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.               

Fifteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies - Jewish Thought: New Challenges

Alan Brill – Is There Still a Mystery to Mysticism after Modernity?

You can find the full lecture at Fordham. This is just a small piece that deals with Judaism. Today mysticism has dropped off the map. Instead we tend to use words that are more descriptive. There are five major schools in thinking about mysticism.

The first school treats mysticism as a series of texts that offers images. This is the view you can find in Bernard McGinn and the Chicago school. Michael Fishbane is a Jewish representative of this school. For him mystical texts are a continuation of midrashic interpretation. The second school focuses on the lack of divine presence. This is very useful for people who do not want to talk about God anymore. An example of this is Arthur Green. According to Green, God withdraws from a dimension and allow us to engage in our own interpretation. You can use god language without dealing with the implications of it. The third school is the political. I will not deal with it here, considering where we are. The fourth school sees mysticism as esoteric writing and knowledge. This covers a wide range of people. Moshe Idel, for example, treats Kabbalah as esoteric knowledge, a map that one becomes familiar with. The goal of Kabbalah is to unpack the text using a number of methods. He downplays negative theology and Neo-Platonism in Kabbalah. Moshe Halbertal now follows this. In a strange way the Kabbalah Center also works like this. They have hidden secrets, technology of sorts, to understand the universe. To go to the other extreme, Haredi Kabbalist Moshe Shapiro works within this school. This allows him to go against science. From his perspective, he knows the secrets of reality and you in the university are just grasping at it. The fifth school focuses on meditation. Mysticism is not secret but an open practice that one learns how to do. The Dalai Lama and Mary Carruthers of NYU operate within this model. Carruthers even looks at medieval texts like this.

Many of us are used to looking at the Zohar from twentieth century categories. The first model looks at the metaphors for their own sake. What do they mean? The second model would try to deflect the theist language. If God is a tree it is not as scary. The fourth wants to ask about how you go from the plain meaning to the esoteric. The final model looks at the pragmatic elements. In the last twelve years there has been a turn away from devekut. Texts have become resources in of themselves. To make the comparison of the spider and the silkworm. In the Ingmar Bergman film, Through a Glass Darkly, a woman sees God as a spider. In the Zohar God is a silkworm spinning the universe. In post modernism we are no longer interested in the experience but in the image itself, god as the spider, god as the silkworm.

(See here for a series of clips of Dr. Brill teaching meditation. I will leave it to the reader to come to their own conclusions as to where Dr. Brill stands in terms of the various models he outlined.)

Eric Lawee – Adam’s Mating with Animals: New Data on Christian and Jewish Receptions of a Strange Midrash

And now for something completely different. According to the opinion of Rabbi Eliezer, Adam mated with every species of animal but was not satisfied until he mated with Eve. Midrashim can have an effect even centuries after it was written. Rashi modified the midrash, but did not view this as strange that the first man engaged in bestiality. It only becomes a problem once Christians pick up on it. In the thirteenth century this Midrash was used by Nicholas Donin to attack Jews. Pablo Santa Maria also used this Midrash to mock Judaism. One solution for Jews was to read this non-literarily. Shem Tov, for example, argued that one should interpret such things according to their allegorical meaning in the way of Maimonides. Moshe ibn Gabbai interpreted this Midrash as saying that Adam investigated every animal with his intellect.

There is new data from the sixteenth century. This is the start of print and a wider diffusion of rabbinic writing among Christians. Sixtus of Siena, an apostate, used this Midrash. Johannes Reuchlin defended Rabbi Eliezer by saying that he only felt desire when he came to Eve. Rauchlin’s Jew, Simon, quotes Sefer Nizzahon (See David Berger’s Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages.) arguing that Adam could not have had intercourse with insects. Censorship was one Christian solution for such a problem. In the third Bamberg edition we see a denuded Rashi that does not refer to this midrash.

In modern times we have Pastor Cohen G. Reckart in the role of Nicholas Donin for the internet age. He says about the Talmud that “No Christian could read this book in a true heart of faith in Jesus and not come away from a study of it shocked and alarmed.”Rabbi Shimon Schwab distinguished between higher order versus lower order animals. Adam might have had intercourse with high more human like animals. The Schottenstein Talmud goes in a different direction of earlier Artscroll references to Rabbi Eliezer, which acknowledged different opinions on the matter. The Schottenstein Talmud simply follows Maharal and says that this should not be taken literally.

Shabbos at the Oxford Chabad

I spent Shabbos at the Chabad at Oxford and was hosted by Rabbi Eli Brackman. Since I regularly go to the Chabad at Ohio State, I figured that it would make for a fun comparison. Small Jewish world, Rabbi Brackman knows Rabbi Zalman Deitsch of Ohio State. (I wonder if they are, even now, exchanging notes on me. “So who exactly is this Chinn guy and what is his deal?”) There was a guest speaker, Dr. Aharon Giamani of Bar Ilan University in Israel. Dr. Giamani’s field, which he spoke to us about, is in the history of Yemenite Jewry. I was fortunate to be able to speak to him over Shabbos and I am grateful to him for allowing me to hold the conversation in my rather poor conversational Hebrew.

Due to a conversation about Jewish philosophy with one of the Chabad people about, I was presented with the tenth chapter Sha'ar ha-Yichud ve'ha'Emunah in the Tanya, the foundational text of Chabad thought. The essential point of this chapter is that God is one with the sephirot. The analogy used is that of the relationship between the sun and the rays of light it gives off. This may be the medievalist in me, but when I hear the analogy of the unity of the sun and sunlight I think of the classical apology for the Trinity that uses this same analogy. I raised this issue with Rabbi Brackman and he was remarkably non-pulsed about it. He agreed that there was a parallel here and that it was probably written like that on purpose. Rabbi Brackman went on to argue that the difference would be that the Tanya does not take any of this literally. Rabbi Brackman went on point out the basic tenant of Chabad theology that God literally includes everything and that individuality is simply an illusion. I had a similar experience with another Lubavitch person a few years ago who, when I asked him what the difference between the Chabad belief that human souls are literally part of God and the Christians doctrine of the Incarnation beyond the fact that Chabad would multiply the problem billions of times over by turning every human being into their own Jesus Christ. My Lubavitch friend responded that he did not know, but that anyway it was not a problem.

If we are going to go with the classical understandings of Jewish thought as found in Saadiah Gaon, the Kuzari, Maimonides and medieval Jewish anti-Christian polemics, the rejection of the Trinity and the Incarnation are critical parts of Judaism. A Judaism in which one cannot give a coherent reason for rejecting the Trinity and the Incarnation is one in which Jews might as well start lining up to the baptismal font. Yet we have Chabad rabbis nonchalantly throwing around arguments that are almost identical. Put it this way, if what Chabad believes about the nature of God and him being one unified entity with the sephirot and all human souls is not heresy then I do not know of any coherent argument against the acceptance of a classical Christian understanding of the Trinity and the Incarnation that will hold water for more than five minutes.

I know people who have or are in middle of converting to Judaism. Last I checked, unless you can give a straightforward NO to the question of whether you believe in the Trinity or the Incarnation with no equivocations or scholastic discourses, you will not be accepted for conversion. This applies equally to the most conservative Satmar court as it does to the Reform movement, making this one of the few things that the entire spectrum of Judaism actually agrees on. Prof. David Berger wishes to argue that Chabad is heresy because of the messianic beliefs held by many in the movement. In truth, it goes much further, into the fundamental doctrines of the movement found in Tanya.

The Lubavitchers that I know, I like and respect for the most part. Considering that I have been living outside of a major Jewish community, dealing with Lubavitch is sort of a practical necessity. I find the implications of Berger’s proposed ban too frightening to seriously consider. That being said, I must admit that it is a real problem.

Shabbos did not end here in the southern part of England until a quarter to eleven at night, so much for doing something on Saturday night. It must strange trying to raise children in such a situation. “Alright kids, go to bed now. Shabbos will be over when you get up in the morning.”