at Sea" from the album Journeys Five stands as a useful introduction to a traditional view of Jewish History. To be clear, by history here, what I mean is not so much the particular facts about the past but the narrative framework in which we place those facts. Admittedly, part of the song's charm is that it never explicitly says anything about Judaism. If I had heard this song on a Celtic album I would have simply thought that this was a solid song. What follows is my interpretation. You have the ship of Judaism crewed by the faithful and led by wise captain rabbis. It sails on the Sea of Galus (exile). The goal is at some point to reach the port of messianic redemption, but that is of little day-to-day relevance when compared to living as a religious Jew. The challenge of sailing on the Sea of Galus is that inevitably you are going to run into storms that threaten to destroy Judaism either through physical violence or through assimilation. 

It should be noted that the captain and the crew are fundamentally passive figures as events play themselves out. They have absorbed enough of Jewish History to recognize that storms are on the horizon and take measures, presumably the strengthening of Jewish practice, to give themselves a chance of getting through the storm with the ship intact. That being said, no one on the ship ever tries to stop storms from happening. Such actions are presumed to be beyond their power and, therefore foolhardy to pursue. All that is left is to recognize that they have limited power and seek to act only within their means. 

This view of Jewish History has not been limited to Orthodox writers. For example, Heinrich Graetz's Jewish History is famously an exercise in a lachrymose narrative in which Jews suffer and think. There is a reason why Rabbi Berel Wein was able to so easily take Graetz and give him a more religious spin. Graetz's basic narrative remained a fundamentally traditional one in which Judaism managed to survive outside threats even as, for Graetz, Judaism meant something slightly different from Orthodox writers, mainly nothing involving Kabbalah or Hasidism.    

An essential point to understand about political Zionism (whether secular or religious) is that it rejected our traditional model of Jewish History. One thinks of the example of Benzion Netanyahu's biography of Isaac Abarbanel. Netanyahu could never forgive Abarbanel for having been caught by surprise by 1492 and for having no real solution to the problem of expulsion beyond apocalypticism. If Jews had a state of their own, then Jews would not have had to ask themselves the question of what are they to do if they were faced with expulsion or pogroms as Jews living in a Jewish State would not be under the power of gentiles. Similarly, at a spiritual level, Jews would not have had to worry about making themselves acceptable to gentiles and refashioning Judaism to suit gentile tastes. Instead, Jews could have focused on the development of a genuinely Jewish culture. From this perspective, traditional Jewish History, with its emphasis on bracing to be hit in the hope of being able to stand back up again, was a colossal mistake that needed to be fixed.     

It should be appreciated that the State of Israel was founded in 1948 at a time when the traditional model of Jewish History seemed to have reached a dead end. This was in the wake of the Holocaust when a modern state like Germany decided to invest its full efforts in murdering all Jews under its control. Furthermore, neither the United States and certainly not the Soviet Union could stand as plausible candidates for flourishing Jewish life, particularly when being Jewish now meant facing the possibility of something like the Holocaust. Under such circumstances, it seemed unlikely that Judaism could survive without a Jewish State that would physically protect Jews and offer them a space to be productive citizens without abandoning their Jewish identity. In judging the State of Israel over the past seventy-five years, it is a fair question to consider to what extent it has offered a legitimate alternative to traditional Jewish History.

In understanding the traditional narrative of Jewish History, it is useful to also pay attention to the song's chorus: "It's our life a journey at sea, a voyage of fate and destiny." What has allowed Jews to even try to survive as Jews has been a belief that there really was no other way of life available to them. To be a religious Jew has meant believing that God has a literal plan for history that requires Jewish survival so he will not allow the Jewish people to disappear. If you are a Jew, you will always be a Jew and God, often acting through gentiles, will never allow you to escape your Judaism no matter how hard you try. Even for those Jews who formally reject such theology, the basic model of seeing the world can be hard to shake.   

 

Haredi Education and the Heroic Teacher

 

Abie Rotenberg's song, "Ninth Man" tells the story of a class of troublemaking kids who turn themselves around because their rebbe steps in as a replacement in their baseball game after the catcher breaks his leg. (One hopes that this was after the ambulance or the boy's parents were able to take the kid to the hospital.) Recognizing that they owe the rebbe a favor, the kids start paying attention in class and find that the material is actually interesting. It strikes me that this song is remarkably useful as an introduction to Haredi pedagogy. The yeshiva system relies on charismatic teachers, who are passionate about the Talmud in the hope that kids develop a close personal relationship with the rebbe and become interested in the Talmud as well. 

In essence, what we have in the song is the heroic model of teaching. The rebbe proves to be a likable person, who cares about the kids and teaching Talmud. In the end, the students come to like him and therefore become interested in what he teaches. While waiting for that to happen, though, the rebbe spends months simply lecturing even though the kids are not learning anything. This itself is part of the education. The rebbe is making the point that he cares about engaging with the Talmud so much that it is worthwhile to do so even if no one is paying attention to him and he might as well be talking to the walls of the classroom. 

There is no attempt by the administration to regulate what the rebbe does in the classroom. The principal simply puts the rebbe in the classroom and then goes out of town. In the yeshiva system, there is no set curriculum of specific things that students are supposed to have mastered by a certain time. An extension of this is the lack of organized testing. If there is no agreed-upon list of things that students should know and a timetable for when they should learn it, there is little point to test students to figure out if they are on task. Any testing that takes place is going to be largely symbolic, serving the need of putting a grade on a report card rather than any pedagogical goals. 

The point of a yeshiva education is not really about mastering material. The goal is to put kids in a room with a charismatic individual, who, if given enough time, might get the kids to want to be like him. Think of it this way. A student who graduates from a yeshiva without being able to read any Hebrew but comes away admiring the rabbis and wanting to be religious is a success story. The student who leaves yeshiva having mastered a decent amount of Talmud, which he then uses to enroll at JTS is a failure. 

It is important to stress for those who have not gone through the boys’ track of the Haredi yeshiva system, how utterly Talmud-centered it is. If you are a teenage boy who is not prepared to study Talmud for several hours a day, regardless of whatever genuine talents you possess, you are royally fracked. Whatever talented individual rebbeim are out there who understand that not everyone is going to fit the model, at an institutional level, yeshivas are not equipped to handle kids for whom a Talmud-centered education would not be appropriate. In a strange way, Haredi girls have an advantage here. Girls are not supposed to be studying Talmud in the first place so girls, at least as teenagers, have more flexibility as to how they can fit into the system. There is no we are going to continue to try stuffing you into our Talmud-shaped hole and if we fail to remake you in our image, it is your fault.  

Considering, my own not particularly positive experience with the yeshiva system, it is strange to recognize the extent to which my instinctual style of teaching history is essentially a secularized version of the rebbe model. The students do not need me to memorize names and dates. They can get those from their textbook or the internet. Furthermore, I recognize that these bits of information are, in of themselves, going to be of little value to the students as they go out into the world. The important thing that my students should experience is the fact that I am truly passionate about history. History is not simply something that I talk about for a class period but what I live and breathe. Catch me out of class and I am really the same history-centered person you see in class. Beyond telling me to stop talking, I do not have an off switch; even then my internal monologue will continue. 

Since my teaching is really an extension of the running conversation in my head, I am prepared to teach even when students are not paying attention. There are some things that are so important that they should be said even if no one is going to listen. One thinks of the Calvinist minister who preaches not because he believes that he will convince anyone, God has already decided before creation who is going to believe and be saved anyway, but to make sure that those listening will not be able to claim that they never heard the message. They were told the truth and decided not to pay attention.

This can be quite disturbing for many students but there is also a certain charm to it. My inclination is to teach what I genuinely find interesting and what I think is important to understand rather than check things off a curriculum. Admittedly, this leads to my getting sidetracked. It is my conviction that my tangents, particularly if initiated by students, are usually the most important part of any lesson. The fact that I find myself talking about something even though I did not plan on it and it is not part of the curriculum suggests that it really gets to the soul of what I am trying to convey to students. 

If I find something interesting, there is a chance that I will be able to convince someone else that this is interesting as well. At the very least, students are going to be forced to face the question of what it is with this history that has me so enthralled. 

Note that what I describe here is my inclination when left to my own devices. This is not necessarily how I actually teach nor what I think makes for genuinely good teaching.

 .  

Sunshine: A Miami Boys Choir Vampire Musical (Part III)

(Part II)

The vampires attack Uman on Rosh Hashanah knowing that they would find many Jews with a demonstrated predilection for the dark side of idolatry and antinomianism. Rebbe Frost quickly converts the class to vampire Judaism. The only survivor is Chananya Yom Tov Lipa Katznellenbogenstein. (I know that he is a Shmuel Kunda creation, but bear with me.) Because of the events of the Magic Yarmulka, Chananya has become an excellent punchball player and a committed rationalist. He no longer believes in magic (yarmulka or otherwise) and strives to improve himself by working hard enough to match his God-given intelligence. He had refused to go on the class trip to Uman, saving his soul twice over. 

Chananya is left in a deep spiritual crisis. How could it be that his rebbe and the entire class would so easily abandon halakhic Judaism? Does not the existence of vampires prove that magic exists and refute science? Chananya decides to follow in the rationalist footsteps of the spy Caleb, who resisted the call of the antinomian spies by visiting the Cave of Machpelah to pray. He refuses to go to Rachel's Tomb because he found the Abie Rotenberg song to be idolatrous. God forbid that a monotheist Jew like Chananya would even think of praying to the patriarchs. On the contrary, Chananya only wishes to better contemplate their pious example so that his faith in reason (and the source of all reason) can be rectified.

It is therefore to Chananya's great surprise that he meets the patriarch Jacob, who had been living his undead existence in the cave for more than three-thousand years. Chananya expresses his ambiguous feelings in joining Team Jacob with "I Want to Know."

I want to know if I should care
I want to know if there is cause to fear 

Chananya wants to know if there is any point in continuing to struggle against vampire antinomianism. He also wants to know if he should be afraid that a vampire like Jacob might bite him. 

I've searched for days
And thought for nights

Chananya has searched for spiritual daylight to help bolster his intellectual rejection of vampire antinomianism that he has thought through.

Could my whole life been a meaningless plot
Could it be true, I am only half a man

Using post-modern meta-narrative, Chananya questions whether this whole musical is ridiculous and whether he is simply a screeching Jewish kid.

Then I met him, he brought me the signs
How blind I have been not to see the light
Show me the way, the only way
I've waited long for this day

Chananya met Jacob, who offers to instruct him in the Guide for the Perplexed and its esoteric vampire fighting secrets. (As a patriarch, Jacob has the chronological defying power of knowing literally all of Torah.) Chananya laments that he was never taught actual rationalist monotheist Judaism in yeshiva. He begs Jacob to instruct him in this one true religious way that allows for so many different ways.

And now I now that I should care
And now I now that there is cause to fear
But I would like to know what can I do

Now Chananya knows that there is objective truth known to reason that he should care about. He also knows that there really is a God worth fearing. This leaves Chananya, though, with a dilemma. What can he do against the vampires? He does not know the location of their secret headquarters nor does he know how to defeat such powerful enemies. 

The first problem is solved when Chananya realizes that it is pashut p'shat in Dracula that the town of Klausenberg, a city with a strong historic Jewish presence, is close to Castle Dracula. This must be the place where antinomian Jews and vampires first made their unholy alliance to take over the world. Though Chananya is eager to slay his rebbe and all his former classmates, Jacob cautions him to take heart as to the true way to defeat vampires. Together they sing "Sunshine." The song mixes their two distinct pains of loneliness, Chananya's recent and raw loss of his rebbe and classmates with Jacob's long-enduring agony of thousands of years of being a vegetarian vampire cut off from both the Jewish community and philosopher's heaven.   

Though the world's astray
And has slowly lost its way
With the goal of virtue fading


The world has been led to follow vampirism, abandoning any sense of Aristotelian virtue ethics, with its sense of objective good and bad action, in favor of brute power.

There's a steady light
That has kept away the night
With the brightness it's creating

Can we bring the world it's only sunshine
Only Torah yields the hope for mankind
Let the beauty of our song
Find the good in everyone
Through the darkness shines our faith in our times

At a practical level, it is only the rationalism of the Mishnah Torah that can defeat the vampires.  Being a Maimonidean frees you of superstition and allows you to recognize that there is nothing supernatural about vampires. They are nothing but a virus that can be eradicated. Even at night, they can be defeated with UV lights. The supposed superhuman strength of vampires is no match for a philosopher on the Maimonidean diet. At a spiritual level, Maimonideanism is a necessary antidote to vampirism. As long as people think of religion in terms of power and becoming immortal, they will inevitably be seduced by the allure of vampires and their offer of power and immortality.

Though we number just a few
We radiate the truth
Through the darkness shines our faith for all time

Maimonideans have always been a very small minority even within the Jewish community. It is really hard for them to even put a minyan together. But the moral power of their positions is so great that it radiates outward keeping idolatry in check. Even pagan Jews have to pretend to believe in God. 

Chananya journeys to Klausenberg and enters the secret underground vampire crypt. He quickly finds himself surrounded by Rebbe Frost and his former classmates. Rebbe Frost mocks philosophy as the destroyer of faith and asks Chananya what he believes in now his position is so clearly hopeless. Chananya confounds the vampires with the Averroesistic hymn, "B'siyata D'shmaya." These lyrics appear to endorse superstition while really being an ode to science.  

Have you ever felt there is nowhere to turn
Things feel confused 
No one's concerned
The times we live in are o so dark

The faith alights a spark
There is a vision, eases pain
Hope arises again, hope arises again

Everyone feels confused on occasion by the mysteries of the universe. A philosophical diety seems to lack the personal touch of mysticism with its idols and antinomianism. One might even turn to the darkness of vampires at a time like this when they appear to dominate. Faith in reason is a spark that protects you from the pain of a vampire bite. The philosopher, with his hope that his consciousness will become part of the eternal mind, will arise even after death, unlike the vampire who will not arise once properly staked but will turn to dust. 

B'siyata D'shmaya, whatever I do 
When I need him to help me, he always comes through
Never will I feel alone
Without him who can stand on their own

The Truths of physics, as embodied by the movements of the heavens, will never let a rationalist down. Chananya, even by himself, is never truly alone and has no need for the vampires' achdus hivemind. 

Prayer after prayer, tear after tear
Begging for help, for heaven to hear
When Hashem at his side
Every door is open wide
Our only hope is to look to the sky
Where he waits for our cries

What else produces tears like praying over some especially dense philosophical prose? One needs to open one's mind to hear the rational music of the heavens. When you place yourself on the side of universals, you can understand anything. There is no hope in looking to mysticism for understanding, but only in looking at the manifest laws of the universe seen in the heavens, which wait for us to cry out eureka.     


What follows is the bloodiest, most elaborate, and coolest fight scene in the history of Jewish musicals. 





Next, comes a punchball duel with Simcha Stark, which explains why it was only rational for Chananya to want sunglasses in an underground crypt. Rebbe Frost is shocked that the best boy in the park could lose at punchball. He pretends to do teshuva, singing the song from the Marvelous Middos Machine. Chananya responds that he always thought Abie Rotenberg was an idolater and performs the quadruple Death by Bais Din combo needed to kill senior vampires. 

The musical ends with "Kumt Shoin." These are the last lines of the Mishnah Torah, indicating the importance of Maimonides. They also are a rejection of the kind of apocalyptic political messianism that can only lead to antinomianism and ultimately vampirism. The rabbis as opposed to the "true tzadikim," never desired the Messiah to take over the world and rule over the gentiles. On the contrary, they honestly wished to be left alone to study God's Torah.