Forgiving My Advisor (Part I)

In the previous post, I discussed some of my mistakes in how I approached pursuing a doctorate. Now I would like to turn to what my advisor did to me. Graduate students in their 20s can be expected to not know what they are doing precisely because this is something unlike anything they have done before. This is why graduate students are supposed to have advisors who know what they are doing as they have done this before. Ideally, they should have already guided other doctoral candidates through the process. At the very least, they should have written a dissertation themselves. Advisors are not supposed to make things worse for students than if they had been allowed to proceed on their own. 

I chose to come study with my advisor because he was a specialist in Jewish History. I wanted to work on an Abarbanel dissertation (either on his views on Kabbalah or Messianism) and my advisor initially said he could work with me on that. (He would later lie about this fact even though I had the email in which he said this.) I did not concern myself with the fact that I was going to be his first doctoral student. The university he taught at offered me funding, so he clearly wanted to work with me.

I should add that there were several non-academic factors as well that appealed to me and ended up taking on more weight than they should have. We had a number of friends in common and people I respected told me to go study with him. I honestly liked him and thought we would get along in addition to working on my dissertation. Considering these things, it seemed only reasonable that I should take the path forward and start working with my advisor. I would do the coursework, write the dissertation, and embark on my academic career. It did not occur to me to wait a few years, while doing something else, in the hope that a better option might come around.

It was only after I committed myself to come work with him that my advisor pulled a surprise on me. While he initially had told me that I could do a project on Abarbanel, he now informed me that he would not agree to something that narrowly focused on Abarbanel. For that matter, he was not going to let me write anything that was simply about Jewish thought. He insisted that I write on some sort of grand topic that would appeal to people outside of the field of Jewish History. He also told me to write my dissertation and then he would put together a dissertation committee. Being young and inexperienced, I had no idea that both of his instructions were the exact opposite of what one is supposed to do.

My advisor recommended Norman Cohn’s Pursuit the Millenium to me, which still is one of my favorite works of history. Cohn wrote about medieval Christian peasants using millenarian ideology to rebel against the Feudal order. His goal was to undermine the Whiggish notion of the Middle Ages where peasants meekly accepted the hierarchal order of their day and it was only during the Enlightenment that people developed a political consciousness. What I took from Cohn is the idea that messianism is not just a religious doctrine but also a political ideology. This gave me the idea of writing about Jewish Messianism as something political. This would be going against Gershom Scholem and most Jewish Historians who have seen Judaism from the Destruction of the Second Temple to the rise of Zionism as lacking politics.

My advisor liked my idea for a dissertation but insisted that even this was too narrow and that I needed to also write about parallel examples within Christianity and Islam. Fairly quickly, I found myself trapped in a project that I was not qualified to handle. Furthermore, I was socially isolated where I was living with few dating opportunities. This led me to depression, which in turn, made it difficult to work on the dissertation, which only furthered my depression. My main relief from depression was writing this blog, which most certainly did not mean making progress with the dissertation.  

To be fair to my advisor, he is an excellent teacher and I learned a lot from him. In addition to introducing me to the work of Norman Cohn, he gave me a copy of Keith Thomas' Religion and the Decline of Magic. I still cherish the memories of sitting in his office doing a private study session on Christian mysticism, reading people like St. Teresa de Avila, St. John of the Cross, and Jacob Bohme. I think it was because I held my advisor in such high esteem, that I did not initially blame him for my difficulties, even though I realized after a year or so that I should not have been given a dissertation project like the one he gave me. I simply accepted that he had made an honest mistake and it was my job to plow through and make the best of it.   

 

A Helpful Message to Finish My Dissertation

Today I was reading up on John of Rupescissa. He was a fourteenth-century Franciscan apocalyptic visionary. He believed that the Jews would convert and be saved in the end. He also, like seemingly every self-respecting Franciscan of the period, got into trouble with the Church and spent the last years of his life in prison, (something to do with having very "un-Christian" ideas about Church poverty) from where he did most of his writings, ranging from the end of the world to alchemy. Tommaso Campanella, another Christian apocalyptic visionary I am studying, also spent over twenty years in prison for his part in a failed political revolution in Naples. (This was after he managed to convince the Inquisition he was insane by being tortured for two days straight.) He also used his time in prison to write productively and was released to spend the last few years of his life as a European court celebrity. Then there is the example of St. John of the Cross; my spiritual guide through depression. His inspiring poetry on life in a spiritual abyss, The Dark Night of the Soul, benefited from a year spent locked away against his will. (I could, of course, also mention Adolf Hitler, who managed to produce Mein Kempf during a year spent in prison, but he does not fit under medieval and early modern Christian thinkers.)  

I cannot help but feel that I am being sent a message, one that I would rather not hear. That the best place to write is not the office, the library, or even on a couch with the TV on, but in prison doing hard time for treason and heresy. So I need to go to federal prison as a violent religious apocalyptic revolutionary. To do that I am going to need to start a violent religious apocalyptic movement. (All violent religious apocalyptic actions will of course be carried out by erring disciples who have distorted my teachings.) In order to learn how to start such a movement, I will need to finish writing my dissertation. But of course, I cannot hope to finish my dissertation unless I go to prison.       

Alice Cullen Learns About Mormonism II

(In an earlier post I talked about my experience meeting with a pair of Mormon missionaries and getting a copy of the book of Mormon. See here. For more on the subject of Alice Cullen see here and here.)
At the end of our discussion Elder G presented me with my own personal copy of the book of Mormon and bade me to make good use of it. I should read it and ask God to tell me if this book was true. If I open up my heart to God he will open up my eyes and I will see the truth of this book. I asked Elder G if he thought we should apply this method of verification to other fields of human endeavors such as history or science. I will open up the Principia Mathematica and pray: God open up my eyes and let me know if Newtonian mechanics is true or if I should stick to Aristotle like a good Catholic.
Later that night, while reading St. Teresa de Avila’s Interior Castle, I realized that there is a far more basic flaw with what Elder G was telling me. Teresa was a sixteenth-century Spanish nun who had all sorts of mystical visions. Her books are descriptions of her visions and a guide to how to go about achieving such experiences. One of the major concerns running through her thought is how the devil sets traps for people along the mystical path to mislead them. Teresa questions herself as to whether she really is experiencing the presence of Jesus or if this is just Satan deluding her. For Teresa, this was more than just an academic question. She had to justify herself before priests, who were investigating her to see if she was truly in contact with God or if she was with the devil. Many of these priests happened to have been members of the Inquisition. A negative answer could get someone imprisoned or even killed. In fact, one of her followers, St. John of the Cross, did end up spending several years in jail.
I am a spiritual novice. I have not spent decades in prayer and meditation. I am way too easily distracted over such things as the escapades of teenage vampires at the expense of my immortal soul. To the best of my knowledge, I have not had any genuine mystical experiences. I would have no idea what one would be if it hit me on the head. So when I open up the book of Mormon to delve into it how do I know that God is opening up my mind to its truth? What if it is Satan trying to trick me? Alternatively, as I do not believe in the sort of Satan who haunted sixteenth century Europe, how do I differentiate between God opening up my eyes and me simply wanting to believe something? These Mormons are really nice people. They definitely are the sort of group that I would love to belong to. What about the hundreds of other students that Elder G will be talking to this year? They will likely be even bigger spiritual novices than I am and have spent even less time thinking about their immortal souls. How are they going to be able to tell if God is speaking to them?
To all my haredi friends and relatives, who have lectured me about the value of emunah pshuta, simple faith and about how Judaism does not require that you make coherent arguments in support of it. You should be very thankful that I never bothered to listen to you. If I did I might actually have to take the book of Mormon seriously. Clearly, if Judaism does not have to make sense then I should not expect Mormonism to have to make sense either.