How to Make Me Want to Convert to Calvinism: Make Me Listen to a Sermon By a Conservative Rabbi

Mackie's preschool is closed for the moment because a teacher was exposed to COVID-19. Hopefully, everyone will be well. In the meantime, both children are home in the morning. This past Friday, the preschool had a pre-shabbat Zoom lesson from the transgender rabbi from the local Conservative temple. (Yes, it is supposed to be the Reform who have temples.) In case you were wondering if she had an agenda, the rabbi opened with modeh ani and then informed the children that there were a female and a non-binary version of the word. Keep in mind that we are talking about pre-schoolers here.  

The main lesson was about the upcoming Torah reading, Toldot. This deals with the story of Jacob and Esau. Jacob disguises himself as his hairy older brother and tricks their blind father, Isaac, into giving him the blessing meant for the firstborn. As someone who grew up believing that God made a mistake by not making me the oldest child, I empathize with Jacob. With my own children, I have emphasized Isaac's line of "the voice is the voice of Jacob but the hands are the hands of Esau." A Jew's superpower is in his voice, which he can use to pray and study Torah. We do not have big muscles and it is not our place to go around beating people up.    

What the rabbi wanted the children to take from the story was that you are supposed to be yourself. In a sane world, anyone who feels that they needed to use chemicals and surgery to make radical changes to their body would think twice about preaching self-acceptance. Regardless of your gender identity, any teacher who subscribes to the Disney/Mr. Rogers Rousseauean school of self-esteem that children should be accepted for who they are (as opposed to the Nathaniel Branden Aristotelian version of self-esteem) renders themselves unfit to educate children. 

I love Mackie. Those who know him will agree that he is a delightful child. That being said, he is illiterate and still in diapers. In essence, he is par for being three years old. I send him to school and work on him as his father precisely because I do not accept him for who he is. He needs to change to become someone else. For example, I insist that he become the kind of person who reads books and uses the potty.

Keep in mind that reading and using the potty are not just utilitarian skills. They involve fundamental shifts in how one perceives the world. To become literate means to confront the authority of texts through time and space as a counterweight to one's personal feelings. Using the potty means recognizing that there is something unclean within you that needs to be expelled in set places through a process of rigid bodily control. Critical to both activities is a recognition of your own limits as a person and the submission to an authority outside yourself. There is nothing natural about reading and potty training as evolution did not provide us with these skills. These are the products of the discipline of civilization. At its root, civilization is about a decision to reject your natural self, the savage.   

Telling children that they are fine the way that they are and do not need to change is a terrible lie when mixed with a Torah portion of the year but to bring in the story of Jacob and Esau to make this point requires satanically perverse exegetical skills. There is a case to be made that Jacob suffers from a mimetic need to have what rightfully belonged to Esau, culminating in dressing up like Esau to steal his blessing. This is still not a lesson in being yourself. It is a lesson in not trying to be like bad people. We try to be like the biblical patriarchs and not stay true to ourselves because they were better and holier people than us. In terms of being oneself, if there was anyone in the biblical narrative who needed to be himself less, it was Esau. He was set aside from the womb to be Jacob's antagonist. In essence, Esau was literally “born to be bad.” 

Within Calvinist thought, Esau serves, along with Pharaoh, as proof of predestination. Do you have free will or did God decide, even before creation, who would be the righteous saved and who would be the sinful unsaved? In the case of Esau, it is hard to escape the conclusion that God's plan required Esau to be wicked and so God made Esau that way. Despite the fact that Esau never had a choice in the matter, God still hated him. It may have been God who created Esau as the embodiment of wickedness, but that is what Esau was and, as such, it was logically necessary for God, who is righteousness, to hate him. 

If you are not a Calvinist you might say that Esau was the exception to prove the rule. Esau was chosen for evil but regular people are not so we, unlike Esau, have the ability to choose the right path and can be held responsible for failing to do so. Alternatively, you can make the case that Esau was more nuanced than a straightforward villain. Esau honored his father and, in the end, made peace with Jacob. If Esau was capable of good deeds, perhaps he was capable of going against his divinely ordained role in more profound ways. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of blessed memory made a powerful case for Esau not being completely rejected from the covenant.

Nevertheless, one needs to admit that the Calvinists have a legitimate point in regards to Esau and, in arguing against them, one is fighting an uphill battle. You throw away all credibility when you pretend that there was never anything fundamentally wrong with Esau in his very being. The one thing that Esau needed was to not be himself. 

I want Mackie to embrace the voice of Jacob and not the hands of Esau. This is not something natural that Mackie can achieve simply by being himself. It will happen because he has parents and teachers who will not let him be himself but will insist that he become something better.  

The Maimonidean Solution to Antinomianism

With the number of religious leaders caught in some kind of sexual impropriety, it should be clear that antinomianism stands as one of the major threats to religion today. Antinomianism provides a spiritual blank check to violate any religious practice and say that not only is it ok but that is a mitzvah. In this, antinomianism should be seen as a virus that turns sins into commandments, hijacking religious faith against itself. Since antinomianism is not a rejection of the faith but its very affirmation, antinomians can piously perform all other commandments. This makes them hard to catch and increases the scandal when they are.

Antinomianism does not require any conspiracies of underground sects with sex rites as in the case of the Frankists. The logic of antinomianism is simply too obvious to anyone who has seriously thought about monotheist religious practice. A perfect God has no need for to you to keep his commandments. (The commands of an imperfect God can be completely ignored.) If I ate the Ultimate Traif Sandwich, God would still be perfect. Furthermore, God could command me to eat such a sandwich without sacrificing an iota of his perfection.

Does God want me to eat kitty stew? The fact that Leviticus and Deuteronomy imply that it is a sin does little to help me. Retreating into legal formalism simply makes the matter worse as it concedes the theological high ground. Since God is infinitely beyond human comprehension, it is impossible to truly fulfill his will by keeping any commandment. In reality, all food is traif as no person could ever eat in a way that replicates God’s perfect will. By eating kitty stew one at least has the virtue of not committing the blasphemy of pretending to fulfill God’s will.

Either I do not understand God’s will or I do. If I admit that I do not understand God’s will then I must remain neutral as to his opinion on kitty stew. If I do understand God’s will than I must be some kind of divine being myself and could never be held to words on a scroll. For a being so divine as me, could we even call it eating? Should we not rather call it the releasing of sparks of holiness trapped in the kitty stew?

The Maimonidean solution is not to challenge these arguments but to change the question. Instead of asking what God wants, a question that no honest monotheist could ever answer, we can ask what actions will benefit Judaism. Assuming that it is a good thing that a Jewish nation and religion continue to exist as vehicles for less false ideas about God, does my eating kitty stew make it less likely that I will be able to pass Judaism on to Kalman and Mackie? Here we are no longer operating in the realm of the divine, but the very human field of sociology. Jewish history offers a fairly convincing case that a Judaism that does not take “kitchen Judaism” seriously will not survive long in a meaningful sense.

I can eat kitty stew and make bracha on it without it negatively impacting my theology. How could kitty stew be more likely to mislead me about the nature of God than some kosher salami? Both are manifestations of materialism and thus both must either inhibit godliness or provide a means to find godliness with equal likelihood. In fact, the kitty stew would more likely benefit me spiritually by helping me get past my concerns about what other people think about me as well as trying to earn brownie points with God so I can make it into his Good Place. The problem with such a religion is that, while it may be incredibly meaningful to an individual, there is no way to pass it on to one's children.

Kitty stew could only be spiritually valuable to someone imbued with a deep love of kosher. It is only someone who honestly believed that his salvation depended upon keeping kosher could, upon reaching a higher spiritual state, realize that it is the exact opposite and then force himself to eat what remains truly repugnant to him. For someone not raised with an absolute commitment to kosher, there is no struggle and no act of keeping kosher, whether in its traditional or antinomian forms. A child raised in such an environment and taught to scorn legalism might appear, at first glance, to be spiritually enlightened. On the contrary, he never even reached the level of keeping kosher let alone transcending it. Without a foundation in the physical law, talk of the spirit is meaningless. A "true antinomian" must struggle with his violation. Anything less is simply discarding the yolk of heaven. 

Much as Maimonideanism can neutralize an academic criticism of Judaism by absorbing its premises into itself, Maimonideanism can, similarly, counter antinomianism not be refuting it but by accepting its premises and offering a different conclusion. One can accept that God is not a being that you can score points with by trying to fulfill his will and still find spiritual fulfillment in Jewish practice enough to try to pass it along to the next generation. 

Is Kalman Literate?

My son, Kalman, is a talented four-year-old. He can write his name. He knows his letters along with their sounds and can put them together into words. He possesses a growing list of basic words that he can recognize on sight. In essence, he fully grasps the theory of reading. Does this mean that he can read? It should be obvious that the answer is no, but to defend that position requires some work.

If we are to define reading as a set of facts to be memorized and repeated on a test then one would be hard-pressed to deny that Kalman can read. If Kalman was not preparing for kindergarten but was instead facing the prospect of being held back in first grade on account of his reading ability, I would be tempted to make the case to his teacher that, when properly coaxed, Kalman can perform acts of reading.

What Kalman lacks is the focus to be able to string words together into sentences, paragraphs, and eventually the first book that he will one day read on his own. I imagine that, as he gets older, he will gain a longer attention span. This, combined with an expanding list of sight words, will create a virtuous cycle in which he becomes more comfortable reading. His reading successes will increase his self-esteem when it comes to reading and allow him to focus longer on his reading, making him an effective reader.

There is no simple way to jump-start this process. I read with him every night and we make a game out of him pointing out words on the page. We talk about the story and the characters and Kalman knows that I love books almost as much as I love him. Because these exercises are at the center of a healthy parent/child relationship, Kalman does not see this as a chore forced upon him. On the contrary, this is his special time with his Abba. God willing, this exercise will continue for years to come with Kalman slowly taking over the reading and perhaps start reading to his younger brother Mackie. In the meantime, progress will be slow because there is no particular thing that I can teach him to suddenly make him a better reader. All I can do is create an environment for "happy accidents" to occur. This is essentially what my mother did with me and I credit her with teaching me how to read more than any of my teachers.

If reading is only a small part theory and is mostly the ability to focus, then evaluating reading skills becomes very problematic. Schools present the twin problems in that their settings are artificial and can be distracting to students. At the same time, it is possible that students, when pressured, will demonstrate skills in short bursts to satisfy requirements even as they will not be able to apply those abilities in the real world.

With reading, it is clear that being able to do it a little is of minimal value. Either you are honestly comfortable reading for extended periods of time without having someone standing over your shoulder to coax and threaten you or you are not really literate. This is a source of much of the trouble in our educational system. Once students reach the fourth grade, they need to truly be comfortable readers and not simply able to demonstrate certain basic skills when it is demanded of them. Without this, a student is doomed to float through English just passing but not actually learning anything in a way that is meaningful. Hence, despite modernity's claim to have eradicated illiteracy, we live in a world of functionally illiterate adults.

This has implications well outside the realm of reading. Consider that our entire K-12 education system is built around being able to master information just well enough to pass a test in the near future without any regard to whether the student has truly mastered the skills to apply what they have learned. This may explain why most people forget the vast majority of what they learned in school. Perhaps students would benefit if education was restructured so that schools had fewer requirements, but demanded a greater level of mastery in order to pass. For example, what if, in order to pass high school math you did not have to go past algebra but needed to be able to get an A on it.

The lesson that I would want Kalman to take from his experience learning to read is that no matter how smart, IQ wise, he is, he will always lose out to people who may lack his IQ but are able to focus. If Kalman could exchange several IQ points for better focus, he would probably be reading by now.

Kalman is a moderately intelligent little boy, who has four physicians in his immediate biological family. He has been raised surrounded by books and by parents who actively read. He is precisely what you would expect from such a child raised in such circumstances. I have high hopes for him. He is smart enough that I am confident that he can succeed in any field he chooses. Thankfully, he is not a genius. If he were, he might be tempted to believe that it is possible for him to accomplish something worthwhile without hard work. Success is built on a willingness to move ahead day after day even when no tangible progress can be seen. If that is going to happen, it helps to have some love in your corner. 

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.   

Vowing to God

I wrote a post over at the Modern Torah Leadership blog on the travails of my son, Mackie, from a Maimonidean perspective. I even managed to work in antinomianism.

I thank my mother-in-law, my sisters-in-law and modern medicine that my son is still alive. Hopefully, soon I will be able to report that he is out of all danger.