Opposing the Ceasefire in Pasadena Before Purim

 

Last night I attended a Pasadena city hall meeting for a vote on a ceasefire resolution for the Israel-Hamas war. (If you look at the photo attached to the article, I am the person standing in the back in a red shirt and orange scarf.) Unfortunately, the ceasefire call passed in the form of a declaration as opposed to a resolution and the language included a mention that the hostages needed to be released. I guess, considering all things, it could have been worse. What truly struck me was how outnumbered we in the pro-Israel camp were, easily 10-1. I have never felt less sure that we can beat these people. 

I will give credit to the pro-Palestinian activists. For the most part, they were remarkably well-disciplined. There were exceptions such as the woman giving pro-Israel speakers the middle finger.

Also, someone went over to me and whispered in my ear: “We are all Hamas.” That being said, clearly, the organizers of the pro-Palestinian group made an effort to make sure that their supporters kept to the rules and did not boo their opponents. In the video, you can even see someone holding up a text on their phone telling people not to boo. I actually thanked one of their organizers for getting his people to quiet down. I even shook his hand. His response was: “I assume you support genocide.” This organizer might be an SOB, but at least he is a polite SOB.

Unfortunately, our opponents are not fools. They understand that, while anger is useful for whipping up people who are already on your side, it turns off precisely the sorts of average people that you need to convince. As Adam Smith argued in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, anger is the emotion that other people have the hardest time empathizing with. The pro-Palestinian speakers offered a tone of moral authority without coming across simply as angry or hateful. Having cute kids coming out to speak certainly did not hurt. (Yes, I assume that the kids were coached and rehearsed their statements. That being said, I have spent enough time in education to appreciate what it takes to get a kid to stand before a crowd and speak clearly.) The biggest ace cards that the pro-Palestinians were able to employ were the large numbers of Jews who went up to the microphone and said things like: “as a Jew who is descended from Holocaust survivors, I denounce the genocide being carried out by the apartheid Zionist state.” Obviously, it is hard to accuse the pro-Palestinians of hating Jews when so many of them are Jewish.

Seeing how badly one-sided the meeting was becoming, I put my name down to speak and was given a minute to address the council. Here is what I said:

It seems clear that, when talking about a ceasefire, quite a few people here mean that Hamas should get the chance to pull another October 7^th. (This got a response from the pro-Palestinians and they were called to order by the council chair.) This Sunday is the Jewish holiday of Purim when we celebrate being saved from the genocidal plot of Haman. I have a message for all the ideological descendants of Haman out there, particularly the Jewish ones. I admit that I am afraid of you. But I also know that, one day, my descendants will laugh at you. Perhaps, we will make cookies shaped like your ears, fill them with jelly, and eat them. The cookies and not your ears.

My basic idea was to make it clear where the moral high ground lies Our opponents are not human rights activists trying to prevent a genocide. On the contrary, their goal is to carry out one themselves. That being said, I did not want to come across as angry. Showing that you have a sense of humor can be an effective tool to humanize yourself in the eyes of your opponents. In contrast to anger, the desire to find humor even in difficult circumstances is something that people easily empathize with. Finally, and I guess this is Chabad having a positive influence on me, I wanted to reach out even to Jews who are so estranged from their Judaism as to willingly collaborate with people plotting to carry out another Holocaust. Perhaps, those who did not get my joke about hamantaschen will be intrigued enough to ask someone for an explanation. They might even come to realize that Judaism is far richer than simply spouting leftism and calling it tikkun olam. For example, Judaism has you teach your children to make a blessing on hamantaschen and share some with your neighbors.   

There is the old joke that the essence of Jewish holidays can be summarized as they tried to kill us, they failed, let's eat. Purim takes this a step further. Haman tried to kill us, he failed and we will remember his efforts not as tragedy but as farce. More than killing Haman, we get our revenge on him, Mel Brooks style, by making him ridiculous. We dress up like him, get so drunk that we confuse him with Mordechai, and, yes, we eat cookies shaped like his ears.    

Chabad and the Benedict Option

To return to the issue of Chabad and its methods of outreach. It is interesting to compare Chabad to Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option. Dreher urges Christians to recognize that they have lost the culture war and are now living in a society that is not only not even formally Christian but is outright hostile to Christianity. His basic model is of fourth-century pagans. They still believed that they controlled society, regardless of what god the emperor worshipped, and could never imagine that Christians really would seek to eliminate them. Recognizing that, culturally if not politically, they are being ruled by members of a hostile religion that is coming for their children, Christians, instead of focusing on getting Republicans elected, need to turn inward and focus on saving their kids. This is done by buildings self-consciously counter-cultural communities. A critical aspect of this is the value system you give kids. You can no longer raise kids on the model that they are going to college to enter a respectable profession. The reality is that becoming a doctor or a lawyer will require kids to do things that will go against their faith. For example, in my own professional life, I refuse, on principle, to give my pronouns because that would imply that I believe in the metaphysics of gender. Even something as innocent as this carries risk and has likely harmed my career. Kids need to know that their parents would rather that they be religious than be successful or they will never summon the courage to make such sacrifices. 

The term “Benedict Option” is a reference to St. Benedict of Nursia, who lived in the aftermath of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. He could not change this fact, so, instead, he established a monastery. If your goal was to save Christendom, St. Benedict’s actions might have seemed counterproductive. You are taking your best and brightest and taking them away from society where they might actually do some good. The genius of St. Benedict was that he recognized that the Christianized Roman culture he grew up with was beyond saving so there was no point in trying. What he could do was establish a monastic culture that would, after several centuries become the basis for medieval Christianity.

What is really interesting about Dreher, is that he points blank tells his Christian readers to imitate Orthodox Jews. Orthodox Jews know that they are not going to win over society so the focus then becomes turning inward to family and community. On the surface, one could make the argument that Chabad, with its focus on outreach, serves as a counter-example to the Benedict Option. Outreach is central to Chabad and the Benedict Option is skeptical of outreach. From the perspective of the Benedict Option, outreach all too easily becomes an excuse to stay within society. It is “selfish” of Christians to send their kids to private schools. They should keep their kids in public schools in order that they should have a positive influence on all the non-Christian kids.   

I would argue that Chabad should be seen as a kind of Benedict Option. One might even go so far as to consider it one of the most successful Benedict Option communities in existence. Keep in mind that the Benedict Option is not against outreach per se but recognizes that it can only be possible once there is a functional community to serve as a base of operations. Furthermore, Dreher is clear that forming a Benedict Option Community does not have to be living in a monastery, as was the case of St. Benedict, or even to head to the countryside. The key idea is to be consciously counter-cultural and reach out to other people with similar values in the hope that, by working together, they can keep each other’s kids in the fold.  

Chabad is fundamentally counter-cultural. Chabad has no interest in accommodating themselves to the outside world. For example, despite Chabad being active on college campuses, Chabad has little interest in sending their own kids to college or in giving them an advanced secular education. One of the great ironies of the Lubavitcher Rebbe was that, despite the fact that he had a university education and spent years living outside of the Hasidic community, he opposed college. Contrary to post-Vatican II Catholic priests who tried to present themselves as basically regular people despite their vows of celibacy, often going so far as to drop clerical garb, Chabad rabbis present themselves as being from a different planet with their hats and beards. Despite Chabad’s friendliness, they make no bones about the fact that they are in opposition to modern society and do not simply wish to give it a more spiritual veneer.

One might think of Chabad as setting up Benedict Option communities and inviting people to join them. Keep in mind that Chabad does not simply do outreach in the sense of dropping people in for a brief mission to give a few classes. Chabad embeds themselves within communities with emissaries going out to places on the understanding that this is going to be their lives’ work and not simply something to put on their resume as they seek something better.   

Can Chabad’s particular version of the Benedict Option be replicated by Jews or by Christians? I am skeptical of this as Chabad benefits from a number of specific features. One is the incredible charisma of the Lubavitcher Rebbe that inspired his followers to build their little communities at great personal sacrifice. Two, Chabad possesses a distinctive ideology that allows them to thread the needle between turning into a sect that is simply hostile to the world along the lines of the Westboro Baptist Church or the Neturai Karta and accommodating themselves to the world to the point of becoming Tikkun Olam progressivism.

In one sense, Chabad’s theology can be seen as rooted in conservative Kabbalah. Rather than seeing commandments as pedagogic exercises to aid spiritual development or tools for building the sort of "Benedict Option communities" that are likely to pass on monotheistic beliefs, Chabad assumes that commandments serve a mystical function. This places commandments outside of any rational analysis and forestalls any attempt to reform ritual practice to better allow Judaism to function. Most importantly, the fact that commandments affect the metaphysical realm means that people who violate Jewish law are not just misguided sinners but agents of cosmic evil. In itself, this sort of thinking can easily lead to justifying assaulting women in the street or even executing them for the “crime” of wearing pants. For Chabad, this theology is balanced by a belief in the intrinsic spiritual value of Jews. Chabad’s theology of Jews having special souls is also rooted within this conservative Kabbalistic tradition and is connected to a view of Gentiles as manifestly evil found in Tanya. Historically though, Chabad has viewed non-observant Jews as worse than Gentiles as their Jewish souls allow them to gain access to various spiritual forces and parasitically feed off them in order to maintain the forces of evil.  

To be clear, Chabad, under the leadership of the Lubavitcher rebbe, came to downplay its early rhetoric against gentiles and non-observant Jews. This is likely connected to Chabad’s messianism. Messianism opens the door to holding that a belief is true while simultaneously accepting a contradictory claim on the grounds that the new truth represents a new dispensation. Standing in the doorway to messianic redemption but not yet in a fully realized messianic age, Chabad can believe that non-observant Jews are manifestations of evil and yet also the key to completing the redemption and fully entering the messianic age. 

C. S. Lewis argued that it is essentially impossible for a human being to fully comprehend the reality of sin while perfectly loving the sinner at the same time. Inevitably, one is going to end up sacrificing one spiritual truth in order to maintain the other. This was why it was important for Jesus to dine with tax collectors and other sinners. Anyone else would have fallen into the trap of flattering such people while telling themselves that they were doing "outreach." It is the strength of Chabad that they have come closer to this ideal than mere mortals have any right to expect.     

Public Judaism: Chabad's Outreach Playbook

 

In the previous post, I discussed Charles Taylor's argument that the Protestant notion of privacy led to the rise of modern secularism. Here, I would like to use the example of Chabad as a model of how Taylor's version of secularism can be countered. Once one understands the extent to which modern secularism relies on the privatization of religion, Chabad’s style of outreach begins to make a lot of sense. In essence, the primary goal of Chabad’s outreach is to get Jews to do publicly Jewish things. By taking Judaism out of people's heads, into their homes, and out into the public sphere, it becomes possible to reverse the presumed slide into secularism where every generation is less religious than the last.

Chabad's strategy of bringing Judaism into the public sphere starts with the very idea of sending out shluchim in the first place to cities one would not normally associate with traditional Jewish observance. Back in the 1950s, the Lubavitcher rebbe actually had a difficult time getting his followers to become shluchim. You want me to leave the New York area, a place where I might have a fighting chance at keeping my kids religious to go where? It should be noted that an essential part of Chabad’s success has been that they have been able to keep the children of their shiluchim religious. In turn, these kids have grown up and have gone on to become shluchim themselves. At this point, Chabad has multiple generations of shluchim, making it a family business. None of this was obvious back in the 1950s and it is certainly foolhardy to believe that people are automatically going to be able to do successful outreach simply because they are thrown out into the secular world. I suspect that a large part of Chabad’s success with their own children comes from the fact that, since the parents are doing outreach, they are more likely to apply what they are doing to their own children without falling into the traps of believing that their kids are automatically going to be religious or that it is a lost battle so there is no point in trying. 

In keeping with the principle of "the medium is the message," the bulk of Chabad's message is quite effectively articulated by the mere fact of having someone with a hat, jacket, and a beard setting up shop in a place outside of New York or Jerusalem. By showing up dressed in their distinctive outfit, the Chabad rabbi is demonstrating that they do not accept the premise that Judaism is merely a set of practices relevant only to the privacy of one's home. In fact, they are going on the offensive and believe that a place with little previous association with Judaism can be claimed as a Jewish space. 

This can be effective as it takes away people's excuse to not be openly Jewish. One cannot argue that people over here do not openly do Jewish things. There is a friendly Chabad rabbi here who is doing Jewish things and he is now challenging you to not just claim to be Jewish but actually put that Judaism into practice. This usually involves simple actions that take only a few minutes like men wearing tiffilin and women lighting Shabbat candles. These street corner tiffilin and candle stands have their counterparts in Chabad's efforts to create major candle-lighting spectacles for Chanukah challenging the notion that a public space must be a secular space. What seems like a minor gesture can have large consequences. Human beings are fundamentally influenced by their lived reality; what you do controls what you think. 

It should be noted that, unlike most Orthodox outreach organizations, Chabad's model of outreach is not built around getting people to become Orthodox. Instead, Chabad focuses on small victories while they play a long game by establishing permanent Chabad house synagogues. These welcome all Jews even those who drive on Shabbat. Chabad rabbis are going to spend decades embedded in a community building personal relationships as opposed to looking for a more prestigious and more lucrative pulpit. If Chabad rabbis were looking for respect, in the traditional rabbinic sense, they would not be serving as shluchim in the places that they do. 

By establishing communities premised on Orthodox observance even if most of the people there are not observant, it becomes possible to reverse the expected trend of secular modernity and create a situation where kids are more religious than their parents. By taking their kids to Chabad programs, parents send the message to their kids that it is not just that they are Jewish but that they are part of a Jewish community and, regardless of what they personally do or do not observe, they are striving to become more actively Jewish. Children raised in such an environment are less likely to assume that the march to secularism is inevitable and, therefore, may choose to not follow that script.      

This interpretation of Chabad's outreach is effectively summarized in a far more entertaining fashion than I could ever offer in Benny Friedman's music video Ivri Anochi. 

The story that plays out in the video is someone being blatantly Jewish causing other people to shift their behaviors in subtle ways that add up to make the neighborhood a more Jewish place. 

A Club That Yeshiva University Can Reject

 

Recently my alma mater, Yeshiva University, has been in the news over the issue of an officially sponsored LGBTQ club with the court ruling that YU is obligated to allow it. To be clear, I am opposed to YU probing into the personal affairs of students. I do not want any guys expelled for being caught having sex with their girlfriends. I do not wish to be accused of being inconsistent so it only seems reasonable not to expel guys caught having sex with their boyfriends. 

A major part of the culture of YU is that many students do not personally live the kind of life that YU endorses. This is important if YU graduates are going to take leadership roles in the broader Jewish community. The practical goal here is to create a world in which even those Jews who personally do not practice Orthodox Judaism, see themselves as Jews and see Orthodox institutions as representing them. Chabad is a good example of this kind of thinking. There are thousands of Jews in this country who drive to Chabad shuls because Chabad makes them feel welcome. For all my disagreements with Chabad, it needs to be said that Chabad has a genius for loving Jews even the completely unobservant. 

Whether you are YU or Chabad, one's ability to be welcoming requires a balancing act where one still recognizes that there are lines that cannot be crossed. For example, I would expect a Chabad rabbi to welcome people who they knew were active homosexuals. I would not be surprised if Chabad rabbis were even willing to acknowledge a couple as husband and husband or wife and wife. That being said, any Chabad rabbi who performed a same-sex wedding would need to be expelled. Failure to do this would mean the end of Chabad. If Chabad could allow same-sex marriage then what redlines would be left that would stop us from simply thinking of Chabad as Conservative rabbis in funny hats?

It is hardly obvious that YU would lose its ability to claim to be the flagship institution of Modern Orthodoxy in America if a rabbi with YU ordination agreed to perform same-sex marriages as a personal decision. An institution like YU may have significantly more leeway than Chabad to allow its rabbis to go off script. That being said, even YU must have its redlines. I am less concerned about where precisely those lines are than the fact that they really do exist.     

I recognize that there are practical reasons for there to be an LGBTQ club at YU. I have no doubt that there are LGBTQ students at YU trying to figure out how to balance their identity with their Judaism. I honestly want such people to feel that they can attend YU. Having a club is likely to strengthen their connection to Judaism. That being said, one needs to ask the question of whether there can be a club that crosses a redline. Is there a club that would be perfectly reasonable to expect at a regular campus but would destroy YU's claim to be an Orthodox institution if it ever officially agreed to recognize it?

While likely far fewer than LGBTQs in the Orthodox community, I assume there are Jewish teenagers who have privately accepted Jesus as their personal savior and are struggling with how to balance their desire to live observant Jewish lives while being true to their Christian faith, knowing that most people in the Jewish community would react with extreme hostility if these kids ever came out of the closet. 

If I knew that my roommate was in the closet about Jesus, I would not out them or try to have them expelled. If people began to suspect that he was really a Christian perhaps because he shokeled when reading the New Testament a little too intensively for mere academic interest, I still would not support any action being taken against them. Things begin to change the moment our Jewish Christian steps out of their closet and actively proclaims that they believe in Jesus. By doing this, they would be putting YU in a bind, either take action against the student or implicitly acknowledge that faith in Christ is not as absolutely contrary to Judaism as one might have thought. If YU feels that it has to choose the former then so be it. 

Clearly, YU should not allow there to be a Campus Crusade for Christ club on campus. I believe that USC should allow Campus Crusade for Christ on its campus even though they are a private university. The difference is that Campus Crusade for Christ does not present a head-on challenge to USC's mission while YU exists precisely to be a space for people who reject Christ. 

I believe that YU should not be hosting Christian missionary attempts to convert Jews on campus even though it is hardly obvious to me that Christian theology is less heretical than hardline Chabad messianism. I would be willing to allow a messianic Chabad club on campus even over the objections of Prof. David Berger. In truth, there are large numbers of non-Jews in YU's graduate schools. If non-Jewish Christians in graduate school wanted a Christian club, I would support them. For that matter, if a group of Christian undergrads from South Korea enrolled at YU to learn about Judaism and America, I would welcome them and allow them to form an official Christian club even if it crossed the line into missionary activity. What would be the point of these students coming to YU if they were not allowed to discuss religion? 

If you want to argue that YU should have an LGBTQ club, I am not going to tell you that you are wrong. I am going to ask you, though, to produce a list of clubs that would be perfectly fine on most campuses but should not be on YU. YU should not have a Nazi or Hamas club on campus but neither should USC. I see a Christian club as less of a problem than an LGBTQ club. If we are going to have an LGBTQ club at YU then it would be unjust to keep Jewish Christians in the closet about their chosen savior.               

Holy Poverty: Finding the Language for Religious Asceticism

Holly is a homeless woman who used to station herself on the corner of Lake Ave. and Green St. in Pasadena. There, she would spend the day sitting in her chair, reading, telling people that God loved them, and that they were going the wrong way down a one-way street. (For those readers unfamiliar with Pasadena, Green St. goes east and Union St. goes west.)  I used to regularly stop to chat with Holly on my 3.5-mile walk to the Chabad of Pasadena on Shabbat. As a conservative libertarian, I learned a lot from Holly as she failed to fit into the usual stereotypes of the homeless. She was always polite, never yelling at anyone. Also, she never struck me as anything less than perfectly sane. She was not some kind of lazy parasite living off of society. On the contrary, she gave more to us who interacted with her than we ever gave to her.

It is important not to glamorize Holly. There was nothing easy about her existence. Furthermore, from what I could piece together from what she told me about her life, she came to her situation through a combination of unfortunate circumstances and poor life choices. Doing her justice requires that one keeps from either pitying her or making her into some kind of saint. She deserves respect on her own terms as someone who actively chose to be where she was, seeing her daily routine on the street corner as having value.

It speaks to our spiritual poverty that it is difficult to categorize Holly. My model would be the apostolic poverty of the medieval Franciscans, combining extreme asceticism with community engagement. The Franciscan rejected personal property but instead of living in a monastery would go out into the world to live on alms, modeling himself on Jesus' first followers. Critical to Franciscan success was that, while apostolic poverty proved to be a hand grenade in the face of the Church, one should not think of the friars as a straightforward rejection of the growing middle class of lay Christians from whom they drew most of their members. On the contrary, by supporting the friar as the embodiment of true Christian living, one could take part in the life of Christ in a way that most could never accomplish themselves. (How many people can ever literally take up the Cross and follow Jesus, suffering as he did?)

It should be clear that this model of holy poverty is distinct from Haredi poverty. For one thing, holy poverty can never be the basis for a society but only the free choice of individuals. As an extension of this, holy poverty, as a charisma granted to individuals, cannot involve marriage or children. What kind of monster could inflict such poverty on a child?

The medieval world would have known how to appreciate Holly. Medievals could understand that the poor were blessed as incarnations of godliness. Holly could receive a habit so that anyone who saw her on her corner would immediately know that she was doing important religious work and was not simply a bum leeching off society.

We moderns have to overcome not only the wall of secularism but also the Protestant Reformation. Secularism affects even people who consider themselves religious by getting them to think in terms of religious and secular spheres. Religion is something you do at home or in Church. Where can Holly fit in except as an object of pity and charity? It is not as if she was a missionary for some denomination. She was engaged in her own spiritual project of embracing the poverty God granted her with love.

It is Protestantism that bears the ultimate blame. Luther, the Augustinian friar, declared war on religious orders in the name of the equality of all believers. He could not stand the notion that some people were better than others and that there could be spiritual heroism that we regular mortals can only stand in awe of. Everyone had to be equal in their inability to perform works and their complete dependence on grace. The irony is that Luther wanted to bring the sacred out of the cloister and elevate everyone to the level of priest. What he brought about was the wiping out of the kind of sacred space that could illuminate the mundane. The fact that the post-Vatican II Catholic Church has effectively ditched the notion of special sanctity for those in religious orders means that Catholics today are also spiritual orphans.

I do not know what happened to Holly. I hope that she got into some housing program and is off the streets. That being said, the selfish part of me misses her. Some people are too valuable to waste on something other than sitting on street corners, informing drivers about God's love and that they are moving in the wrong direction.

Teaching Latin at a Chabad School

Dr. Jacob Ackerman attended a Chabad grade school in Newark, NJ during the 1950s where he served as the editor of the school newspaper. As an example of what he wrote about he mentions, "Mr. Posner, the Latin teacher, was out for three days because of a cold." So it used to be acceptable for a Chabad school to teach Latin. I am curious as to what texts they read. There is not a lot of Latin literature left if you exclude sex, violence and the gods. For me, that was what made Prof. Feldman's Latin classes fun.

2018 in Reading

Here is a shoutout to some of my favorite books, whether on Judaism, history, education, or science fiction, that I read this past year. 

Judaism

Hasidism: A New History. Ed. David Biale.

This book reminds me of the famous H. H. Ben Sasson Jewish History as a large single volume with multiple people writing different parts that summarize where the scholarship stands at a particular moment. This is not an easy book, but, certainly, one that repays careful reading. On a personal note, my father's favorite shul, Emunas Yisroel, gets a paragraph as an example of how Hasidism can function without a formal rebbe. 

Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson by Elliot Wolfson. 

The book about Chabad messianism by a former professor of mine not named David Berger. Wolfson exemplifies an argument that figured prominently in my dissertation on Jewish messianism that, at the heart of rabbinic Judaism, there is a thin line between the spiritualization of messianism and its elimination. Reading Wolfson has helped me make sense of a line of Chabad apologetics I have run into in personal conversations in which the Rebbe was a successful messiah if we just properly understood what messianism is supposed to mean. 

Jewish Law as Rebellion: A Plea for Religious Authenticity and Halachic Courage by Nathan Lopes Cardozo.

This is one of those books designed to generate conversations/pick fights. One can make a fair case that Cardozo is a heretic from Orthodox Judaism in the sense that, even if his beliefs cannot be refuted merely by appealing to the source material, there is something about his thought that subtly undermines an aspect of Judaism that is necessary to its identity. Critical to Cardozo's claim to legitimacy is the assumption that there exists a constituency of halakhicly serious Jews who do not identify as Orthodox or at least might become serious if only they could be presented with a more flexible less morally tone-deaf version of halakha. I fall into the former category but have never gotten the sense that you could build a community around people like me. The Conservative movement is collapsing and I fail to see where there exists a market for a more traditional but still not conventionally Orthodox version of the movement. Perhaps things are different in Israel. 

American History

The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro.

I have read three of the four volumes. I still need to read the really big one on LBJ's years in the Senate. These books are the real-life version of the kind of politics you see in House of Cards. 

Much like Richard Rothstein’s Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Caro seems caught between his heart and his head. Both writers feel a compulsion to insist that the New Deal protected the common man from big business or blacks from segregationists. At the same time, the actual story they are telling is how New Deal politicians were corrupt and in bed with the worst sorts of business interests and segregationists.  

The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind - and Changed the History of Free Speech in America by Thomas Healey.

One of the challenges of history is to get your mind wrapped around the idea that people thought differently. Here, we have a critical part of the story of how the J. S. Mill understanding of free speech came to replace the more traditional one of William Blackstone, which only stopped the government from arresting people before they publicized an idea but not afterward. The Blackstone model while keen on protecting the people's ability to have the information needed to make use of their vote, did not value diversity or believe in social progress. The group in charge believes that they are right and oppresses their opponents. If a minority is willing to undergo martyrdom for their beliefs, maybe one day they will seize power and turn the tables on their oppressors. Ultimately there is no wider value system built around freedom of expression beyond the letter of the law. One advantage of this position is that it does not require you to rely on the intellectual honesty of your opponents that if you allow them to spread their ideas, they will allow you to do so in turn. In a world in which both the right and the left accuse the other of hypocrisy when it comes to free speech, it might make sense for both sides to drop Mill and replace him with the narrow legalism of Blackstone.  

Classical History

Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD by Peter Brown.

Here is another book that asks you to rethink terms you take for granted. In this case, wealth, poverty, and charity. Brown's larger project has been to map out a period of late antiquity from the fourth through sixth centuries in which Rome did not suddenly become Christian and come to a violent end leaving the Middle Ages to come out of the rubble. In this book, Brown charts how one goes from a pagan Roman understanding of wealth as something to be spent for the benefit of the city in order to gain honor to donating to the Church to earn a reward in heaven. This also involves the invention of the poor as a trans-urban class with their paradoxical states of blessedness and pity/contempt. Libertarians will find inspiration in considering how the modern welfare state, as the product of a post-Christian world, is the heir to this same paradox when confronting poverty. This book will also prove helpful to readers of Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois series trying to understand her argument that bourgeois values are a product of the eighteenth century as Brown offers us a distinctly pre-modern unbourgeois understanding of wealth. 

Spirituality

How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem by Rod Dreher.

In looking over the ruins of the conservative movement in the wake of Donald Trump, one needs to consider the failure of the conservative intellectual tradition that made this possible. In order to reconstitute such a tradition, conservatives will need to go back to educating a class of intellectuals from the foundation up. This means literature, which sets the agenda for the imagination. Dreher provides a good example of what it means to read literature from a religious perspective. In addition, we have a powerful memoir of a difficult and ultimately tragic family life. Dreher's family reminds me a lot of my own in that my parents and siblings have made different decisions in our lives and, no matter how much we love each other, it is the kind of love best conducted at a distance. In contemplating the challenge facing conservative intellectuals trying to affect the modern imagination, see also Alan Jacobs' Year of Our Lord 1943, which takes a critical look at the failed attempt by Christian thinkers such as C. S. Lewis to influence the course of post-war culture as it was being born.     

What I Believe by Leo Tolstoy.

If you think of Tolstoy as simply a writer of long melodramas involving Russian aristocrats, welcome to the other later and highly subversive Tolstoy. Here is the Christian Tolstoy at war with all Churches, particularly the Russian Orthodox one. If you have trouble understanding how serious spirituality will inevitably threaten any religious establishment, here is a good place to begin. What I found particularly intriguing about Tolstoy is his brutal consistency as a pacifist. He recognizes that pacifism will not end oppression nor lead to peace on this Earth. On the contrary, as a Christian, Tolstoy embraces martyrdom as the endpoint of his pacifism. Furthermore, Tolstoy is an anarchist and does not dance around the fact that, forget about the military, no true Christian can allow themselves to serve on the police, in the legal system, or hold any political office.  

Education (Politics)

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff.

For fans of Jordan Peterson and the whole school of "owning the libs," here is a better alternative. This is a book that could have simply been a polemic against Social Justice Warriors and probably would have sold more copies if it did. Haidt and Lukianoff, perhaps because they are not creatures of the right nor are they trying to ingratiate themselves with the right by offering it a pat on the back, are able to implicitly attack the campus left by avoiding the trap of left vs. right. This may not sell books but, in the long run, this is how you reach out beyond your echo chamber and influence people.

In a similar vein, I recommend Sen. Ben Sasse’s Vanishing American Adult and Them, which deal with the failure of modern American education to create proper pathways to adulthood and how this has contributed to our current politicized discourse. In examining the origins of this politicization Yuval Levin’s Fractured Republic points to the fact that both the right and the left show a certain nostalgia for mid-20^th century America. He argues that the social revolutions of the period such as the civil rights movement and the counter-culture were made possible because they were working off of the strong social cohesion of the 1950s. In essence, both liberals and conservatives want to go back to a part of the 50s while ignoring an essential aspect of what made that culture possible. All of this literature owes a debt to Robert Nisbet’s Quest for Community, which argues that Enlightenment relativism has cut off the very branch that it relies on to make itself possible.  

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan.

One of the frustrating things about trying to make the case for not sending my kids to school is that defenders of conventional education operate as if the burden of proof is not completely on them. Instead, they turn around and make unicorn arguments premised on assuming that schools actually do what they are supposed to. I am then challenged to explain how my admittedly flawed alternatives can possibly compete with their ideal system. The key to reading Caplan is to not whether you find his figures convincing. Rather, it is to recognize that it is even possible to seriously question the value of conventional schooling. The moment you find Caplan even vaguely plausible then a crushing moral burden has been placed on defenders of education. Either they produce evidence to justify spending billions on education (the kind of evidence that would convince people to throw similar kinds of money on pharmaceuticals) or they must step aside and allow for the separation of education and state.   

Autism

Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna by Edith Sheffer. 

Some of you may have noticed that I have stopped referring to myself as an Asperger. In recent years, the reputation of Dr. Hans Asperger has taken a downturn as more information has surfaced indicating that he was a Nazi collaborator. Sheffer offers another nail in the coffin for anyone still wanting to hold on to the belief that Asperger was a humanitarian physician trying to protect special needs children from being murdered. Beyond the question of Asperger's clear guilt, the book illuminates a certain conservative collectivist mindset that valued being amiable with the status quo as a critical part of social intelligence and ultimately of one's value as a human being. Such a perspective made it frighteningly easy for people who were not Nazis to become full collaborators and wash their hands of the affair afterward. 

Science Fiction

Skyward by Brandon Sanderson.

In a break from the dense worldbuilding of the Cosmere, Sanderson tries his hand at a fairly conventional YA novel essentially featuring a Katniss Everdeen as a fighter pilot. This is a book that was predictable and should have been lame were it not for the fact that Sanderson is a master subtle dash of humor writer, something that is easy to lose sight of in the shadow of his world-building. Jerkface could have easily been a straw-man villain but he is actually kind of sweet even if it is still fun to hate him. Keep an eye out for the computer M-Bot, who snuck up on me as my favorite character largely because he is an autistic type character who is allowed his "humanity." 

Star Wars: Lost Stars by Claudia Gray.

I believe that the Force, with its struggle between the light and dark side, is essential to Star Wars. One of my concerns with Last Jedi was that it tried to refashion Star Wars without Jedi and Sith. That being said, this book, like Rogue One, did a magnificent job even though it is also guilty of trying to get away from the Force. I guess it is possible for a Star Wars book to be good without necessarily being a good Star Wars book. That being said, it is great to see the original trilogy from the perspective of "regular" people on the ground. Also, Gray deserves credit for what she has added to the Star Wars universe in that she has effectively written an apology for the average imperial soldier. The two main characters are teenagers who want to get off their home planet and make something of themselves while improving the galaxy along the way. So they end up in the Imperial Academy and become imperial pilots. If a few imperial bad apples commit war crimes, that does not make the Rebellion innocent, particularly as the Rebellion does not offer a clear way forward as an alternative to the Empire. In the end, one of the characters defects to the Rebellion but that comes across as a personal decision that does not lessen our sympathy for the one who stays with the Empire. 

Needing the Secular World: A Thought Experiment and Some Rodney Stark

In the last post, I discussed the idea that Haredim, while they might possess individual scientists, are incapable of creating their own genuine scientific culture. This brought up an argument from the late Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz of the necessity of being able to fill out all jobs required by a society. It is not enough for Haredim to say that other people should be doctors or lawyers and, for that matter, policemen and garbage collectors; Haredim need to be able to fill these positions themselves. The fact that Haredim cannot do this, in the long run, poses a major ideological challenge far beyond any particular scientific argument. I would like to further develop this idea with a thought experiment and consideration of the Rodney Stark model of conversion. 

Imagine a town divided between secular people and Haredim. No one has a political advantage to allow them to force their values on anyone. Both Haredi and secular parents are keen to pass on their values to their children and keep them from going over to the other side. One major advantage that secular parents would have is that, ironically, it would be easier for them to raise their children without ever interacting with the other side. The reason for this is that there is no job that they require that they cannot simply fill in with their own people without recourse to Haredim. They can make sure that their children only visit secular doctors and have their trash picked up by secular garbagemen. Haredim, for all their talk about maintaining their purity, are forced to lead relatively open lives. Every day Haredi children will walk past secular policemen and garbagemen. If they get sick, they will be hard-pressed to make sure that they are seen by a religious doctor. It will not only be that these people happen to be secular, but the children will be conscious of these facts as they have been taught to think of these as non-religious jobs.  

Haredim, of all people, should be able to instinctively appreciate how such casual contact with the outside world can become spiritually dangerous. To understand the problem at an intellectual level, it is useful to turn to the sociologist Rodney Stark and his model of conversion. Stark argues for the importance of social relations in causing people to convert to a different denomination or even to move outside of one's religion. People are unlikely to be converted and even more importantly stay converted due to some argument made by a stranger in the street. By contrast, they are very open to their friends and family. 

There are two major reasons why a personal connection is so much more valuable than an intellectual argument. Human beings are social creatures. Even if we wanted to, we are unlikely to be able to change our lives around an argument, even one we believed. By contrast, we do readily change our behavior to match those around us. Furthermore, it is social relations that are going to keep a person within a movement. An argument can be countered with another argument. By contrast, you cannot will a new set of social connections into place; it takes years of work (particularly if you are not a neurotypical).

A good example of this kind of thinking can be found in Mormonism. The LDS Church, decades ago, recognized that having missionaries try to "cold call" strangers was essentially useless. By contrast, having a potential convert meet with a missionary at the home of a Mormon friend was very effective. Hence the LDS Church has now built its entire missionary program around this premise. 

Everyone has their moments of crisis. People with a strong spiritual sensibility are likely to have more of them and they are likely to involve their chosen faiths. Keep in mind that, if you never expect much from your religion, it can never disappoint you. It is precisely the true believer who can become disillusioned. When that happens it can only benefit the LDS Church if you have a Mormon friend that you can find yourself falling into a theological conversation with. This friend can then suggest that perhaps you might want to come over to his house sometime to continue this conversation with some of his other "friends."

This idea that people are ultimately converted by their friends leads us to a particular narrative of conversion. There is a first stage in which a person "socially" converts in the sense that they take on a group of friends, who happen to follow a particular religion. At this point, there is nothing intellectual involved. In fact, the person would likely insist that they have not converted or changed in any significant way. That being said, this is the truly crucial stage. At some point, a person is going to realize that he has come to associate with people from a particular religion and that religion carries a particular ideology that needs to be taken into consideration. A person who fully converts is likely to look back and reframe their narrative to make themselves seekers who found their faith when, in truth, it was the religion that found them.  

This idea of social conversions can be seen in Chabad. The society around a Chabad house consists of a series of circles. At the center is the Chabad emissary couple. Around them, you will have some observant people. But most people at a Chabad house are not Orthodox. You can have people who have been associated with Chabad for years as an important part of their lives without ever becoming Orthodox. They like the Chabad rabbis and perhaps recognize some need for Jewish spirituality, but have no interest in being ritually observant. 

This state of affairs is possible because Chabad emissaries tend to be both remarkably nice and tolerant. Non-religious Jews are amazed at how tolerant Chabad emissaries are and want to be friends with them. In the long run, this model has proven to be incredibly effective even if that is hard to see on a day-to-day level where it appears that what you have is an observant rabbi surrounded by a non-observant congregation just like you would see in a Conservative synagogue.

My wife an excellent example of this. As a teenager with a non-Jewish mother, she started going to the Chabad in Pasadena on Friday nights mostly as a matter of convenience as it was easier to get there by bus than the Conservative Temple. Her taking on ritual observance and then realizing that, if she ever wanted to get married, she needed an actual Orthodox conversion was a process that took years. This process was made possible by the kindness and tolerance of the Chabad emissaries for someone who was not halakically Jewish.

As to ideological conversions, consider the example of C. S. Lewis. The most dramatic moment of Lewis' journey from atheism to Christianity was a late-night conversation with a number of religious Christians, including J. R. R. Tolkien, in which Lewis argued that the main ideas of Christianity came from ancient paganism and therefore should be taken with equal seriousness. One might enjoy Greek and Norse mythology and even see it as a source of great moral teachings, but one cannot be expected to seriously believe in these religions. The response was that the ancient pagans intuitively understood certain truths that were ultimately fulfilled in Jesus. 

Now what can easily be lost in this story is that Lewis did not simply walk up to some random Christians at his favorite pub, the Eagle and Child, and start an argument with them. At this point in his life, he had started believing in God largely because the writers he most identified with were theists and he found that he could not disassociate what he admired from that theism. He had even started going to church as an exercise in being part of the theism team. This led him to become friends with a number of intellectually serious practicing Christians and it was with these Christian friends that he had his famous late-night conversation about pagan mythology.    

To bring this back to our earlier thought experiment, in order to keep their children in the "faith," both the secular and Haredi parents are going to have to keep an eye out for alternative social circles as opposed to some guy handing out leaflets. The secular parents have nothing to worry about as there is no reason why their children would consciously ever have to interact with Haredim. They will know that Haredim exist as theoretical abstractions walking in the streets in strange clothes almost like philosophical zombies. There will never be a reason to take them seriously as individuals with names. Haredi parents will be able to work with no such advantage. Their children will have to interact with secular people, such as doctors and policemen, as individuals with names. This can form the basis for a friendship or at least enough of one that, when that inevitable moment of crisis comes and they feel frustrated with the Haredi community, they might think to go talk to that secular person in their life. The moment we cross that line, the child might still be a long way from leaving and may have no conscious desire to do so, but his soul is now in play.

Science and Torah: Is a Society of Torah Scientists Possible?

This past Shabbat, I attended a Shabbaton hosted by the Chabad of Pasadena. It featured Dr. Mickael Chekroun, an atmospheric scientist at UCLA. He gave an address titled "From Particle Physics to Serving Hashem." (Why someone who is not a particle physicist would speak about particle physics is a mystery to me.) His main point was that it is possible to be a religious Jew and a scientist as you can count on science eventually catching up to the truths that Torah has already revealed.

Already, such an attitude makes it difficult for someone to be a scientist. Science is a method to be followed, admittedly one with a tenuous relationship to objective facts, and not a set of conclusions. A scientist is not a prophet and can have no inkling of where new evidence will lead. In practice, any evidence produced by someone that fits neatly into their pre-set beliefs must be discounted. It is the equivalent of a tainted crime scene. (Science does have the advantage over criminal investigations in that it is possible to redo an experiment as opposed to a crime.) As to the question of being a religious scientist, yes it is possible, but also completely irrelevant. An individual scientist can hold Jewish beliefs, but he can also hold flat-earth beliefs without it interfering with his ability to perform productive research. Since science can be reconciled with any belief system that does not point-blank declare the scientific method to be invalid, the fact that it can be reconciled with Judaism says nothing positive about Judaism. The relevant question is whether Judaism can serve as a helpful backdrop to a society of scientists, who not only produce legitimate research but also pass on the scientific method to the next generation.

Can Judaism produce a scientific tradition? It has long been recognized within Orthodox circles that it is quite possible to be a committed Jew without being Orthodox or even in any way observant. The difficulty is getting multiple generations of committed non-observant Jews. So it is only fair to ask the same question regarding Orthodox scientists. Dr. Chekroun might, today, identify with Chabad, but he is not the product of Chabad. (Much like Kylo Ren did not rise out of the Dark Side.) By his own admission, he already was a working scientist when he came to be involved with Chabad. Will his children become Chabad scientists? Rabbi Chaim Hanoka, the head Chabad rabbi in Pasadena, is the son of the scientist Dr. Yaacov Hanoka ztl. Like Dr. Chekroun, Dr. Hanoka was not a product of Chabad, but part of the early generation of college students, who became religious through Chabad. The Hanokas are a respectable Chabad family. That being said, none of Dr. Hanoka's children ever became scientists.

The fact that a person's biological children do not become scientists, in of itself, is not a serious challenge. Personally, I feel little at stake over whether either of my children, Kalman or Mackie, will become practicing historians when they grow up even if I am determined to give them the values of a historian. That being said, this issue of children helps us comprehend the larger issues of society and continuity within science. Contrary to popular perception, science is a social process. Science is not about individuals performing experiments. Science happens when those experiments are repeated by other scientists including the scientist's worst enemies. A scientific community is possible because whatever petty personal rivalries might exist, everyone is committed to the scientific method. As with any community, the sense of shared values allows science to craft a covenantal tradition that binds the dead, the living, and those who have not yet earned their Ph.Ds.

Can Lubavitch (or any Haredi movement) produce a self-sustained scientific society? In practice, there are very real difficulties for any product of the Chabad school system to ever become a scientist. As a matter of principle, Chabad is against college. It might be theoretically possible for Chabad to create its own scientific institution to train Lubavitch scientists. Perhaps, something along the lines of the Vatican's astronomy institute. In practice, this is unlikely as the scientific method is not something that you can dabble in. It requires a full commitment, the kind we usually associate with religion. A scientist with anything less is going to fall prey to having some kind of outside agenda. (This might explain why so many scientists are against religion. Science cannot afford to submit itself to any outside authority. This causes religion to be seen as a threat. Furthermore, the fact that science is such an all-encompassing commitment allows it to serve the kinds of emotional functions most people get from religion. Hence, for a scientist, science becomes a logical replacement for religion.)

This commitment that science demands for itself makes it different from other professions. It should surprise no one that, in the New York area, Orthodox Jews are a force to be reckoned with in Law and Medicine. This is unlikely to happen soon with any of the sciences as science is not simply a job that you put in long hours in the hope of being well paid and that demands no larger allegiance. (Note that the practice of medicine is not a science any more than being a mechanic makes you a scientist. In both cases, you are applying a set body of knowledge instead of attempting to acquire new knowledge.)

It is here worth distinguishing between applied science and theoretical science. Historically, the tendency has been for a theoretical science to proceed without any sense of how it might be useful, followed several decades or even centuries later by the applied science. The crucial science is the theoretical one. It is also the part of science that would be the most difficult for the Orthodox world to produce on its own. Unlike Law and Medicine, theoretical science offers little in the way of financial reward. Rather than helping fund those engaged in full-time Torah study, a society of Orthodox theoretical scientists would compete for funds. Even more damaging, such a society would demand that the wider community believes that funding science is equal to funding Torah in the sense that both should be pursued for their own sake.

Does any of this make a difference? The Haredi world can do quite well for itself simply by recruiting professional scientists for itself from the secular world. But what would happen, granted that this is an extreme scenario, if the Haredi world ever "won?" Say, maybe just in Israel, if everyone decided to become Haredi and we had to face the Yeshayahu Leibowitz challenge. Now Israeli science is going to be handed over to Haredim and, come the next generation, there will be no more secular kids, who became religious as adults to become scientists. What would happen to Israeli science? Historically, one thinks of the philosophical traditions produced by pagan Hellenists, suddenly in the fourth-century, falling into the hands of Christians and later to Muslims. Now we have no more pagans and we must expect Christians and Muslims to step in and do philosophy. There is some debate on the matter, but overall the fall of paganism was not good for philosophy.

Not that I expect Haredim to ever become close to triumphing, but this issue does indirectly have practical implications. As long as Haredim cannot answer questions like what will happen to science if they took over (or the police and the army for that matter), Haredim will always be a marginal group. Even a large birth rate will not help them as, in the long run, they will not be able to hold on to their children. Such practical questions, with their implied reliance on secular society, will do far more to destroy people's faith than any science lecture. 

I do not doubt that Haredi communities such as Lubavitch will be able to continue to attract scientists. I am also willing to charitably assume that Haredim are tolerant enough to put up with eccentrics in their midsts with an interest in science. Such behavior can easily be justified by assuming that these exceptional individuals have special souls, which require this particular spiritual diet. That being said, I doubt that the Haredi world will ever be able to produce a scientific society of its own that is not dependent upon the secular society it opposes. Yes, one can be Haredi and a practicing scientist. What the Haredi world will never be able to accept is a self-conscious organized society of people with the values of science and with the determination to pass those values on to their children (biological or otherwise).

The Mises Institute as a Religion: A Heretical Libertarian's Response

Recently, there has been some controversy over an essay by Jeff Deist of the Mises Institute over his use of the term "blood and soil." This term has Nazi associations though I do not think anyone is actually accusing the Mises Institute of being a Nazi or otherwise white supremacist organization. I would even be open to a charitable reading of Deist as describing the reality on the ground of people being concerned with blood and soil if it were not for the fact that Deist is an exercise in totally uncharitable readings of other libertarians. What is certainly a real issue, particularly in this age of Trump, is a willingness of even elements within the libertarian movement to tolerate bigotry. This is the inheritance of a mistaken Rothbardian strategy that imagines that white men angry over desegregation and immigration are going to, somehow, turn into friends of the free market and of liberty.

I would like to call attention to another issue in the essay. At the very beginning of the piece, Deist states:  

Thanks to the great thinkers who came before us, and still among us, we don’t have to do the hard work — which is good news, because not many of us are smart enough to come up with new theory! We can all very happily serve as second-hand dealers in ideas.

This is followed by an attack on libertarians for falling into the "modernity trap" and imagining that technology might render government obsolete. To my mind, this sounds as if the Mises Institue is now treating the works of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard as religious holy texts, "capital T truths" that must be submitted to without question. 

The essential features of a canonized religious text are that one cannot disagree with it and it must be viewed as essential to being part of the group. This serves to draw a line to establish who is a true believer in the group. For example, I consider Jesus to be a great Jewish teacher. What makes me not a Christian is that, despite my high opinion of Jesus, he does not play an essential role in my relationship with God. This renders the entire New Testament to be of historical and spiritual interest but ultimately of marginal value. One can be a good Jew and certainly a good monotheist without ever reading it. In a sense, I am worse than a heretic. It is not as if I actively reject Christianity as much as I am indifferent to it. Raised as a Jew, I never developed any emotional attachment to Christian ritual nor did I ever develop a deep-seated psychological fear of burning in Hell for all eternity for rejecting it. (Haredi Hell, on the other hand, does keep me up at night.) 

As with Christianity, I would argue that Chabad, at this point, should be viewed as a separate religion from Judaism. Chabad views its texts, such as Tanya and the sichas of the late rebbe, not just as one legitimate interpretation of Judaism among many but as the True Judaism. Without the teachings of Chabad Chassidus, one cannot be a truly "complete" Jew. 

To be clear, as a traditionally observant Maimonidean Jew, I do not completely reject the notion of religious texts. It is important to draw lines and establish signaling devices to decide who is in and who is out. I am not a fundamentalist and my relationship to my God and my holy books is one more of arguing than submission. That being said, just as Christians are right to reject me as a Christian for my indifference to the New Testament, I am justified in rejecting, as a theological Jew (distinct from a biological/halakhic Jew), any person who is indifferent to the Talmud and the Bible. (Like Chabad, Karaite Judaism should be seen as a related but still distinct religion from Judaism.)      

One of the problems with canonized texts and authors, in the most fanatical sense, is that, because they cannot be argued with, one can never develop a mature relationship with them and never learn from them. For example, I can learn from Plato and Aristotle because I have never been tempted to treat them as articles of faith. There has never been any need to reinterpret them to suit my ideological preferences as I have always felt willing to say that I believed that they were wrong. Ironically, this has made it possible, over time, for me to become convinced of their wisdom. I admit that, in recent years, I have gained much respect for Aristotelian virtue ethics for its ability to deal with real human beings instead of theoretical abstractions.   

Like the Gospels, Deist offers us "good news." The truths of liberty have been revealed to us. Our job is now simply to spread these truths through the entire world. This is a simple task because there is now no need to argue with anyone. The Truth of Mises and Rothbard is so obvious that only the satanically perverse would ever question it. Hence, like a good Calvinist missionary, the purpose of spreading the libertarian gospel is not to actually argue with anyone and refute their beliefs but to demonstrate that opponents actively hate the truth and were never worth arguing with from the beginning.   

From the perspective of the Mises Institute, is it possible to be a good libertarian without an understanding of Mises? Speaking for myself, I came to libertarianism largely through the questioning of my own Republican orthodoxies. Hence, I was a libertarian before I read much of libertarian thought. It was because I was a libertarian that I discovered Milton Friedman's Free to Choose as a better articulation of what I was already trying to say and then later I became aware that there was something called Austrian economics. I confess that I only read Atlas Shrugged after several years of being a libertarian. I think that this was a healthy path to liberty, one that preserved my intellectual honesty from factional politics. I do not claim to be an expert on libertarianism; I am a mere student of liberty, humbly trying to put things together for myself. 

With the Mises Institute, particularly someone like Tom Woods, I can never escape having a clearer sense of how right they believe they are than what they are right about. It is like they have received a revelation that seems to boil down to them having received a revelation, its content being secondary to the fact that it is a revelation and they are right. Thus, revelation becomes, not a book to be read, but a heavy object to beat people over the head with and claim moral supremacy over.         

Mises was never Euclid, let alone Jesus. I have a hard time believing that anyone could read through a thousand pages of Human Action, understand it, and, in good faith, claim to agree with all of it. Furthermore, even Mises himself, if he were alive today, would, despite his genius, face a challenge in how to apply his own work. How much more so with us little minds. We who cannot comprehend every word of this brilliant mind and who might even find ourselves disagreeing with him and, thus, have no recourse but to cobble together our own understandings of liberty. Not only that but we must then face the very hard task of applying our theories of liberty to a rapidly changing world. Let us face it, our arguments could be logically unassailable and people will still ignore us if we cannot show, in concrete terms, how liberty will make their lives better. 

I support a big tent libertarianism. If you are acting in good faith to decrease the power of government and increase the autonomy of individuals over their own bodies then welcome to the club. As for the details, welcome to the debate, the most fun part of being a libertarian. If you wish to be an effective participant in this debate, I can suggest a reading list of material to get you up to speed. That being said, we are not a religion with sacred texts that you must accept. On the contrary, we invite you to create your own path to liberty. 

   

Is Someone in Chabad Trying to Smuggle in Evolution?

The following comic comes from the Chabad children's magazine, the Moshiach Times.

What can the line that turtles "lost their teeth a long time ago" mean besides for evolution? Obviously, the individual turtle today did not lose his teeth due to cavities. That would eliminate the entire joke of the strip. Long ago must mean that there used to be turtles with teeth and, for some reason, turtles lost their teeth. My understanding of Chabad theology is that it is hypothetically willing to accept evolution as long as it can be placed into a young Earth. Perhaps, before the flood, turtles needed teeth to fend off the T-Rex after it abandoned vegetarianism at the time of Adam's expulsion from Eden. After all the evil T-Rexes were drowned in the flood, turtles lost their need for teeth and, quicker than a koala bear marching to Australia, evolved into the toothless turtles of today.    

Toward an Asperger Judaism or Why I, Under No Circumstances, Should Be Placed in a Position of Leadership

As readers of this blog know, I am an Orthodox Jew and I have Asperger’s Syndrome. As an Asperger, I tend to value abstract ideas over socially interacting with people. Ideas have the advantage of being clear, logical and consistent as opposed to people, who are ever-changing and are difficult to predict. While Asperger’s Syndrome is associated with autism, I, in no way, view it as a mental illness. On the contrary, I tend to see other people (neurotypicals) as suffering from a lack of consistent rationality. (Admittedly, marching to one’s own drumbeat and telling the rest of the world that they are the ones out of step likely counts as a form of insanity all of its own. I am not sure what the technical label for such an illness is, but I know that it is something distinct from Asperger’s Syndrome.) At the end of the day, I seek to pursue this peculiar mode and be granted tolerance in the same way as countless minority groups of various kinds.     

Being an Asperger and relating to ideas and socialization in a different manner has implications for how I approach Judaism in that Judaism consists of both a set of ideas and a social community. Judaism has its beliefs such as Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith. These tend to relate to the nature of God, the Torah, and future reward and punishment. That being said, Judaism is primarily about performing rituals as part of a community. At first glance, one might think that an Asperger like me would hate Judaism for all of its rules and demand for social conformity. The funny thing about Judaism is that it offers precisely the sort of socialization that is well suited for an Asperger like me. Judaism has clearly defined rules and which do not simply have to be intuited. If one follows these rules, one is a member of Jewish society in good standing. Ironically this serves to save a person from having to constantly engage in the sort of dances one has to within general society in which one’s social standing is always on the line. Ultimately with Judaism, I can pay any debts to society in advance and save myself unwanted social interactions in the long run.  

With Judaism, I can show up, perform the necessary halachic rituals and in return receive a basic social structure. For example, I can pray for two hours on Shabbos morning with a minyan. This is the perfect form of socialization for me as it does not require me to speak to any mortal human beings, but only to read a text and use it to contemplate the larger universe. Having paid my social dues, I can go home and be sociable with my books and my brain. The hope is that by paying these dues I will have a community of people to talk/argue with possibly over a meal after shul. Even I acknowledge that I need such a structure order to get by in this neurotypical world and, as an Asperger, I am particularly ill-equipped to find it by conventional means. 

Let me be clear, this is not some Orthoprax manifesto proclaiming the practical benefits of Judaism regardless of theology. On the contrary, I care tremendously about theology. Recall that, as an Asperger, it is precisely this realm of ideas that is real to me. Unfortunately, I long ago came to the conclusion that most Orthodox Jews, particularly Haredim, do not really care about theology. Instead, they engage in “social thinking” where theology serves merely as a mask to cover the principle of “we in the community are good and everyone else is not.” Or, to paraphrase Mel Brook’s 2,000 Year Old Man, let them all go to hell except cave 76. Ironically enough, a large part of what convinced me of this has been precisely the rise of the use of bans against supporters of potentially heterodox ideas within the Orthodox community itself. These bans seem remarkably selective and do not seem to cover principles that many in the Haredi community are guilty of violating. My concern here is not those who hold positions that I see as heretical. Obviously, they disagree with me and many of them are far more learned than me. My objection here is to people who acknowledge that these ideas are heretical or at least are willing to denounce them when they manifest themselves in other religions, but refrain from following through on their principles and place believers in these ideas outside the pale of Judaism.

My wife (also an Asperger, but who will like it noted that she disagrees with me) and I live in Pasadena, CA. As she notes, the biggest problem in our marriage is that the closest shul to where we live is a Chabad House 3.5 miles away and I have come to the conclusion that the rabbis there, though very nice people, are heretics. This has nothing to do with any of their messianic beliefs. The problem is that they view the Lubavitcher Rebbe as something more than just a great and wise Torah sage. Furthermore, they do not see Chabad as one of many legitimate interpretations of Judaism, but as the definitive version of Judaism. To be fair to Chabad, most of my objections to them apply at least to some degree to the Haredi community as a whole and I am therefore well on my way to declaring them to be heretics as well.   

On more than one occasion I have heard Haredi rabbis proclaim that “our gedolim are always right.” Now my Asperger brain takes statements like this in a very matter of fact fashion to their logical conclusions. Always being right implies omniscience. Only God can be omniscient. So any claim of omniscience is a claim of godhood. Thus any claim that the gedolim are always right is really a claim that they are gods or at least extensions of some sort of godhead. To the best of my knowledge, no one has been removed from a position of leadership for making such statements. Such people have not even been reprimanded for showing inappropriate zeal for God’s unity in making imprecise statements that could lead to misunderstandings by oddball Aspergers like me. Now there is no doubt in my mind that anyone who lectured on the efficiency of Catholic saints as manifestations of divine power on Earth would be thrown out of the Orthodox community. (Let me note for the sake of anyone who thinks that I am being too academic that, as an academic historian of medieval Jews, I need to be familiar with Catholic doctrine and formulate opinions as to its compatibility with monotheism so this is, after a fashion, a relevant issue to me.) It seems to me then that the problem most Jews have with Catholic saints is not some higher principle of God’s oneness, but the fact that these saints are Catholic. Judaism must be superior to Catholicism because we are Jews and we need to think well of ourselves. So we appeal to high-sounding theological principles which we, regardless of whether we actually believe in them, have no intention of sacrificing the community for their sake.

The practical manifestation of this doctrine of the power of gedolim is the organization Kupat Ha’ir. This group collects money on the promise of blessings from various gedolim, which are presumed to carry some sort of power. I once called Kupat Ha’ir’s hotline to ask them to explain the difference between their claims about Mother Rachel wanting to hear our prayers and Catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary. Needless to say, Kupat Ha’ir’s crack team of theologians manning their lines proved unprepared to handle such questions.

I am hardly original in opposing Kupat Ha’ir. The problem is that no one, besides for perhaps R. Marc Angel, seems willing to take action against them. I once heard a prominent rosh yeshiva denounce Kupat Ha’ir in very harsh terms. I asked him afterward whether he believed that rabbis associated with Kupat Ha’ir, such as R. Chaim Kanievsky, are heretics. His response was not to deny that Kupat Ha’ir is heresy, but simply that the people involved are gedolim so they cannot be guilty of heresy. I can only conclude from this that the rosh yeshiva, as great a scholar as he is, is trapped by his social thinking and is unable to follow through on a purely theoretical principle even if that principle is nothing less than belief in God. His sense of Judaism requires the acceptance of gedolim even more so than it does a clear and consistent sense of what it means to not have any intermediaries between man and God. As for me, I am first and foremost a Maimonidean style monotheist. If have to sacrifice the entire Jewish community for that belief I will. King Ahab, according to the Talmud, was a great Torah scholar and worshiped idols. I see nothing wrong with viewing the present Haredi leadership in the same manner. Admittedly this makes me a poor candidate for any position of authority but still leaves me eminently qualified for being a street corner or blogosphere crank. What else should you expect from someone with Asperger’s Syndrome?              

I have no objection to those who wish to take a Moses Mendelssohn position of a Judaism without dogma and create an intellectual free for all; your beliefs are consistent. Similarly, those committed to defending all of Maimonides’ principles are also consistent. To those who wish to take a hard-line on some of the later principles while taking it easy on the earlier ones, I have a question. Are you willing to let Christians off the hook as well? If no then you have to demonstrate how your beliefs differ in principle from what Christians claim. If you cannot answer that then this Asperger Jew, with all the power he has invested in himself, will declare you to be a heretic (or simply a neurotypical who cannot think past his social ideology).