Confessions of a Pharisee

 

Underlining the Christian doctrine of depravity are the simultaneous notions that one is a sinner and that it does not matter because God has already forgiven you. For some mysterious reason, God loves you despite your sins. In fact, God has chosen you because he desires to save the worst of sinners. You can take comfort in the fact that you are not capable of being truly righteous as that would open the door to God actually expecting you to live up to that standard. An advantage of this worldview is that it allows a person to be honest about their sins. As long as you try to “earn” salvation by being a “good person,” you fall into the trap of the theological Pharisee, who believes that they are righteous or at least “better” than those “sinners” out there. To be clear, nothing that I say should be taken as a criticism of historical Pharisees, who were a Second Temple-era religious/political faction.  

The Pharisaic attitude inevitably leads to hypocrisy. In order to claim that you are a righteous person, you need to put one’s thumb on the moral scales and claim that the same action when done by you is a minor failing at best while a demonstration of the utmost depravity when committed by others. Even the exceptionally pious person does not escape. The very thought that one is pious is a grievous blasphemy as it credits man with the righteousness that belongs to God alone. This naturally creates its own hypocritical defense mechanism. It is the other people who are such Pharisees and think that they are righteous. By contrast, I only act from pure motives.

Another manifestation of the Pharisee mindset is an inability to forgive others. If one’s claim to having a connection to God is dependent upon being righteous or at least better than other people, then others must be held to their sins. If I am going to make it into heaven, it is going to be because others have been sacrificed as scapegoats on my behalf. They were the ones who caused and are therefore responsible for any sins that I might have appeared to have committed. One thinks of Eve blaming the snake and Adam blaming Eve. At the very least, their relative wickedness should mean that God should count me as righteous in my generation. One thinks of Noah, who was righteous relative to everyone else in the flood generation. He built an ark for himself and his family and shut the door on everyone else. This is in contrast to Abraham who prayed for the sinners of Sodom.

Considering this, I would like to confess to being a Pharisee. As the son of a rabbi, I was raised to assume that I was a good person. My father praised me for going to synagogue early and staying for the entire 2.5-hour service. The logical conclusion of my father loving me was that God loved me as well. I was more observant than the other kids in my class, so I was better than them. Of course, I knew of kids in larger Jewish communities who did not watch television but those were crazed fanatics.  

This religious pride, a far greater sin than any ham sandwich, had its parallel in my intellectual pride. My mother praised me for my reading and my teachers seemed to appreciate how I was able to talk about all sorts of historical facts. It was this academic pride that got me into trouble when I went away to middle school in Pittsburgh. The kids in Columbus had grown up with me and accepted me as the oddball rabbi’s kid. My new classmates simply saw me as someone socially isolated and insufferably full of myself and, therefore, an easy target for bullying. My response to this bullying was to call them bozos and sink further into myself. Not only was I religious and smart, but I was also the victim of all of these lesser people.

There is an irony to believing that you are religious and smart and then building your self-esteem around these assumptions. You find yourself simultaneously needing to believe these things and fighting off doubts. It is hard to ignore all the evidence that one is neither a saint nor a genius but if I am not religious and smart then what am I? One of the implications of this dilemma is that I am terrible at accepting criticism. I cannot disassociate the particular points being made with the macro question of whether I am special. As such, I have a compulsive need to respond to even minor criticisms. To make matters worse, I am smart enough to be a decent lawyer for myself and come up with reasons why I am right even as I lack the far more important good sense to let certain issues lie.  

When my keen intellect is not devoted to defending myself, it seeks out reasons to find fault with others and never forgive them. I bear grudges against people who did things to me years ago, whether ex-girlfriends or academic advisers. As readers of C. S. Lewis’ Great Divorce can appreciate, I created a hell for myself that was locked from the inside. The more I suffered for what they did to me the more I was the righteous martyr and they were my sinful tormentors. The fact that my life did not play out as a suitable theodicy narrative and the "villains" got to go on with their lives while ignoring me made me feel even more depressed. This, in turn, fed a negative emotional cycle. I needed to cling to the belief that they would get what was coming to them and I would be vindicated as their moral superior. As such, I could never forgive them as long as they refused to come to me on bended knee and ask for forgiveness, acknowledging my moral superiority. To forgive them would mean to throw away my heavenly trump card as the victim of such horrors, which should force even God to deem me righteous.

I am blessed to have friends and family who love me despite my flaws. If they can love me, despite my flaws, one can hope that God loves me and has forgiven my sins. If God is willing to forgive the worst of sinners, perhaps that includes the most self-righteous of Pharisees. 

On Coaching and Teaching

 

When working with students from disadvantaged communities, it is easy to fall into a negative cycle. These are students who are often even less inclined than most kids to read as they come from cultures that do not even offer the pretense of supporting reading. The parents are likely not going to be able to help them with homework so the temptation is to not give them homework in the first place. These students are often significantly behind their peers so it is tempting to keep the curriculum simple and not demand too much from them. We do not want these kids to become frustrated and drop out. While this sort of thinking may be founded upon good intentions, there is a trap. These students will, one day, go out into the world to compete for college placements and ultimately for jobs against students who have been given a vigorous education both at home and at school.   

Imagine being a basketball coach for a team of middle-class Jewish day school kids. These kids have their Judaic classes plus a variety of secular interests and hobbies besides for basketball. Most of these kids are here because they think it might be nice to hang out with their friends after school. Shooting a basketball and playing pickup ball is fun so why not join the team. You want them to run laps and do drills? How mean of you. Why are you yelling at them? They are doing their "best."  

I used to be one of those kids when I was in 5th grade at Columbus Torah Academy. I particularly remember one practice where the coach made us run ten laps around the gym. After finishing, I went to get a drink of water from a fountain in the gym. The coach yelled at me and then made the entire team run another ten laps. In essence, that practice consisted of us running laps. Why did he "waste" our time like that? We could have run laps at home. Shouldn't our couch have been actually teaching us how to play basketball? 

As an adult, I now recognize that the coach was right. One of the most essential parts of being on a team is to put yourself into the hands of a coach, recognizing that the coach understands the larger picture of what the team needs in order to win better than you do. As a player, if you do not understand this down to your very gut, the coach should cut you immediately even if you have Stephen Curry's 3-point shot. The greatest shot in the world is not going to help your team if you do not know how to get open and can easily become a trap if you lack the humility, when double-teamed, to accept that you might not be touching the ball that game. This might be the game for the number five guy on the team to be fed the ball and take those open shots.

To be clear, we were not a good team and regularly lost heavily to local Catholic schools like Saint Catherine’s and Saint Pius. I was certainly one of the lousier players even though I honestly tried. This was not our coach's fault. He did his job even if it was not a pleasant one. I do not believe that he acted out of any desire to beat down on elementary school boys. The fact was that we were going up against more talented teams and he had to make do with what he had. It would not have been kindness if he had told us we were great only for us to get blown out by reality. 

A more extreme version of the coach is the drill sergeant. Consider the example of the film Full Metal Jacket. It is easy to laugh at the antics of the sergeant but there is something truly tragic about his situation. The Vietnam War is in full blast and the recruits he is training are draftees. We can assume that they are not America's best and the brightest. These are kids who could not make it into college even to avoid military service in an actual war. The sergeant knows that many of these kids are going to die. It is his job to make sure that they do not get their squad mates killed. Then you have someone like Gomer Pyle who most certainly should never have been allowed into the army except that it was the job of some bureaucrat to meet a quota by drafting Pyle even if Pyle is going to get someone killed.

Being a teacher does not involve life and death responsibility like a drill sergeant but the stakes are higher than that of a coach. The worst that can happen if a coach fails at their job is that the kids will be humiliated for an evening by a better-prepared team, possibly leading some of the kids to conclude that they do not have a future in sports and, instead, should become accountants. If a teacher fails at their job, then students will graduate and apply or even start college not even realizing that they are not prepared because, all along, they were fed a fake education.

From this perspective, it seems logical to license teachers to do anything we allow coaches to do. Specifically, teachers should be allowed to accurately describe a student’s shortcomings to their faces and expel them from the classroom for failing to live up to basic standards. Furthermore, obedience should not be something up for negotiation but should be seen as the price of entrance. 

The reason why this does not happen is that the consequences of a teacher not doing their job are entirely long-term. There is no big game next week where the students will be crushed by a better-prepared squad. In practice, even exams usually fail to properly demonstrate that students are not up to task as they are created and administered by the teachers who have every incentive to not hurt their students’ self-esteem. Imagine if my coach had been allowed to schedule a game for us against our school kindergarten. We could have been an A+ team.

As teachers, we work under a further significant disadvantage. Students volunteer to join a team so the coach is free to kick anyone out if they do not get with the program no matter their individual talent. Most students who come to my class have no particular desire to study history. I have to be grateful to the students who do their work as they are told even if they then take a sip of water. If students tell me to "go F myself," the most I can do is report them to the administration, knowing full well that, at best, any punishment will be symbolic and that the student will be back in class the next day. I stand a greater chance of losing my job for "creating" a situation where a student might become "frustrated" enough to curse at me than that student has of being expelled from my class or from the school.       

I have taken to teaching some of my students to play chess. Chess teaches critical thinking and focus. You cannot simply do the first move that occurs to you. Most importantly for my students, chess is unforgiving in its exposure of your ignorance. You think you are smart; why did you just lose? Let us go over the game and see all the better moves that you should have seen if you were actually paying attention. There is no need to insult the students. The game itself can offer more biting criticism than I ever could. With chess, you do not need to wait several weeks for the big game to expose your failings; all chess needs in order to expose you is a few minutes. 

The Buckeye Christian Political Club

 

Zayid and Umar live in Columbus, OH. They hear that on Saturdays in the Fall, a group of cool people meet in their secret club to drink beer and yell at a television screen. These cool people are keen to make sure that only other cool people join their club. As such, they only allow people who wear the right kind of clothes and say the correct password to enter. Zayid wears scarlet and grey and says something very ungentlemanly about a woman named Ann Arbor. As such, Zayid is deemed to be cool enough to enter. Umar wears blue and maize and sings "Hail to the Victors." He is chased away.  

It turns out that the cool people also have a meeting on Sundays where they sing songs and listen to a sermon, followed by cake and socializing. Zayid makes sure to wear a cross and tells the people that Jesus is his Lord and Savior. Umar wears a turban and says "Allah Akbar." Once again, things go well for Zayid and poorly for Umar. 

The following Tuesday, these cool people have their biannual go into a booth and fill in the circle next to some politician get-together. Zayid wears red again and tells the people that we need to ban critical race theory. Umar wears blue again and declares that the year 1619 was the true founding of America. Perhaps Umar's luck finally turns around.

It is clear that the cool people hanging out in the first instance are simply fans of Buckeye football. There is nothing ideological about their opposition to Michigan. Even if Umar was the world's greatest expert on football and could talk for hours with charts about the superiority of Wolverine football, it would do little good. If anything, Umar's intellectual defense of Michigan would backfire and convince the Ohio State fans that Michigan represents empty intellectualism rather than the instinctual embrace of the "soul" of football. 

If pressed, the Ohio State fans would likely concede that there is nothing intellectual about their choosing of Ohio State over Michigan. It is equally reasonable for Michigan people to choose Michigan. That being said, they will still want Michigan people to stay in their place "up north" and not force Ohio State fans to hang out with them. Michigan people may only be pretend stink but that pretend stink still carries a whiff to it. 

Once we understand that fandom exists as something real where people are incredibly passionate about something completely vacuous, it is hardly obvious that the fandom model is not in operation in areas that make intellectual claims that sound like they should be taken seriously such as religion and politics. Do the Buckeye Christians really have a well-thought-out theology that allows them to reject Islam or does their clubhouse serve the same function as a church on Sunday as it did as a Buckeye hangout on Saturday? It is hardly obvious that there is a meaningful difference between the claims “Jesus is Lord” and “Ann Arbor is a Whore.” The fact that people around the world might proclaim the former with enthusiasm and without the benefit of alcohol should matter little. If the Buckeye Christians do not talk about Jesus with a greater level of enthusiasm than their denunciation of Ann Arbor, why should we not assume that both of them are equally meaningful to them?     

The same goes for politics even though politics deals with objective facts as opposed to metaphysics and there are real-world consequences to politicians of one party or the other winning elections. (This is distinct from whether your vote actually matters.) Despite the fact that people regularly make statements in politics that should be subject to refutation, we should not take these claims seriously as something the people actually believe. Their claims likely function not as truth statements but as signaling devices to show what team they root for.

From this perspective, the more a claim is clearly false, the more politically useful it becomes as a signaling device. Claiming that Trump really won the election or that American police are the moral equivalent of the Gestapo are both ridiculous. But the fact that they are ridiculous makes them good signaling devices. Only a true-believing Trumpist or leftist, who had no interest in being accepted by mainstream society, would ever say such things. 

Peter Boghossian engages in a useful exercise where he has people line up along a spectrum indicating not whether they support a statement or not but how strong their position is. One of the things that comes out strongly from these exercises is that people who take the most extreme positions are not there because they really have done significant research into the topic. Instead, their positions are marks of their identity. This causes them to take challenges to their positions very personally and lash out when someone questions them. It is almost as if they were sports fans confronting fans of the opposing team.  

From Conservatism to Libertarianism: My Personal Journey (Part III)

Part I, II.


In the previous posts, I described how my strong distaste for the Left led me to become a conservative and how my frustration with the Republican Party, particularly over Iraq, grew. So the me who was neither shocked nor horrified by Republican defeats in November 2006 (in contrast to my enthusiasm for Bush in 2004) was an independently minded Republican with a socially liberal streak. If you were paying attention to the last post, you might have noticed that I did not use the word "libertarian" and that was on purpose. When I began this blog in December 2006, I still did not identify myself as a libertarian. Going back over my early posts, you can see that I identified myself as "operating within the classical liberal tradition" and use the word "libertarian" to describe the position that the government should stay out of people's bedrooms. For me, classical liberalism meant J. S. Mill, specifically that people should be left to themselves to pursue their own understanding of the good life, in contrast to modern liberalism. (I was unaware at the time that Mill was actually more open to government intervention in the economy than would be implied by On Liberty.) I was already even ok with gay marriage as long as it was framed in terms of personal liberty and not group rights. That being said, I did not identify myself as a libertarian. The main reason for this was that I had almost no contact with libertarianism as a political movement or as an intellectual tradition. I still thought in terms of conservatism vs. liberalism. I criticized conservatism from within conservatism. I still hated the left as much as always and was not about to turn traitor.

I started identifying myself as a libertarian around 2008 during the presidential campaign. I still supported the late Sen. John McCain and did not vote for Ron Paul even during the primaries. I even attended a McCain rally in Columbus when he clinched the nomination. I identified as a libertarian conservative as a way of telling people on campus that while I did not support Obama, I did not agree with the Republican Party on social issues such as abortion. I was not one of those "close-minded" religious extremist Republicans. At this point, I still had little contact with libertarianism. My libertarianism was the product of my own thinking. But I decided that if I was going to be a libertarian, I might as well discover what libertarians actually say.

I started binge-watching Youtube clips of Milton Friedman in the summer of 2009. Friedman was a revelation to me as someone who was saying the kinds of things I had been thinking and being far more articulate about it than I ever could. At a practical level, I recognized in Friedman a roadmap for a compassionate conservatism that could expand the Republican base to include blacks and Hispanics. From Friedman, I quickly branched out to reading Hayek (I owe a debt of thanks to Simon Snowball for giving me a copy of the Constitution of Liberty and for alerting me to the existence of a something called Austrian economics), Ayn Rand, and Murry Rothbard. I attended my first IHS conference in the summer of 2011. IHS has remained my chief lifeline to libertarianism as a flesh and blood movement. People like Sarah Skwire, her husband Steve Horwitz, and Michael Munger have been models for me of how to be an intellectually serious and principled defender of liberty in all of its radicalness while keeping both feet planted in the real not yet converted to libertarianism world. As someone on the autism spectrum, that last part has proven critical.

One implication of my path to libertarianism was that, since I came to libertarianism largely through my own thinking and only discovered later that there existed people who thought like I did, I have not felt tied down by faction. For example, being an Objectivist or a Rothbardian was never what defined libertarianism for me as I did not become a libertarian through them. I could recognize some things of value in such groups and move on.

It should come as no surprise, considering that I came to libertarianism while still a registered Republican, I was firmly in the minarchist camp. In fact, when I first encountered anarcho-capitalism through David Friedman, I was quite critical of it. Granted, my defense of government was firmly planted in pragmatism over principle. For example, I made a point of teaching my students that government was a magic wand that we used to call kidnappers policemen taking people to jail, something that could never seriously be defended unless we accepted that it was necessary for the well being of society that we all participate in such an immoral delusion.

What eventually turned me against even this moderate apology for government was my growing disenchantment with the American political system. As long as I could pretend that the Republican Party was serious about economic liberty and that everything else would pull itself together from there, I could hope that the Republican Party could fix America and that that the United States could still be considered a defender of liberty (even if an imperfect one). Once I lost faith in the Republican Party, it set off a domino effect in which I could no longer defend the United States government and modern states in general.

Even today, I am on the very moderate end of the anarchist spectrum. One could even argue that I remain a minarchist at heart. I still am, fundamentally, a Burkean conservative. I am not a revolutionary seeking perfect justice. The moment you make a claim on perfect justice, you hand a loaded gun to everyone out there to pursue their perfect justice, including those whose perfect justice requires your death. I am willing to accept that human institutions will always be marred by flaws and logical contradictions. The best we can do is make a good faith effort. If that means some government, so be it.

I acknowledge that I lack the moral authority to challenge governments rooted in some traditional authority, particularly if, like England and the United States, that authority itself is the classical liberal tradition. That being said, I feel no such bind when it comes to those governments premised on progressive notions of overturning tradition in the name of perfect justice. From this perspective, my anarchist attack on progressive government is simply the other side of my defense of traditional government. Edmund Burke himself famously defended the American revolutionaries as good Englishmen forced to defend English values against a monarch intent on changing the status quo. The Americans were not the real revolutionaries. They were forced to create a new system of government for themselves (that actually was not so different from what they previously had) because their opponents had embraced revolution first. (This argument is also crucial for how Burke understood the Glorious Revolution and why it was acceptable, unlike the French Revolution.)

While in principle I oppose government as an institution of violence, I accept, in practice, that we might not be able to do better than limited government. In pursuit of that goal, I embrace using the threat of anarchy as a weapon to threaten the political establishment. If this actually leads to the overthrow of government then so be it. In my heart, I have rejected the authority of government over myself and no longer see myself as morally bound to follow its laws. My obedience is merely that of a man with a gun to his head.

Moshe Eliezer: Toward an Antifragile Judaism

This past Friday was my son, Mackie's, first Hebrew birthday. So I am taking the opportunity to post the speech I gave at his bris. This speech lays a framework for some ideas that I have been hoping to explore on this blog at some future point. 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a concept called "antifragility." The idea is that, if you want to evaluate if a system is stable, you do not simply go by how well it handles everyday stresses. What is important is how the system handles extreme "black swan" events. Systems that are antifragile not only can survive a crisis but even gain strength from it. Part of what is counterintuitive here is that it is possible to end up rejecting the system that is superior based on what we can observe. Often, what appears as the day to day strength of a system is precisely what will bring it down in a crisis. This concept can be applied to Jewish survival. Passing on Judaism to the next generation means not becoming seduced by things that look impressive from the outside to the neglect of things that can survive a crisis. It is one thing to talk about how it is great to raise children in Brooklyn or Jerusalem and what is the best way to do so under those circumstances. The interesting and relevant question is how to raise children when Brooklyn and Jerusalem are not options. In the end, the only kind of Judaism that is going to survive, regardless of geography, is that which can make it outside of such places.

We have decided to name our son Moshe Eliezer in honor of my great-grandfather and my teacher, the late Prof. Louis Feldman. What they both had in common was a Judaism that was antifragile and could survive even under less than ideal circumstances.

My great-grandfather, Rabbi Moshe Eliezer Shapiro, grew up in Israel but had to flee during World War I. He ended up as the rabbi of Atlantic City, NJ. Atlantic City in the 1920s was a relatively family-friendly resort town that inspired the game of Monopoly. That being said, this was never his plan for how he was going to lead his life. For example, my grandmother grew up going to public school. Things would have been much simpler if he could have stayed with his father, my namesake, in the Old City of Jerusalem, where he could have lived out a more ideal Torah lifestyle. Perhaps this is the origin of the Chinn family preference for out of the way Jewish communities. My father was raised in McKeesport, PA and I was raised in Columbus, OH. I now find myself raising my children in Pasadena, CA.

The character trait about Prof. Louis H. Feldman (Eliezer Tzvi) that most struck people who knew him was that he was so much more than the short old man in a baseball cap, crumpled chalk-stained suit, and sneakers that he appeared. At one level, his appearance disguised the fact that he was a genius and the foremost scholar of Josephus of his age. Feldman embodied humility; he honestly did not seek honor nor did he desire people to recognize his greatness. He was able to do this because it really was never about him. He wanted other people to know and love the classical world like he did. The more he could get others to see this and not himself the better.

To dig deeper, Prof. Feldman's scholarship disguised what a holy person he was. If he was not most people's idea of a great scholar, he was certainly no one's idea of a tzadik. What kind of nice Jewish boy would spend his life on Greek and Latin? Feldman was not just a classics scholar who also happened to be a religious Jew. Underlying everything he wrote, was an implicit apology for what Jerusalem had to do with Athens. The world of Philo and Josephus was a model for Feldman as to how to be a Jew in the modern world. Feldman's Judaism was never pure or ideal, but that was its strength; it was capable of surviving in an impure non-ideal world.

In his final years, I used to regularly visit Prof. Feldman. More than history, what he liked to talk about was growing up in Hartford, CT. If you are looking for the key to Feldman's unconventional Judaism, the place to start is in Hartford. As with Atlantic City, Hartford was not anyone's ideal place to raise Jewish children. Maybe that was the point. How could someone be a religious Jew in academia? The same way that one could be religious in Hartford and the same way that one could be religious in ancient Alexandria or in Rome; with unwavering values and a sense of humor.

Moshe Eliezer, welcome to the family. I can't tell you that things are going to be simple and I am sure you are going to have lots of questions but that is the Judaism that I am offering you. It is antifragile enough to survive even when things are less than ideal. There are challenges ahead here in Pasadena but you are capable of handling them. How do I know this? Because your roots run much deeper than just Pasadena. They go back to Columbus, to McKeesport, to Atlantic City, and to Hartford. If you dig deeper you will find that they go back to Alexandria and Rome. I look forward to teaching you about your classical heritage. If you stick with it, you just might find your way back to Jerusalem.   

Toward a Lockean Theory of Halakha

In the previous post, I argued that Haredi Judaism, to the extent that it accepted charismatic authority in the form of Gedolim, must be seen as an anti-halakhic movement. Charismatic authority is implicitly antinomian in that the only way for someone to demonstrate their absolute loyalty to the charismatic authority figure, as opposed to some textual authority, is to violate the law as interpreted through text. For example, Sabbateans were known to secretly eat a cherry on the fast of Tisha B'Av to demonstrate that they did not really need to fast on account of the coming of Sabbatai Sevi. On the contrary, the way to now truly fulfill the commandment of fasting was to eat. The real purpose of fasting was to signify faith in the coming of Sabbatai, the Messiah. So by showing such faith in Sabbatai, as to do what might look like a sin, you are the one who is really fasting, as opposed to the fasting non-believers, who are really the ones eating. Similarly, if you believe that it is impossible to know the law through one's own intellectual efforts, but require the aid of Gedolim, then the logical way to demonstrate this faith is to commit a sin like taking a bite out of that traif sandwich at the command of the Gadol.

In a post-Enlightenment world, there are good reasons to be tempted by charismatic authority. It very neatly solves the challenge to authority both from potentially heterodox methods of interpreting the world (such as science) and, most importantly, from non-believing clergymen, working to bring down the faith from within. Charismatic authority, if we accept it, clearly trumps science and offers an a priori religious authority that makes liberal clergymen irrelevant. We see this logic at work within American Protestantism as well, where the Evangelical use of charismatic authority has beaten the text-based authority of the mainline denominations.

Let me suggest an approach to religious authority that might redeem text-based authority in the modern world, making use of John Locke style social contract theory in which everyone is free to follow their own understanding of Judaism and free to reject other opinions as demonstrating that the person is not serious about their Judaism, all the while being subject to everyone else having that same power. Here is another thought experiment. As a scholar of Jewish history, I have just made an important discovery in my university library, a set of Gemarah and Shulhan Arukh. Our parents and grandparents were all committed socialists, who raised us on kibbutzim. So despite the fact that we all strongly identify as Jews, none of us know anything about halakha. Even after we started believing in God again, we felt that there was something missing in our relationship to him. Observing the laws in these books look like the perfect solution we have been praying for.

We are going to start a club called the LOJS (Local Orthodox Jewish Synagogue). We will gather together on Saturdays to engage in Jewish worship, as set forth in the books I found, and to listen to lectures on how to observe the many strange laws found in these books. (Can you believe it, but we are going to have to baptize our dishes.) Sessions will be presided over by a Jewish studies professor, whom we will call a rabbi. There is nothing special about him and people should feel free to ignore him. It just makes sense to have someone in charge to be officially not obeyed.

Word of the LOJS club is spreading and soon we will have chapters in many different cities. Now, in trying to recreate some form of traditionally observant Judaism, we will face a number of challenges related to authority. We are trying to create a religion based on what we read in a set of books. These books say a lot of things, much of which is blatantly contradictory (do we listen to Bait Hillel or Beit Shammai) or simply difficult to understand, leaving a lot of room for interpretation and reasonable disagreement. So even if everyone was totally committed, we would have people wanting to practice different versions of Judaism. Since we are all baalai teshuva trying to figure things out, none of us carry any real authority that others should listen. To make matters worse, all sorts of people are applying to join our club with different levels of observance. Most people are more in the market for a few rituals to give some spirituality to their lives, but not to refashion themselves with a complete set of laws that must be accepted in totum. Furthermore, everyone is coming to Judaism with previous social and ideological commitments, which they are not about to give up now that they are joining their LOJS. For example, we have the nice gay couple who want to be married in the club, the feminist studying to be a rabbi, the libertarian-anarchist who has no intention of praying for the restoration of any Davidic monarchy and the Christian who believes that Jesus is his Jewish Lord and Savior. Different LOJS clubs are going to make their own decisions about where to draw the lines and who can be members, but no one is in a position to force their views on anyone else.

The sensible solution to these problems of authority would be for every individual person and LOJS club to proceed with creating their own standards all while showing the spirit of charity for all those other clubs setting their standards. God did not speak to me and I am not the heir of any special tradition. I am just a scholar trying to read and apply a manual like anybody else. Furthermore, we have to accept that everyone is coming to Judaism with some kind of previous ideological baggage, which sets boundaries on how they will interpret laws. For example, classical liberal Jews might refuse to kill homosexuals and Amalekite children. We have to accept this for the simple reason that we have no greater divine authority than they do. Just as we need our opponents to accept us even when they disagree with our interpretations and look askance at our ideological commitments so too must we be consistent and accept them despite our disagreements.

There is one limitation I would place in order to keep everyone honest; we are free to reject anyone, who does not appear to us to be acting in good faith and seems to be using Judaism as cover for some other ideological agenda. A greater level of personal observance should be a cause to give the benefit of the doubt over those who are less observant. That being said, overzealousness in rejecting other LOJS clubs should serve as prima facia evidence of using Judaism as cover for another agenda, much as a lack of ritual observance would. For example, even as I, much like Chabad, welcome people who drive on the Sabbath, are intermarried or even gay, I would reject the membership applications of members of Jews for Jesus and Jewish Voices for Peace, finding that they perform little in the way of Jewish practice and their Judaism consists mostly of using their Judaism to castigate other Jews for failing to believe in Jesus or make suicidal concessions to the Palestinians. Clearly, their agenda is simply to call themselves Jews in order to convert us to their actual religion. Similarly, I might reject applications from Satmar on the grounds that despite their meticulous observance, their eagerness to denounce other Jews and place themselves on some kind of moral platform indicates that they are less interested in Judaism as a way of practice and to relate to God than they are in setting up an anti-modernist cult. In making these decisions, I recognize that I make myself vulnerable. Not only should I not expect any tolerance from those who I have rejected, but reasonable people might also come to question my motivations in the particular lines I draw and decide that they cannot accept me.

Clearly, there would be nothing to stop a Jews for Pork group beyond our ability to reject their application as a Jewish organization. (I would make a point in distinguishing Jews who incidentally did not practice kosher in their homes and ideological traif eaters.) That being said, we should be able to avoid the problem with antinomianism. There are no hard hierarchies let alone charismatic authorities so there is no reason why there should be any antinomians in our midsts, particularly if we do our job in rooting out those trying to use Judaism as cover for other agendas.

Social contract theory is often criticized for being ahistorical. There was never a moment when non-civilized men came together and agreed on any kind of social contract, whether the Hobbesian, Lockean, or Rousseauean versions. This criticism misses the point that the social contract was never something that happened in history, but is happening every day. The United States government stands because every day the vast majority of Americans, not me, get up and agree that the government has moral authority over themselves and their neighbors even to the point of killing them. The moment that even a small percentage of the population begins to question this then you get the Bastille and the Berlin Wall.

Similarly, many people might question the applicability of my scenario as it lacks any FFBs (frum from birth). What you have are some Jewish Studies majors deciding that they are really interested in halakha and getting other people to listen to them. (Granted that no one would ever take us seriously.) For me, this is precisely the point. Living post-enlightenment and emancipation, there are no people truly born religious. Being observant Jews is something that we decide every day. Furthermore, there is no power of tradition to give anyone any inherent authority over anyone else. My father might be an Orthodox rabbi, but I grew up in Columbus, OH as a product of American culture. Just as a genetic test would demonstrate my utter lack of racial purity, even a casual reading of this blog should be enough to demonstrate that my ideas are hardly pure of gentile influence. I do not claim to be anything more an American with classical liberal values and conservatives politics, who grabbed onto the Judaism he found around him, trying to give himself a community and some meaning to his life. I challenge anyone to demonstrate that their Judaism is any purer.

There are many Jews out there, who lack my Jewish education. I am not smarter or more virtuous than them and claim no intrinsic authority over them. I am sure, if they wish, they could study the same texts that I studied and surpass me. There are certainly many Jews who are more learned than me. I am sure that, if I applied myself, I could remedy that. Such people may be compared to my in-laws, brother-in-law, sister-in-law and younger brother, who all, unlike me, have medical degrees. It may be prudent that I take their medical advice seriously, but none of them can claim any kind of authority over me; I remain free to shop around for medical advice. Most importantly, I deny that any of them are intrinsically smarter or virtuous than me (besides for my mother-in-law). If I wanted to, I could go to medical school and become a doctor as well.

Let us do away with charismatic authority and even the hierarchy of tradition. Let us be the People of the Book.

2016 in Reading

Between my tutoring work and taking care of Kalman, I have not had time to blog much. As my tutoring has me driving into Los Angeles three time a week, I still get to listen to a lot of books. (God bless Audible.) As such, I would like to give a shoutout to some of my favorite books from the past year, books I would have loved to blog about if given the opportunity. None of these books are explicitly libertarian, but they are all worth the attention of lovers of liberty.

For psychology there is Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and  Elliot Aronson. As someone who likes being right, this humorous book sometimes cut a little too close for comfort. Considering how terrible humans are at admitting mistakes, one of the great virtues of the market is that it forces you to admit that you were wrong after a fashion. (It is called going bankrupt.) Can you trust a system like government designed to take people who are even worse than most at accepting blame and protect them from ever having to do so? The chapters on police interrogations and wrongful convictions are frightening. Has the art of criminal investigation really improved much since the Middle Ages?

Dr. Alan Brill used to tell us that people during the Middle Ages were not irrational. On the contrary, they would call us irrational. So for Judaism let me recommend his Judaism and Other Religions: Models of Understanding. In a post-Enlightenment multi-cultural world, the greatest challenge to any religion is how to grant legitimacy to other religions while still being able to justify the continued existence of yours. I greatly respect Brill for his ability to draw a line between offering textual background and advocacy for any particular solution. This book categorizes different Jewish stances regarding non-Jews ranging from saying that they are completely trapped in error to relativists positions where no one has any claim to objective religious truths. There is one point where Brill breaks his academic neutrality to acknowledge that a particular position is racist. Even this case serves demonstrates Brill's fairness as he does not attempt to sugarcoat Jewish tradition to make it palatable to moderns.  

Donald Trump's rise and electoral victory have drawn attention to the plight of white America. For this, I recommend Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones. This is top of the line journalistic history using a powerful narrative of nice Mexican boys dealing black tar heroin to white suburbanites in the midwest to make a general argument on how we need to rethink our conceptions of drug use and addiction. As this is a rare tale that takes us from Columbus, OH to Los Angeles, I feel a special connection to this book. Quinones is intent on blaming pharmaceutical companies for pushing painkillers ignoring their potential for addiction. I see a tale of moral hazard. The American government, with its regulation of the drug market, created a two-tier system of doctors prescribing legal drugs and a black market of drug dealers. This left Americans defenseless against the dangers of prescription drugs. My doctor with his lab coat and framed degree would never give me anything dangerous. He has nothing in common with the smelly villainous street corner dealer. We can see the problem even in our use of language as "drugs" have come to mean only the illegal kind, implying that there is a meaningful difference between them and the legal kind.

For History, I recommend Imbeciles: the Supreme Court, American Eugenics and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck by Adam Cohen. Buck vs. Bell stands along with Dredd Scott as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in American history. The State of Virginia conspired to have a perfectly ordinary woman declared to be mentally incompetent so she could be sterilized for the crime of being poor, uneducated and a rape victim. This is a kind of horror story for me as I can so easily imagine the government today using the same tactics to go after autistics. Just as the line between mental deficiency and being poor and never being allowed to finish grade school is easily blurred, so to can the lines between mental deficiency and not being able to function in a traditional classroom also be so easily ignored by those with an interest in doing so.

For fiction, my recommendations come from science-fiction. We have the Three Body Problem series by Cixin Liu. This Chinese mishmash of the Cultural Revolution and War of the Worlds is one of the most learned works of science-fiction I have ever encountered. As with anything by Neal Stephenson, it helps if you have a graduate level background in the history of science. This series competes well with Atlas Shrugged and Moon is a Harsh Mistress for being the greatest pro-liberty science-fiction story ever written. The heroes of this series are all fundamentally individualists, who act for their own personal human reasons as opposed to the large elaborate plans of governments.
  
Influx by Daniel Suarez is another highly intellectual novel in which the hero has to struggle against a vast bureaucracy staffed by people who act in the "public interest" to withhold advanced technology from the public. They have a complex argument, based on computer simulations, as to why they need to be in charge of all of humanity that could only be comprehended by a computer. There is a particularly harrowing torture sequence in which the hero faces off against a machine intelligence, who demands he cooperate with him in replicating human ingenuity. Failure to comply is met with the step by step destruction of his own personhood.

It took awhile for me to get into the Red Rising series by Pierce Brown. I got that it was going to be Hunger Games on Mars. Young Adult dystopian novels were beginning to bore me. Then something happened that shocked me and this was not the early murder of Darrow's wife, which, while well handled, was hardly surprising. If Darrow draws parallels to Katniss, he is far more morally tainted. The second book pushes the series even further into Game of Thrones territory. Book three contains one of the best pro-capitalism speeches in all of fiction. It comes suddenly and from a character that you had not realized was one of the good guys.  

Evidence of Civilization in Los Angeles

For the summer I am going to be in Los Angeles. There are certain social reasons for this, which I may choose to discourse in more detail at a later point depending on how things go. In the meantime I hope to be working on my dissertation and I may actually have a job as well. (Again I will provide details at a later date, depending on how things go.) I have a place to crash at short term, but I am looking to see if I can find a place to rent for at least July and August. If any of my readers know of anything, I would be much obliged.

Coming out to Los Angeles, I was concerned about giving up some of the comforts of life in Columbus OH, particularly Graeter's ice cream. For those of you not from Ohio and have not experience Graeter's, let me explain it this way. When I went home to my mother in Maryland, I told her that I brought her a present, something special from Columbus. Her response was: "you better not have tried to pack Graeter's ice cream." My mother certainly has good reason from experience to question the common sense of this ABD graduate student brain. In this case, though, her concerns were not warranted. I had brought her a jar of Graeter's raspberry topping.

So it was to my delight that, after flying in last night and jumping into a Ralph's supermarket to pick up a few things, that I beheld a delicious taste of home.

I guess there is civilized life in Los Angeles after all.

In Memory of Brian Jacques

My sister just informed me that Brian Jacques has passed away. For those of you not familiar with him, Brian Jacques was the author of the Redwall series. It is about mice, squirrels, badgers and hares fighting off rats, weasels, foxes and ferrets with all the blood and gore my child self could have ever asked for. The series now consists of over twenty novels, most of them bad, consisting of telling the same story over and over again, but the first six novels were truly inspired. Beyond those first novels (the only ones I recognize much as I only recognize the original Star Wars films) I owe a debt of gratitude to Jacques for, along with my mother and my grade school teacher Mrs. Kristine Coyne, helping to make me a reader. The Redwall series was my Harry Potter (and to all those people upset with Rowling for not writing more books, I ask you to look at Redwall and ask yourself if you would really want twenty Potter novels).

The Redwall books were not just a personal thing to me, but a beloved series within my family. My older brother was the first to come to them. I first learned about them after he spent an entire Sabbath reading the first novel, Redwall, coming down and drafting me for a role playing game. He would play the hero Matthias the mouse and I was to play Cluny the Scourge with   his whip-like tail. This was a variation of his usual game of him playing Beowulf and me Grendel. You can say this for my brother, he beat me up in good literary taste. Soon after this Brian Jacques came to Columbus for a book signing and my mother took my brother and the rest of us kids along. So I got to meet Brian Jacques, probably the first author I ever met, and he introduced us to starfruit, which he was eating. With such inspiration, it was only natural that I would make a go at the books, despite the fact that I was only in second grade and Redwall was by far the longest book I had read up to that point. (Long before Rowling, Jacques was breaking the unofficial 350 page limit for children's books.) It took me awhile, and by the time I got through it my older sister had also taken an interest.

At this point the series consisted of only three books, Redwall, Mossflower and Mattimeo. We had to wait for the fourth book, Mariel of Redwall to be published in the United States. When our copy finally came in by some agreement I can no longer recall, the reading order was my sister, me and then my older brother. The next morning I got up early snuck into my sister's room and nicked the book while she was sleeping in order to get a harmless jump start on the book. My parents disagreed and as a punishment, my brother got to go ahead of me. Thankfully for me, both my siblings finished within a few days.

Farewell Brian Jacques warrior of Redwall. May you find peace in the Dark Forest.       

Thoughts for the Super Bowl: Playing According to Rules in Sports and in Life

Only a few more hours until the Super bowl begins and my beloved Pittsburgh Steelers will play the Greenbay Packers. I am not going to any Super Bowl parties, but will be at home in Columbus armed with plenty of food and alcohol. I will have my laptop on so readers should feel free to twitter  me. In the meantime I thought I would take the moment to speak about rules, both in sports and in life.

As an Asperger I struggle in social situations in large part because the only way I know how to deal with people is through clearly defined sets of rules. Other people always seem to be able to get away with general appeals to fairness and decency, which, not surprisingly, always ends with other people being able to do whatever they want and me being left to pay the bill. One of the reasons why I like sports so much, even if I personally was never any good at them, is because sports are a realm of human interaction defined solely by rules with no pretension of there being anything else. In a sport like football there are two teams trying to score more points than the other. After four quarters of fifteen minutes one team will win and the other will lose. (Unless there is a tie at which point the game goes into overtime.)


Whether or not Steeler and Packer fans like each other today, they all agree about the rules of the game. You score points by moving the ball down the field to score a touchdown or a field goal. You have four downs to move the ball ten yards or the ball is turned over. A catch is a catch, a fumble is a fumble and a sack is a sack. This goes for the formal rules on the playing field as well as the more informal rules of sportsmanship. There are no pretensions of vague pleas to socially acceptable behavior and allowing the most deserving to win. I find a comfort in these hard fixed laws, even when they do not go my way.

 

I have very strong memories of the first Steeler AFC championship game I ever saw. I got up that morning in January 1995 convinced that the Steelers were going to crush the San Diego Chargers and head to their first Super Bowl in my lifetime. Things did not go as planned. After jumping out to a 13-3 lead, the Steelers gave up two touchdowns in the second half. In the closing minutes of the game they drove down the field setting up a fourth and goal at the Charger three yard line. Neil O’Donnell’s pass was stuffed on the goal line and that was the end of the game. How could it be that my Steelers had lost and all those months of playing a great season had come to naught? Should not there be one final thing to be done to give the Steelers and fans like myself what we “deserved?”

The next year, the Steelers made it to the Super Bowl to play the Dallas Cowboys. No one gave the Steelers much of a chance, but, down throughout the game, they found themselves, in the final minutes down only 20-17. At which point Neil O'Donnel threw an interception and the Cowboys won 27-17.

When I was in eighth grade at the Lubavitch school in Pittsburgh, I competed in a contest in Jewish law across the Lubavitch school system in North America. I was one of four students from the school selected to go to Toronto to compete in the championship, my own personal Super Bowl I thought. The first part of the championship was a written multiple choice exam held Saturday night. As I am sure has happened to many of my readers, after going through the exam once I went back and changed several of the answers that I was not sure about only to find out later that I was right the first time. The top third of contestants got to go on to a final oral round. I was the one person from the Pittsburgh team who did not make the cut. After the names were read out, our school principal, who traveled to Toronto with us, came over to me to congratulate me for a good effort. As he walked away from me to watch the finals, in my mind I was calling out to him: "is there not something you can do, some way you can pull some strings to let me also stand in the finals?"     

Of course the rules of the game have also given me some moments of victory such as in the Super Bowl two years ago, when, down 23-20 against the Arizona Cardinals, Ben Roethlisberger threw one of the most incredible touchdown passes in Super Bowl history to Santonio Holmes.

Sorry Cardinal fans, Holmes feet were down and in. The Steelers won their sixth Super Bowl, 27-23.




Hopefully this Super Bowl, Roethlisberger will produce another incredible pass, this time perhaps to Hines Ward or Michael Wallace, to win a seventh Super Bowl. But if he comes up short like Neil O’Donnell then so be it; that is how the game is played. I only wish that people could be honest with themselves and recognize that life must also be played by rules through both winning and losing.

Midwest Orthodoxy

There is a post up over at Dr. Alan Brill's blog about Orthodox communities in the Midwest. The author sets up a model of Orthodox life in these communities, contrasting it to the East coast, and makes the case for why Centrist Orthodoxy may no longer be viable for such communities when faced with competition from Haredi Orthodoxy and non-Orthodox movements. According to the author, Midwest Centrists operate on an immigrant narrative: "they came from Europe, they became American, and they remained Orthodox." This is in contrast to the "elitist" narrative that dominates on the East Coast. The author is not clear what he means by East coast elites. I assume he is referring to the ideals of being able to engage in advanced Talmud while going to the Ivies as exemplified by schools such as Maimonides in Boston. It is certainly the case that there are specific Orthodox congregations in cities like Boston, New York, and Washington DC that are packed with professionals with advanced degrees in a way that is just mind-boggling. Whatever the potential long term weaknesses of the elitist model, the immigrant narrative is of little use for people who are already several generations removed from Europe. What is left of this narrative is a vague Americanized cultural Orthodoxy as exemplified by shul clubs. This leaves Midwestern Centrist Orthodoxy without a firm ideology with which to stand against those from either side of the ideological spectrum.

I am a Midwesterner, the product of Columbus OH and McKeesport PA. There is a lot of truth in this model of Midwest cultural Orthodoxy and its origins in the immigrant experience. McKeesport, even in my time, was quite literally an immigrant community. (The joke was that everyone in McKeesport was Hungarian even the gentiles.) That being said, in this knocking of the Midwest, there is something missing. My religious experience growing up was very non-partisan. There was no sense of us versus them; we were Jews. There were some Jews who were more observant and there were some who were less observant. I think there is something very healthy about growing up like that. The fact that fewer Orthodox Jews growing up today, particularly those "elites" on the East coast, have this experience is unfortunate and a source of many of the problems today. Ideologies like biology are also subject to the laws of Darwinian evolution. The ideologies that survive to reproduce a next generation are not necessarily "better," just better at indoctrinating the next generation under the given circumstances. Honestly tolerant non-partisan ideologies, lacking a strong sense of us versus them, are almost always the losers in this struggle.

 The Orthodox community in McKeesport has almost completely died out and Columbus shows little sign of being able to expand. Above and beyond ideology, there are pragmatic reasons for this. As a single person in his late 20s, the most obvious one is the dating pool. Dating requires a baseline pool of other available singles. No Orthodox community in the Midwest has that baseline. What happened in McKeesport, where you had just a few families and the children just married each other until everyone was related somehow, is not an option today. If you are Orthodox and single you essentially have to move to New York. This has led to communities like Washington Heights, full of Orthodox singles from Midwest communities, including Columbus. Several years ago, oblivious to these dynamics, I moved from Washington Heights back to Columbus. I did this right at the time in my life when I wanted to start seriously dating. In good consciousness, I could never recommend someone in a similar situation to do what I did and move away from my dating pool. Of course, this dooms a community like Columbus far more so than any lack of a coherent ideology.

Reflections on the Autism Speaks Protest

So I spent Sunday morning protesting the Autism Speaks Walk. I took part in the protest as an associate of ASAN. I am not, though, an actual member of the group even if I did originally help found the Columbus chapter and even if I continue to view it as my family here. For this reason nothing that I say should be taken as representative of ASAN, a liberating position if at times I am critical of them. (Melanie, Noranne and Aspitude have already posted on the event so see them for an alternative perspective.)

We had a dozen or so people, Autism Speaks had about eighteen thousand so it gives an idea about what we are up against. Standing around waving signs is not an ideal way to win friends and influence people in the best of circumstances. In our case, the area we were given by the university to protest was away from the arena where the walk was being held, across a giant parking lot, across a busy street. People driving into the parking lot could see us and the end of the Walk was right by us, but other than that we were irrelevant. I know someone in the OSU band, who performed at the event, and she told me later that she was unaware that we were even there. Maybe it would have helped if we could have provoked some sort of reaction. In truth, though, besides for the occasional catcall of "you're stupid," "get a life" or "go home" we were pretty much ignored as we deserved. Why should anyone pay attention to some people waving signs? If anything the people of Autism Speaks were very nice to us. One of the organizers came out to offer us water if we needed it (we had brought plenty of our own). If we did not succeed on the ground we did succeed where it counts most in the twenty-first century, media. We were interviewed by the local ABC and NBC stations. The credit for those needs to go to our front office, particularly Ari Ne'eman, and to those in our group who made the phone calls. State representative Ted Celeste also stopped by. Representative Celeste is a good friend of the group, whom we have spoken to multiple times in the past. He apologized to us for having a puzzle pin on his lapel, knowing our strong opposition to its use. The fact that Celeste bothered to even talk to us in such an environment (we being outnumbered more than a thousand to one) says a lot about him.

I can only admire Autism Speaks for creating the sort of trans-generational, trans-community networks that they have. Central to their fundraising and what the Walk is meant to demonstrate is that autism is first off a family issue and second a community issue. For this reason you did not have just autistic children walking, but their entire families as well. And not just families, you had large groups of friends and neighbors as well so surrounding every autistic child is a large "team" of support. Now as someone from the group pointed out, this entire Walk was designed with neurotypicals in mind and not autistics. One can only imagine the hell some of these kids were being put through, taken off of their schedules to a place with lots of noise and people running around. A step in the right direction for Autism Speaks would be if it would openly fashion itself not as an organization for autistics, particularly as autistics are not represented in its leadership, but as a support group for the parents of autistics. However difficult it might be to go through life autistic, it cannot compare to the challenges of being the parent of an autistic child. These parents need and deserve the support of their families and communities.

This brings us to the trap that Autism Speaks has maneuvered us into, one that we have failed to solve and until we do we will not be able to stand up Autism Speaks in the public arena; Autism Speaks has pitted us, not against their front office, but against the parents of autistic children. Say what you want about the front office, their eugenics policies and their misuse of funds, but that is not going to help you deal with a parent grasping for solutions in the here and now. The toughest moment of the Walk for me was not the taunts (I am a brawler and cannot resist a fight); it was when that organizer, who offered us water, followed up by asking us who is going to speak for his son who is unable to speak. I admit that the person is not me. I have not spent a single day being the parent for that man's kid nor do I have the solution to his problems. The most that I can say is that I am the obvious ally, who would be willing to help him, as long as I am not alienated by talk of disease and cure, lines of discourse that will make it nearly impossible for me to hold down a job and eventually get married. There was a good conversation with him and the group and he was really nice to us. We spoke about advances in communication technology that offers alternatives to verbal speech. After the man left someone from the group made a crack that the man was prejudiced with his talk of "all people communicate by talking" Fine, maybe they are right and this man suffers from petty prejudices (don't we all); that simply dodges the real issue at hand that this man is on the front lines dealing with the real challenges of autism and we do not have any readymade solutions to offer.

What we need to have is a dialogue with the parents. All this rhetoric about Autism Speaks giving out $600,000 salaries and only spending four cents to the dollar on families very well may be true, but that simply makes us sound like every other political group this time of year going negative against the opposition. I do not wish to fight all those parents, friends and family who came to the Walk and they certainly deserve better than political attack ads. If given the chance, here is what I would want to say to them: I acknowledge the difficult situation that you are in and that I am in no position to judge you as to whether you are truly "tolerant." As someone on the autism spectrum I am incredibly fortunate in ways that many of your children are not and because of that I feel a sense of responsibility. Whatever the future of autism holds I am here with you for the ride. That being said we need to consider some hard realities. First off, whatever theoretical debates we can have about using a magic pill to cure autism, no magic pill is on the horizon. This leaves us with ever improving methods of schooling and therapy, all of which will remain expensive. Secondly genetic screening and finding out the root causes of autism is not going to help a single child with autism presently. Thirdly, every one of your autistic children is going to become an autistic adult and that is going to require a system of its own that is not in place at present. Autism Speaks, for all of its high sounding rhetoric, offers nothing to help you with any of these real issues. For your sakes and more importantly for the sake of your children you need to start talking to other people; perhaps to people who are on the spectrum, but are still leading productive lives. They might not be able to offer you a cure, but they can at least open up a serious conversation as to how live with autism.

Catching Up on Things: History 111 Fall 2010

Sorry for being offline for the past two weeks. This past month, just in time for our string of three-day Jewish holidays, I moved back to Columbus and started teaching again at Ohio State. On top of all this, I did not have an internet connection at my apartment until last night. (While I might miss New York and Silver Spring, what I am paying for my half of a two-bedroom apartment goes a long way to making up for things.) I hope to be back posting on a regular basis, though likely a little less often than earlier in the year.

So to get things back on track, I would like to invite everyone on board my new teaching experiment. For this quarter I decided to run my History 111 class as a book club. Instead of using one textbook and doing a survey of European history from antiquity up until the Enlightenment, we will be doing a series of shorter books on specific topics. Ideally, I would like to do secondary sources, but I am open to doing primary sources and even good historical fiction. While I picked the first book, Bart Ehrman's Peter, Paul & Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend, subsequent books are to be picked by the class. We have already voted for the next book, Robert Harris's novel Imperium, which deals with the life of the Roman orator Cicero as told by his servant Tiro. It is similar to Robert Graves' I, Claudius, though it is, I believe, more accessible to a general audience.

I was inspired to do this in part by the wonderful book club I have here in Columbus and in part by my desire to take Alfie Kohn seriously to see what might come about with implementing some of his ideas. (See The Book Club: or How to Destroy School.) If the Alfie Kohn model of education could work anywhere it should be in a college where there is at least some degree of self-motivation among students. By allowing students to pick what books we read I am allowing the opportunity to structure the class to suit them. I still will be maintaining graded assignments, including homework. For example, as in previous years, students are supposed to email me a question or comment about the reading before class. (An idea I took from Prof. Louis Feldman.) I then structure my talk around responding to these questions. That being said, this is a rather open-ended assignment and serves to further make room for student input.

What attracted me to Ehrman was, one, he writes about the historical Jesus and early Christianity, topics of popular interest. He writes in a balanced fashion which, while not openly hostile to orthodox religious sensibilities does a very effective job of explaining how an academic approach differs from an orthodox one and for its superiority. Two, Ehrman provides an entry into the historical method as he talks his way through texts and how to use them. What Ehrman does to the New Testament is what historians do to all texts, sacred or otherwise. Part of what is subversive about the historical method, a Pandora's Box so to speak, is that it is impossible to accept it partway. If you accept the historical method then you commit yourself to applying it to all texts, the Bible just as much as Julius Caesar. Regardless of how orthodox your eventual conclusions, the moment you agree to subject the Bible to the same cross-examination as any other text you have put a knife into orthodoxy, committing yourself to the Kantian charge of placing everything before the bar of reason. There can be no return to innocent belief.

So this experiment seems to be going well even if I seem to be speaking a lot more than I might have liked. If anyone has book recommendations, please feel free to post them.

Presenting at an Autism Conference

I spent the day at an Autism conference sponsored by Ohio State's Nisonger Center, titled "Transition: The Challenges, Strategies and Models in School, Work and Health." It is great being back in Columbus for a few days and meeting up with friends. I, along another person from the Aspirations group, took part in a panel organized by Dr. Tom Fish. The panel was on the topic of transitioning from school to the work place for those on the spectrum. I admit that there is something ironic about having me speak about this since the Hebrew Academy let me go. My learning experiences this year as a high school teacher, including the fact that things did not work out as I had hoped, were among the major points I touched upon. I am not going to talk about any clinical neuro-supremacist (that neurotypical behavior is the standard against which we judge good and bad and the purpose of the professional is to "help" people on the spectrum to be more like neurotypicals) biases. Melanie was there and I leave the matter to her and her Twitter site. I do wish to speak about the manner of presentation. This was my first experience sitting in, as part of the audience, on a professional conference presentation for a non-humanities field. I have sat through quite a number of history conferences with presentations ranging from brilliant to horrible, but there was something strikingly boring about the presentations on autism I witnessed today. I certainly do not have a large enough sample to make any judgments on the matter and would love to hear from someone with more experiences with such conferences, particularly if they also have been to conferences in the humanities fields, but here are some of my explanations.

The humanities teach rhetoric – Overall you are going to get better public speakers with people from the humanities. The humanities encourage the sort of self expression necessary as the foundation for any explicit or implicit study of rhetoric.

The humanities are a labor of love – Say what you will about the humanities, but every single person at a graduate level has made a conscious decision to turn down going into a different field and making more money. If you are in the humanities you are there because you love what you are doing and find it interesting. Even if you cannot pass this on to someone else, it is there. Take a person with no speaking skills, reading off a page with a Ben Stein drawl and the love is going to come through somehow. Professional educators and clinical researchers are doing what they are doing because it is a job to them. They might truly love what they do, but there is no reason to go looking for it.

Length – At humanities conferences I am used to 1.5–2 hour sessions with 3-4 speakers going for 20-30 minutes each plus question and answer time. This conference had single speakers going for 1.5-2 hours. There are limits to my attention span, even with skilled speakers. I also think there is something to be said for the notion that if you have a specific message that is important you should be able to deliver that message in twenty minutes. Anything over that and you have to start asking yourself some hard questions as to whether you are speaking because you actually have something to say, you do not know how to organize your own thoughts or because you simply wish to kill time and hear yourself speak. If you cannot believe with complete faith in the importance of what you are saying, why should anyone believe in its importance enough to listen?

PowerPoint – I admit that I have come to use PowerPoint a lot in my own lectures. It organizes the material for me and makes it easier for students to write down the major points, which leads to more effective memorization. I have never seen people so enslaved to their PowerPoint as some of the presenters today. PowerPoint no longer simply served as an aid; it was the center of the presentation, without which there could be no presentation. If one can more easily imagine a presentation going on without the speaker than without the PowerPoint then we have a problem. It is bad enough when lectures cease to be actual speeches, just mere reading from a text; add a second printed source, this time for the audience, and there truly is no speech to present.

My panel went well and I will only take part of the credit. We had three real people on the dais, speaking about something important to them, with a message to impart. At the end we received one of the nicest compliments I have ever heard, one truly befitting our modern age. "Your panel was the only one today during which I did not send off a single text message."

Columbus OH and Sabbatianism

I came across the following comment about the Rabbi Jekuthiel Greenwald ztl, who was the rabbi of Beth Jacob in Columbus OH, in the early twentieth century:

Rabbi Jekuthiel Judah (Leopold) Greenwald, a prolific and eclectic scholar, best known for his halakhic work on the laws of mourning, Kol Bo 'al Avelut, after emigrating from his native Sighet, Hungary [This is the same city that Elie Wiesel is from. Now it is part of Romania.] to the United States, served as orthodox rabbi of Columbus, Ohio. One of his many interests over the years was Sabbatianism. He published in Weitzen in 1912 a full-fledged work, Le-korot ha-Shabta'im be-Ungaria (Annals of the Sabbatians in Hungary). In his Sefer ha-Zikhronot (Book of Memoirs), published in Budapest in 1922, Greenwald recalls how as a soldier stationed in the Balkans during World War I, he stumbled on to the grave of Shabbetai Zevi in Albania.

Rabbi Greenwald's son, a Denver advocate, informs me his father's literary estate contained no unpublished papers on the subject of Sabbatianism. Yet perhaps now that the Iron Curtain has been lowered in Eastern Europe, it will once again be possible for an enterprising researcher to have a look at the Sighet city archives. (Bezalel Naor, Post-Sabbatian Sabbatianism: Study of an Underground Movement pg. 107-08.)

A Student’s Letter of Recommendation

This past week I found out that the Hebrew Academy was not going to bring me back for next year. The administration decided that even though they loved the fact that I taught at a very high level, in essence offering a college level course, I lacked the right touch for dealing with high school students. One of my students, without me asking, was kind enough to write the administration a "letter of recommendation" for me. The student sent me a copy and allowed me to reproduce part of it here.

I am writing because recently I have heard some criticisms from other students about Mr. Chinn's class, so I would like to describe my experience in Modern Jewish History. Since the beginning of the year Mr. Chinn's class has been one of my favorites. He conveys the information with great energy and he really makes the material interesting. He always manages to connect what we are learning in class to current events, which helps me learn the material much better. His quizzes and tests are challenging, but fair. They always reflect the material covered in class which is more then I can say for other classes I've taken. He encourages really thinking about the material, and will often teach by asking the students questions about, for example what the motivation of a historical figure might have been. There is always a lot of dialogue between Mr. Chinn and the students on the material, and it really makes for a charged and energized learning environment.  

…

In short I feel that Mr. Chinn was a really excellent teacher and I am glad to have had the privilege of taking his class.

It looks like I am going to be back in Columbus next fall to use my final year of funding. That is unless someone else has a use for an eccentric graduate student in medieval and early modern history, with a loud theatrical style of lecturing.

The Book Club Classroom (or How to Destroy School)

There is another possible working model for Alfie Kohn's homework free class that is worth consideration, the book club. When I lived in Columbus I co-chaired a book club for those on the autism spectrum. Every week we would meet for an hour and discuss around fifty pages of a given book. We did books ranging from two to four hundred pages so we did a different book about every one to two months. We did short stories like Isaac Asimov's robot stories, Sherlock Holmes and H. P. Lovecraft. We also did full novels like Killer Angels, Twilight, Catch-22 and Sabriel. Like any classroom, we had a range of people in the club. In our case, we ranged from graduate students in literature to people who had trouble picking up books to read to begin with. Not everyone did the reading every week (some less often than others) so we usually did not have full participation. Also, not everyone came every week. No one was forced to come to book club. We were there because we liked the company and liked talking about the books.

It is not unreasonable that our book club could be used to replace a literature class. The sort of "class" this would give us would be much more democratic and there would be no mandatory homework or tests. The teacher could come to the first day of class with some suggested books and the students could come with some of their suggestions. Everyone could make their case for their book of choice and, afterwards, everyone could vote. The book with the most votes wins. Other books that did not win can still be considered for the next vote and it would be even expected that books (like presidential candidates) will lose in their first run, which will serve to bring it to people's attention, only to win on the next try. After choosing a book, it will be announced that we will be discussing a certain number of pages or chapters for the next class. Some people will do the reading and take part in the class discussion and others won't. When the book is finished we can vote on the next book and the process continues. Since no one has to do any of the assignments there is no reason to give tests or even to give grades. Everyone is in class because they want to be. Some people might actually want to talk about the books and others might just want to hang out.

This process could easily be adapted to history. Greetings class in modern Jewish history, I am your teacher. For this coming week would you like to talk about Hasidism, the Enlightenment, the Holocaust or the founding of the State of Israel? Once we have picked the topic I can point you to the relevant parts of the textbook, primary sources, and outside academic literature that you may wish to read. Please feel no pressure, do the reading if you feel like it and if you would like to actively take part in class. If there is a topic that really interests you, I will gladly help you do further research and will even to write a paper. I am not in charge of you; you are all here because you wish to be. I am simply here to help run discussions and so that my particularly training in these fields may be used.

The potential problem with this is its mandatory nature. Those students who do not do the non-mandatory reading are for all intents and purposes not in class and are no different from the students who do not bother to even show up to this non-mandatory class. One can certainly make a very good case that modern Jewish history and even literature are not of critical importance and that therefore there is no need for them to be mandatory. These are nice things for students to engage in and so they should be available for those students who wish to take the classes. The moment we decide that class should be mandatory then we commit ourselves to making sure that students actually come to class and actually doing work. This means that we actually have to check to see if the work is being done. This means graded homework and tests.

The question of payment raises similar issues. As long as I am doing the book club on a volunteer basis it is only something of interest to me whether anyone actually gains something from coming to book club. The moment I become a salaried teacher then I become answerable to the school, which directly pays my salary, and to parents, who indirectly pay my salary. Obviously, they are paying me to run my book club classroom for a reason and it is only reasonable that I offer some hard evidence to show that their money is not being wasted. By assigning homework and tests I can procure hard empirical evidence that my students have mastered the concepts that I was paid to give over (or that my students are lazy/stupid and it is not my fault).

In theory, this book club model can be used even for math and science allowing us to turn the entire school system into a series of book clubs in which students can pursue their interests without ever being forced to do homework or take a test. Teachers would either be volunteers or baby sitters hired for their particular academic training. This would mean the end of mandatory schooling. Let us be honest, this means my childhood dream of destroying school would come true, leaving students with clubs to attend (if they wish). The adult me might also be willing to do away with school, but is this Kohn's plan?