Esotericism in the Classroom

 

As someone who works in the American educational system, I find that I need to avoid openly stating my beliefs. Students ask me what I think of Donald Trump and I tell them that I do not discuss politics on school grounds. It may very well be that my students have as low an opinion of Trump as I do. If I agree to talk about the issues where I agree with them then I will be trapped in those situations where I disagree with them. Not talking about politics in school is a matter of principle. I honestly believe that it is not appropriate for adults to use the platform they have been given as teachers to advocate for their own political preferences. Kids deserve the space to be ignorant and not know how to solve the big issues of the day without someone trying to recruit them to some cause. 

The fact is, though, that I have another incentive to keep my politics to myself. Unlike the many teachers who can afford to openly plaster their leftwing politics on their classroom walls, I know that I risk my job if I were to ever openly talk about my politics in front of students. This reality has helped me appreciate the esotericism of Leo Strauss. Central to Strauss' narrative of intellectual history is the idea that pre-modern philosophers hid their views from the masses. One did not want to end up like Socrates, executed for challenging the gods of Athens. Of particular interest to Strauss was Maimonides, who openly admits, in The Guide to the Perplexed, that he contradicts himself in order to conceal things from certain readers.    

Having to be careful about saying my opinions has taught me something else about esotericism, it helps you become a better teacher and thinker. Part of the danger of having strongly held beliefs is that they become a form of identity. You believe less in the idea and more in the community of people who hold them. The idea becomes a password to show that you are a good person. For those who have started reading my dissertation posts, this is an essential feature of the military model with its social ideology. If you cannot simply pontificate your beliefs wherever you want but have to limit yourself to a personal blog, it gives you a space to examine your own ideas. Clearly, your ideas are not obviously true otherwise there would not be people who want to silence you. Are your opponents bad people; maybe, even if you are right, there really is something dangerous about what you believe?

In truth, arguing with students will not win them over to my side. As Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay argue, if your goal is to convince people that they are wrong, perhaps the most counterproductive thing you can do is argue with them. Whatever arguments you make are almost certain to simply demonstrate that you are on a different team and cause your interlocuter to become defensive. They will then respond with their own tribalistic reasoning and all meaningful discussion will break down. 

Recognizing that you are not going to be able to convince people that they are wrong, it is far more productive to let other people simply talk. This has the advantage of developing a relationship with the person as they do not perceive you as a threat. Furthermore, while you may not be able to convince them that they are wrong, there is still one person who can. However resistant people might be to outsiders telling them that they are wrong, they are perfectly capable of converting themselves if given the chance. Most people do not get much opportunity to really listen to themselves talk about what they believe so give them the chance. 

The proper setting for someone to change their own minds is while sitting by themselves reading a book. This was something that Protestants understood very well. It is the Bible that has the power to convince people that they are totally depraved sinners who can rely on Jesus and not anything else, including their own good deeds. After listening to people's arguments, rather than arguing, it is more productive to suggest a book (or a blog) for them to read. 

Being by yourself with a book has the advantage of not having to worry that the author is right. The author very well might live on the other side of the world or even be dead. Furthermore, disagreeing with the author does not break the connection. You can continue to read the book and the arguments might stick around in your head for years until you wake up and realize that you do not have the same opinions as you once did. The more this process is simply going on in your head the better as there will be less social pressure to conform to whatever your group tells you that good people believe. 

As a teacher working in a system in which just about everyone is to the left of me, I have had no choice but to follow the advice of Aaron Burr in the Hamilton musical: "Talk less. Smile more. Don't let them know what you're against or what you're for." 

It turns out that this is good advice and if I did not fear for my job, I would not have the discipline to keep to it. Students should feel free to talk about their beliefs and not worry about whether I think that they are right. As kids, they are most certainly wrong about nearly everything and that is fine. They do not need to hear my slightly less ignorant views. Instead, I can then serve as a librarian to suggest books for them to read. Who knows how they might be affected years down the road by an idea that has been bouncing around in their heads.   

What I wish to give over to my students, above all, is the spirit of skeptical inquiry. This is not a system of belief that I can ever argue them into. To be a skeptic means to be willing to attack your own ideas as vigorously as your opponent's. You become a skeptic by experiencing having your own mind being changed in subtle ways over many years of thinking and reading. Skepticism also has the virtue of helping people become more tolerant. Maybe that person I disagree with is actually right? Let me listen to them. If nothing else, I am honestly curious as to what they actually believe and how they came to their conclusions.

 

The Exodus: Past, Present, and Future

The Passover Seder tells the story of Passover through three different time frames. We see the Exodus from the perspective of those who left Egypt, but also from the perspective of the Patriarchs and the Rabbis. This is essential for understanding the Seder as the Seder is designed to transcend time. It is not simply about commemorating an event that happened in late Bronze Age Egypt but connecting us to it.

As to be expected, the Seder talks a fair amount about the Exodus from Egypt using verses from the Book of Exodus. The logical way to organize the Haggadah would be to have the child ask the Ma Nishtana questions, followed by Avadim Hayinu. We could then proceed to tell the story of Passover in a straightforward linear fashion, focusing on Moses telling Pharoah to let the Israelites go, Pharoah saying no, and Egypt getting smitten with the Ten Plagues. Instead, we take a confusing side detour to the Rabbis of the Tanaitic period. We soon find ourselves jumping back in time before the Exodus to learn that Abraham’s family were a bunch of idolaters and also that Laben tried to kill Jacob. Later, we find ourselves jumping forward in time again to the Rabbis making acronyms for the plagues, calculating how many plagues there actually were in Egypt and then during the crossing of the Red Sea, and telling us that we need to talk about the Passover lamb, matzoh, and maror. After completing the other biblical commandments of the night, eating matzoh and maror, we then go back to the Rabbis to Hillel’s sandwich.

The Seder is not simply the story of the Exodus. In a “post-modern” twist, it is the story about the telling over of the story of the Exodus. The Patriarchs are not simply the background as to how we ended up in Egypt, but the promise of the Exodus. The Patriarchs had to accept, on faith, that God would eventually, after hundreds of years give their descendants the Land of Israel. Along the way, they had to endure tremendous difficulties. For example, Abraham left Haran even though he was prosperous to travel to Canaan and then was hit with a famine that forced him to go to Egypt. Centuries before the Exodus, it was already something that people needed to relate to.  

In the Midrash, Abraham is depicted as celebrating Passover when visited by the angels. The cakes he served them were matzah. Why would Abraham celebrate something that had not happened yet? The Exodus is not simply something that happened at a specific time but the event that connects Jews across time. Abraham had just circumcised himself, joining himself to a promised Isaac who had yet to be born but who would be the first person circumcised at the proper age of eight days old. Abraham was also joining himself to all the Jewish people throughout history who were also yet to be born. As such, he joined them in celebrating Passover.  

Already, at the time of the Exodus, Moses commanded the Israelites as to how they should respond to their Wicked, Simple, and Unable to Ask Sons. (The Wise Son does not appear until Deuteronomy.) This was an act of faith. The Tenth Plague had not yet happened and Pharoah was still refusing to let them out. The Children of Israel needed to believe that they would get out and have children for whom this was all history. That first Passover in Egypt was still a celebration of God’s promise that had yet to be fulfilled.

The Rabbis exist on the other side of time to the Exodus. Living after the time of the Bible, they represent us. Passover was something that they commemorated as something happening in the past. But they also connected back to the Patriarchs. They were the ones who lost the Temple. Remember, Hillel's sandwich was supposed to contain the Passover lamb. Despite all this, the Rabbis had the courage to allow Judaism to continue even if that meant lambless matza sandwiches. They made the decision to be satisfied with God’s promise of a messianic redemption. In honor of that, we put the cup out for Elijah, celebrating a redemption that has not yet happened. It does not matter that it is not yet “next year in Jerusalem.”  

As Jews, we exist across time. At the Seder, we are joining Abraham and the angels in the fields of Mamri, Moses and the Israelites in Egypt, the Rabbis in Bnai Brak, and our future descendants who will share a fifth cup of wine with Elijah. All occur in God's ever-present now. No matter where and in what century you celebrate Passover in, you get to join the one and only Seder.      

Community Building and Sexual Morality

Years ago, I wrote about sexual morality from a Kantian perspective, arguing that sex outside of a relationship such as marriage violated the categorical imperative to see others as ends and not as means. I have also written about community building in the contexts of the Ender series and the Twilight series. More recently, I have written about the musical Rent and its depiction of community being built out of individuals whose very morality renders them incapable of being part of a community in a meaningful sense. In my most recent post, I wrote about Calvin existing in his own head without the moral sense that he is obligated to parents and future generations. In this post, I would like to explore sexual morality from a community perspective.

For a community to meaningfully exist it cannot simply be a collection of individuals cooperating together at a given moment but must also operate within time. A community that does not produce a next generation will not survive. As such, how this next generation comes into being is a central concern to the community to such an extent that each individual’s attitude toward this question serves as a useful means to measure their commitment to the community as a whole. Since sexual intercourse is the primary means by which human beings come into this world, there can be no community that can survive in the long run that does not take some interest as to who people are sleeping with. To be clear, a healthy community is likely to recognize that, considering the fact that reality is messy, there is often a need to play ignorant and not go kicking down the doors of people violating the sexual norms of the community.

There are many plausible strategies for trying to ensure a future generation for the community. If you are the Shakers, you forgo physically reproducing children and rely completely on outreach. This has proven to not be an effective strategy for the Shakers and they have just about all died out. To their credit, the Shakers were a victim of their success at getting their adherents to actually follow the tenets of the faith. If only the Shakers were a little more “accepting of human weakness,” they might have survived.

If you are the Catholic priesthood, your celibacy is one of the main things that tie you to the wider Catholic community and stops you from breaking away from those “sinful” lay Catholics and creating a “purified” Catholic Church. You are relying on all the non-celibate Catholics to be fruitful and multiply so there can be a next generation of priests.

On the other extreme, cults will often allow for a surface sexual liberation. This is something that makes them attractive to potential believers. The irony of such sexual liberation is it comes to serve as one of the primary means of cutting people off from any sort of traditional morality that lies outside of the cult. This opens the door for the cult leader to become a tyrant as there is no outside standard by which to judge him. Furthermore, even the supposed free love turns out to be illusory. Instead, what you get is a hierarchy where those at the top are liberated to prey on others and those at the bottom will find sexual norms enforced upon them. It is precisely this ability to brazenly abuse others and get away with it that becomes the mark of their place in the hierarchy. As such, they are incentivized to become sexual predators and everyone else must “humbly” accept this.

Traditionally most societies have operated on a system of polygamy and slavery founded upon male covetousness. One has the male lord with his property such as cattle. This creates a political system where people submit themselves to the lord of the household as his bondsmen in order to eat the food he provides. This logic of lordship extends to women and the lord is able to have relations with those women under his domain. This allows the lord to produce lots of sons to continue his line, with the favored son becoming the next lord and his brothers serving under him. Daughters can be sent to neighboring households to cement alliances with other lords.

This order is further reproduced through the servants. They do not have access to the lord’s harem so they do not have women of their own. This is solved through warfare. The lord leads his servants against neighboring households. Upon victory, the servants take male members of the defeated household to be their slaves and help themselves to the women as well. Thus, the servants become minor lords themselves under their lord. The most successful practitioner of this sort of politics was Genghis Khan and a significant percentage of the world’s population are his descendants.   

We can see this sort of thinking in the Bible with Abraham even as Abraham was, perhaps, a less evil practitioner of these norms. He owned herds of animals and with that came servants. When he was unable to produce a son with Sarai, she agreed to allow him to take up with Hagar. This produced Ishmael. When Isaac was finally born, this created a problem as it was not obvious which son was going to inherit the leadership role from Abraham. Abraham made war upon the four kings after they took Lot and the people of Sodom into captivity. Clearly, it would have been Abraham’s right to take all of these people as his slaves, but he returned them to the king of Sodom without accepting any gifts in return. (Note that taking a gift from the king of Sodom would have indicated that Abraham was submitting to the king of Sodom as his lord.)

Later in the Bible, we are introduced to the concept of the Captive Woman (Yifat Toar). The Bible places limits on what can be done to her, but one cannot ignore the brutal reality that this law underscores. One of the purposes of going to war in the ancient world was to gain captives, including female captives. Similarly, in Judges, we have the Song of Deborah where she imagines Sisrah’s mother wondering why he has not come home and assuming that he has been delayed because he is dividing up the female captives. When one hears of the horrors of what was done to women on October 7^th, it is important to recognize that, historically, such behavior has been the norm in war.

I would argue that the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile radically changed Judaism. Among other things, it may have given rise to the beginning of what we might think of as the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic. In a world in which Jews did not have power, being the lord of a household and spreading one’s seed through slavery and warfare stopped being practical. As members of a minority religion faced with the twin threats of extermination and assimilation, Jewish survival depended on a father’s willingness to not only have lots of offspring but to invest in raising them as Jews. This meant that Jewish men were going to need to be made to settle down and marry Jewish women. Note that it is precisely when we get to Ezra that we see Jewish men being denounced for taking non-Jewish wives not as a matter of this leading to idolatry but because intermarriage itself suddenly became a problem.  

Women leaving Judaism were not nearly as serious a threat. A man might want to leave Judaism in order to move up in society and become someone with power. This did not apply to women as we are still dealing with patriarchal societies. A woman who left Judaism would simply be exchanging the relatively mild Jewish patriarchy for a gentile patriarchy enforced through explicit violence. 

Since it was primarily men who needed to be kept in line, the key feature of the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic became the regulation of male sexuality. In Judaism, this has manifested itself in taboos against looking at women dressed in a manner deemed immodest or listening to women singing. This has the practical purpose of setting up no-go spaces for men. This serves as a useful proxy for avoiding places and the sort of people who are not practicing a similar sexual ethic.  

Furthermore, the rabbis cleverly made use of the ban on sexual relations with a menstruating woman to render all sex outside of marriage to be sinful. Unmarried women are kept from using the mikvah. As such, all unmarried girls above the age of puberty are legally in the state of niddah and men cannot touch them let alone sleep with them. As strange as this sounds, it has been worth it for Judaism to allow its members to fall into grievous sin by engaging in pre-marital sex without immersing in the mikvah rather than allow unmarried girls to use the mikvah. If unmarried girls were allowed to use the mikvah, rabbis would no longer have a coherent argument as to why pre-marital sex should be regarded as a sin.

To be clear, the main problem with sex outside of marriage is not that it harms individuals but that it harms the community. As such, the community needs to greatly limit such behavior and inculcate in its members a deep loathing for such behavior. The problem is that people are not likely to think in terms of the needs of the community and sacrifice for it. As such, the solution is to simply label pre-marital sex as sinful by the legalist workaround of making unmarried girls ritually impure.

Admittedly, the main tool for regulating male sexuality has been regulating female sexuality. If women face a stigma for sex outside of marriage they will insist on marriage. As more women take themselves out of play men will conclude that their only hope is to get married.  As long as men are not supposed to be looking at women dressed in a certain fashion, it becomes the implicit obligation of women to dress in a manner that will allow men to look at them. To be clear, this still requires the Jewish community to come after men who sleep with gentile women. 

At first glance, the lord of the household and the Judeo-Christian sexual ethics will appear similar. Somewhat counterintuitively, the former will usually enforce stricter modesty codes on women. The reason for this is that the consequences of female infidelity are greater. A woman who is unfaithful calls into question the paternity of her children and their future claim to rule, thus undermining the entire system. From this perspective, honor killings of women on the mere suspicion of infidelity become a reasonable response. This demonstrates that the men are in charge and can guarantee the parentage of their children. By contrast, Jewish survival is far more threatened by male indiscretions than female ones as this would create a situation where men stopped being committed to raising their kids as Jews.   

The practical distinction between the two models is what they mean for male sexuality. In the lord of the household model, restrictions on female dress or their ability to leave the house do not mean restrictions on men. On the contrary, restrictions on women are meant to demonstrate that they are the property of a man. This divides women into those within the community. They are the property of a husband lord and are not to be touched by bondsmen. Then there are outside women who are fair game. By simultaneously being willing to kill women within the community for walking in the street dressed immodestly and assaulting women who are not part of the community simply for walking in the street, one demonstrates that the community is powerful and that everyone should submit themselves to it. (On the implications of this sort of thinking for Muslim men in Europe, see Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Prey.)

By contrast, the primary purpose of the Judeo-Christian ethic is to restrict men. Men are the ones who are easily tempted and need to be kept in line. As Jews lacked power, they did not need to demonstrate that they had power over their women. On the contrary, Jewish survival has relied on keeping men within the community and not assimilating into the wider society despite Jewish lack of power.  

 

Non-Intuitive War Crimes

 

An essential component of Protestant theology is sola scriptura. This is the belief that only the Bible has authority. For this to work, it is necessary to not only accept a Protestant reading of the Bible but also that only the Protestant reading of the Bible makes sense. In essence, a Protestant needs to be perfectly confident that he can drop a suitably translated Bible next to a native Pacific islander and they would be able to reconstruct Protestant theology for themselves. The moment we no longer assume that this is likely, sola scriptura collapses and we are left having to choose which pair of exegetical glasses we are going to use to read the text with. Protestantism may be one possible framework along with a Catholic or a Jewish reading but that will no longer be sola scriptura. 

I see a similar problem with the notion of international war crimes trials. There is a basic problem with charging someone from another country with a war crime mainly that it violates one of the most basic principles of law, ex post facto. For something to be a crime, there has to be a clear law with set penalties that were being violated at the time the crime was committed. Without this, governments can arrest anyone for what they did last week even if it was perfectly legal then.  

The Nazi defendants at Nuremberg were some of the evilest people in all of history and they certainly deserved death. That being said, the Nuremberg trial itself was illegal. The actions of the Nuremberg defendants, including mass murder, were all perfectly legal under German law. By contrast, the crimes, the tribunal, and the very process of the trial were all made up on the fly for the sole purpose of prosecuting the defendants. Considering this, an essential justification of the Nuremberg trial was that the crimes committed were so egregious as to make it obvious to the defendants that what they were doing was a crime. 

Considering this, a war crime cannot just be something that is a war crime. In order to be a war crime, it needs to be obvious that the action is a war crime. The moment we fail to meet that high standard then we lose the moral high ground and are stuck in the morally dubious position of trying to punish people for failing to live up to our morality. 

A war crime can never be obvious because the very act of fighting in a war already violates the most basic of moral taboos, murder. One thinks of the scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where Paul stabs a French soldier who is in a shell crater with him. Paul, stuck in the crater, is forced to listen to the man die. The power of the scene relies on Paul, stuck in the muddy crater and cut off from the fighting around him, coming to the awareness that, because of his actions, a human being is dying next to him and that he will never be able to wash this guilt from himself. Sending people to war means telling young men to murder other young men who simply happen to be wearing the wrong-colored uniform. If they agree to commit cold-blooded murder, they will be hailed as heroes, but if they refuse they will be imprisoned or executed for dereliction of duty.   

If this was our standard for a war crime, war crimes would be obvious and just about every soldier and politician throughout human history would be guilty of committing them. Imagine if Amnesty International were to be contacted for help by a soldier in prison for refusing to fire on uniformed enemy soldiers who refused to surrender. The moment Amnesty took such a case would be the end of war crimes theory as no country could ever accept that their soldiers have a moral right to refuse to fight.  

For a war crime charge not to collapse into reductio ad absurdum, we need to assume that there really is such a thing as legitimate war, where you murder perfectly decent people who have not harmed anybody, and that this can be distinguished from illegitimate warfare which is a crime. I do not want this to sink into moral relativism. Clearly, there can be distinctions made between legitimate and illegitimate warfare. Part of being a citizen is agreeing to murder people in legitimate wars and the government has the right to punish people who wish to renege on this agreement. The problem is whether we can assume that these distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate will be obvious to all reasonable people.

Imagine that I was drafted into a war. I agree to murder someone in an enemy uniform who was not in the act of trying to murder anyone from my side. Perhaps, they were on the toilet and I took them out with a sniper rifle. My commanding officer next tells me to start shelling a kindergarten classroom that enemy soldiers are using for cover. Have I just been ordered to commit a war crime and should I risk going to jail rather than do such a deed? What if the kindergartners are singing a song about how they pledge to kill people in my country? Why is it worse to kill those kids than the soldier who was not threatening my side?

I like to think of myself as an educated person. That being said, I am not any kind of lawyer or war crimes expert. Presumably, my officers will have manuals written by legal professionals employed by my government explaining how the orders they are giving me are not war crimes and, as such, I will face prosecution for failing to carry them out. What grounds would I have to argue against that? At least I know enough history and political theory to give some decent speeches before my military tribunal when I am tried for dereliction of duty. What is an eighteen-year-old fresh out of high school supposed to do besides listen to his government’s lawyers and hope that his side does not lose the war?

There are many areas of law that are allowed to be complicated. For example, I cannot assume that I have correctly filed my taxes simply by relying on my moral intuitions. On the contrary, I need to rely on professionals. Similarly, the precise parameters of the right to kill in self-defense are not intuitive. As a rule of thumb, if you have time to worry that the law might not recognize your right to self-defense in a particular situation that is a sign that you should not kill your attacker. By contrast, for war crimes to be a meaningful charge, it needs to be intuitively obvious. Soldiers cannot be expected to go to war advised by foreign legal experts whether something is really a war crime. The moment a war crime becomes something that you even need an expert for and cannot simply rely on what your "parents might say” then the entire legal edifice of war crimes collapses into the personal morality of foreign lawyers to be used against you if your side loses the war.     

What Does It Mean to Think Critically?

 

Ideological battles are usually won or lost based on who can control the language in use. In the struggle against critical theory, one of the disadvantages we in the opposition are saddled with is that the supporters of critical theory control the word "critical." In my education classes, people like Paulo Freire are presented as supporting "critical thinking." From this perspective, who can oppose critical theory? Clearly, students should not simply take what they learn at face value. A teacher's job is to give students the tools to question what they read and see. The problem is that the word "critical" can mean very different things depending on whether you are coming from the classical liberal tradition of the Enlightenment or from critical theory. 

Enlightenment critical thinking can, perhaps, best be seen in Kant's famous "What is Enlightenment?" essay. Kant's Enlightenment is about the power of the individual to challenge the claims of established social and political institutions. For example, if my priest waves his Bible at me and insists that I obey him, I have the right to read the Bible for myself to decide how the Bible should be interpreted or even if it should be accepted as an authority at all. In this, Kant was the heir to the Protestant tradition that placed the individual as the primary actor in the drama of salvation as opposed to the community. It is the individual who reads the Bible and chooses to believe. 

Whether you are a Protestant or an Enlightenment philosopher, critical thinking is something carried out by individuals. Furthermore, the entire foundation of critical thinking presupposes the existence of autonomous individuals existing separate from institutions. It is only from this outside perspective that it is possible to critique institutions. It is only possible to attack Catholicism, for example, if you can first imagine yourself as a non-Catholic. If a person cannot conceive of joining another religion or rejecting all religions, then their arguments will never rise above criticisms of particular Catholics and calls to reform the Church to make it better match Catholic ideals. 

It is here that science becomes important. Science is fundamentally a process through which one can make objective statements about the nature of the world that are disconnected from any kind of traditional authority. As such, science provides a platform outside of any particular culture by which that culture can be critically judged. For example, I can tell my priest that I do not believe that the Earth was created according to the Book of Genesis because I have science that tells me that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Furthermore, the truths of science are, theoretically at least, equally accessible to the Pacific Islander as the European. A native can be a perfectly competent scientist without European science missionaries coming to him with a science textbook to "believe" in or demand that he accepts a wider set of European cultural values.   

The classical liberal placement of the individual as the one engaged in critical thinking explains the importance of freedom of thought. Since one of the ways we develop ideas is by talking to (and arguing with) other people, the primary manifestation of freedom of thought is freedom of expression. People have the right to come up with their own narratives of how the world works. This even includes people with absurd ideas like the sixteenth-century Italian miller Menocchio, who was murdered by the Inquisition for the crime of telling people that the universe was like a giant piece of fermenting cheese. Trying to make sense of the universe, no matter how bad we are at it, is a fundamental part of our humanity. As such it is a right that cannot simply be sacrificed merely based on a utilitarian calculus as to what is to the public benefit.   

Because critical thought is the product of individuals, there can be a distinction between words and physical violence. Assuming you are not engaged in a conspiracy to commit physical violence, your words cannot be violence. I can speak and write every blasphemy against the Christian religion without harming any individual Christians in the slightest. As long as we assume that only individuals are truly real as moral units, there can be freedom of expression because no individual can be harmed by words. The moment we accept that a collective entity like the Catholic Church possesses an objective moral reality then this distinction between speech and violence collapses. The Church can be harmed by my blasphemy, which would make blasphemy an act of violence. Hence, all speech potentially becomes violence. This renders freedom of expression, the right to be wrong and even offensive, a dead letter.  

Contrary to the classical liberal notion of critical thinking, which is based on the autonomous individual, critical theory comes from Marxism. As such, its foundational moral unit is the group. This changes the meaning of critical thinking. For example, in classical Marxism, to think critically means to come to a recognition that economic classes and not individuals are the fundamental structure of society. The worker comes to know that he is oppressed not by his boss and landlord but by this entity called capitalism. It is capitalism that is responsible for the many seemingly disconnected problems he sees in the world. The practical implication of this is that a fundamental revolution in the nature of society is necessary. It might be possible to fix the problem with the boss and the landlord through negotiation or even legal reform. Capitalism, as something that infuses everything in society, can only be defeated through revolution. 

This basic structure of Marxist thought evolved, in the 20th century, into critical theory, which placed culture at the center of the story instead of economics. This came to include issues like race, gender, and sexuality. Hence critical theory functions as a methodology of coming to the realization, for example, of how one is oppressed by the entity of cisgender heterosexual white men and it is this structure and not just capitalism that needs to be overthrown.  

In a sense, classical liberal critical thought and critical theory mean opposite things. Classical liberal critical thought is premised on the individual coming into the consciousness of their individual reason and using it to challenge established power structures (or simply to argue with random strangers on the internet). By contrast, critical theory maintains that autonomous individual thought does not really exist. There are only forms of group thought. For example, my beliefs are not my own but are the products of my bourgeois upbringing. My classical liberalism is merely a cover for my capitalist ideology. My defense of free speech is merely an apology for the right of capitalists to use their economic power to promote their ideology.

We see this in Freire, where one is either a member of the oppressor or the oppressed class. Critical for Freire, is the idea that oppressors cannot, simply, through the power of their own reason, reject their oppressor nature and join with the oppressed. A wealthy person cannot study public policy, decide that there is a lot of oppression, and work with poor people to advocate for better laws. Even if the laws on the ground are changed, the fundamental oppressive structure would remain and might even be strengthened now that the wealthy liberal can plausibly claim to be a humanitarian and justify his continued hold on power. The only way for the wealthy to be redeemed is through the revolution which will fundamentally refashion the very structure of society as well as human nature itself.

A similar pattern can also be seen in Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility. It needs to be emphasized that the white racist villains of her narrative who use their emotional fragility to avoid talking about race and, therefore, prop up the system of white supremacy, are not Klansmen or even Trump voters; they are the seemingly well-meaning white liberals who attend her diversity workshops but insist that they are not racist and are even offended by the idea. White people need to accept that, by virtue of growing up in American society and benefiting from white privilege, they are racists. The structural racism that permeates all aspects of American society will not disappear until white people confess their complicity in racism without even asking black people to forgive them. To ask for forgiveness is to imply that it is possible for white people, as individuals, to atone for racism without the revolutionary restructuring of society. 

DiAngelo's version of white complicity in structural racism has a lot in common with Protestant notions of total depravity where humans are so caught up in Original Sin that even their reason is tainted. A person must simultaneously accept that they are sinners, without the power to change their way, and that it does not matter because Jesus has atoned for them. For DiAngelo, it is impossible for a white person to reason themselves out of the web of privileges that they have grown up taking for granted and the prejudices used to defend them simply through rationally thinking that people should not be judged by the color of their skin. Instead, critical thinking becomes the exercise in which the white person recognizes that their reason cannot redeem them from the sin of racism.   

One of the implications of critical theory is that it undermines freedom of thought. Since we are no longer concerned with individuals but abstract forces that are granted a moral reality, words now become a form of violence. While it is axiomatic for a classical liberal that even the vilest racist taunts should be tolerated because words are not violence and people have the right to be wrong, for critical theory, the merest disagreement becomes an act of violence. If you believe that white people are not so bad, it is not just that you are wrong. Such words allow white supremacy to persist and cause blacks to die at the hands of the police. Therefore, if you reject the principles of critical theory, you are literally murdering black people on the street and deserve to be treated as a killer. 

If non-tax-payer-funded schools wish to teach critical theory, that is their right. That being said, intellectual honesty demands that those teaching critical theory be clear as to what critical theory is and how it is distinct from critical thinking. Critical thinking relies on the rationality of individuals to challenge established ways of thinking. Critical theory, on the other hand, is the very denial that such a thing is possible. Critical thinking teaches that people can be wrong in their ideas and that is fine because words are not violence. For critical theory, it is precisely words that are the true form of violence as words have the power to undermine group identities.                    

Christian Microaggressions

 As a Jew whose academic training largely revolved around history, I have a complicated relationship with Christianity. On the one hand, Christianity is very similar to Judaism and shares the Hebrew Bible. That being said, there is a bloody history of Christian persecution. More importantly is the legacy of the doctrine of Versus Israel, the True Israel. The idea is that Christians have replaced the Jews as God’s chosen people and all the blessings of the Hebrew Bible now apply to Christians. An extreme version of this kind of thinking can be seen today among White Supremacist groups like the Christian Identity movement. Not all Christians subscribe to Verus Israel theology. Many Christians believe in a dual covenant theology where Jews remain the Nation of Israel with all of its blessings. Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate is a good example of this kind of thinking.  

Verus Israel can be seen as the ultimate act of cultural appropriation and the violent history behind this cannot be denied. Of course, Christians have the right to be Christians and that means that they have the right to make use of material that has its origins in Judaism. This raises a question though of where a line should be drawn and something becomes a microaggression, even an unconscious one, where our Christian engages in thinking that indicates a replacement theology that denies Judaism its cultural heritage. To make matters more complicated, our Christian may honestly be driven by a desire to show his respect for Judaism.

It seems obvious to me that Christians should be allowed to read the Hebrew Bible. It should also follow that they are allowed to read the Hebrew Bible in its original Hebrew. What about the use of Hebrew phrases? Is that a sign of respect or is it reflect even a subconscious desire to erase Judaism? What about the use of Jewish symbols like the Star of David? Can Christians make use of Jewish rituals that Christians have historically not practiced? For example, can Christians create a Passover seder for themselves? The Last Supper was a Passover Seder (unless you go with the Gospel of John) so why should Christians not take up the practice. The problem is that such activity can make it appear that the Christian is claiming the mantel of Judaism for himself.

A further wrinkle in this is Christian missionary activity. Obviously, Christians have the right to try to convince Jews to convert to Christianity just as Christians have the right to try to convert Muslims and Hindus. That being said, there are groups like Jews for Jesus who appropriate Jewish practices for themselves as part of a marketing campaign to make Christianity acceptable to Jews. There is the issue of Christians dishonestly trying to portray themselves as Jews to engage in missionary activity. Being a missionary is fine as long as you are honest about your intentions. On top of that is the issue of trying to replace Judaism.

The irony is that all of this could be dismissed over some laughs and drinks if it were not for the growing recognition of microaggressions. Considering the long and dark history of Verus Israel, any general discussion of microaggressions that did not include Christian appropriation of Jewish culture becomes its own form of microaggression. To say that microaggressions against other groups matter but that microaggressions against Jews do not, denies Jews their history as an oppressed group.

Part of the problem with microaggressions and other forms of sensitivity training is that it forces everyone into a grievance arms race. All of us have our prejudices and say things we should not. As such we are vulnerable to being discredited. This traps us into trying to discredit other people for their microaggressions before they can discredit us. In essence, this is the old noticing the speck in the other person’s eye in order to ignore the log in our own eye. This was taught by a great Jewish thinker named Jesus.

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.  

I Am Traditionally Observant, Not Orthodox: My Religious Evolution (Part III)

(Part I, II)

As someone committed to traditional practice while still interacting with Western thought, it should come as no surprise that I would eventually find my way to Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed. Taking Alan Brill's class on the Guide introduced me to the writings of Leo Strauss and the possibility of reading Maimonides in a highly "unorthodox" fashion. On the flip side, I came to recognize that, if we were to take Maimonides doctrinally seriously, we would have to condemn most Haredim as heretics. This, along with Marc Shapiro's Limits of Orthodox Theology got me to start questioning whether there was anything particularly authoritative about Orthodox beliefs. My high school self, if asked about Orthodox beliefs, would have recited Maimonides' Thirteen Principles as something accepted by all traditional Jews going back to the Bible. Now I had to consider the possibility that these were the creation of the Middle Ages and that Maimonides himself may not have believed them. 

The Slifkin affair helped give these issues practical weight. Much as with the Republican Party, I could identify as Haredi for a long time after it stopped making logical sense because I convinced myself that most Haredim were like me. For example, I assumed that most Haredim really were ok with evolution even if they liked to take potshots at it. Haredi outreach literature assured readers that evolution was not a problem for Judaism. The ban on Rabbi Natan Slifkin changed that. It quickly became clear that the opponents of Slifkin were not some fringe group but mainstream Haredi society itself. It was not just evolution at stake, what was being rejected was the entire Jewish rationalist tradition itself. In essence, either, over the course of less than a decade, Rabbi Avigdor Miller, reaching out from his grave, had taken over Haredi Judaism or I had been deluding myself as to what Haredi Judaism was really about. 

As with my conservativism, leaving Yeshiva University for Ohio State in 2006 affected my Judaism. I was isolated without a strong sense of community. Living inside my head without the feeling of being answerable to anyone else, it could only be expected that I would put together a Judaism to suit me. Readers may be surprised to learn that I continued to wear a black hat and jacket through my first year at OSU. Even though it was several years since I had identified with the Haredi community, I continued to wear a black hat as a matter of habit. During the summer of 2007, I fractured my clavicle. For several weeks, it was not practical for me to wear a jacket. If I was not going to wear a jacket, I might as well not wear a hat either. Now that I had stopped, I had the perfect excuse not to take it back up again. 

What led me to stop identifying even with the Modern Orthodox community was biblical criticism and women in the rabbinate. The funny thing about these issues is that I am actually pretty conservative on both of them. It is not as if I believe that biblical criticism refuted the Bible. I know enough Orthodox apologetics to defend against the obvious attacks. Furthermore, as a historian, I know to be skeptical as to what we can say for certainty about the ancient world as well as to the agendas that people bring to interpreting evidence. 

As with many religious scientists confronting evolution, I recognize a distinction between methodological and ontological naturalism. History and science are both games played by rules, one of which is to do research as if the supernatural does not exist. While this means that neither history nor science can ever be used to directly attack religion, it does force one to go about one's day to day studies sounding distinctly irreligious. 

That being said, as the historical method became critical to how I navigated the world, I felt I needed the freedom to go where the historical method might take me even when it might go against orthodoxy. There was a tipping point where I decided that I was not going to stretch orthodoxy just far enough to say that I was just ok but anyone to the left of me was a heretic. From this perspective, it no longer mattered if I had really crossed any lines or not. As long as I believed that one needed the moral legitimacy to do so, I might as well consider myself not Orthodox. 

My opinion as to women rabbis followed a similar course. I am of a very conservative sensibility. I believe that society benefits from having distinct concepts of men and women and can therefore accept that this can even spill over to men and women having distinct roles, including women being excluded from the rabbinate. If pressed, I might employ some version of G. K. Chesterton's anarchist argument against women's suffrage. The moment you give women the vote, you are admitting that government has full legitimate authority over them. As opposed to recognizing the existence of a women's sphere of existence which is outside of politics by virtue of the fact that women cannot vote. Similarly, putting women in the rabbinate means that rabbis are the only legitimate religious authorities. 

It is one thing to acknowledge that if it was up to me to vote on whether to have women rabbis, I might allow myself to get distracted by other issues that might assume greater importance. It is another matter entirely to make the essence of Judaism about opposing women rabbis to the extent that this would be an issue worth throwing people out. If you are putting more effort into denouncing women rabbis than Haredi claims about the power of gedolim, as exemplified by Kupat Ha'ir, then you clearly lack proper monotheist zeal and might even be an idolater. 

The reality of Orthodox Judaism today, including Modern Orthodoxy, is to denounce biblical criticism and women rabbis at the same time as it winks and nods at gedolim worship. That is not me. So I am ok with being considered not-Orthodox. It simplifies things for me not to be tied down by that label. I prefer to think of myself as a traditionally observant Maimonidean Jew. If there was an intellectually serious Conservative community in my area, committed to halakha and untainted by modern leftism or tikkun olam rhetoric, I would join them. I do not have that so I am stuck doing the best I can without a community in which I really feel comfortable in. 

People who have met me sometimes comment as to how shocked they are when they see how I look and live my life and hear what I sound like when I start talking about religion. One friend, after knowing me for several years, found out that my  father is an Orthodox rabbi and commented: "oh, that explains so much about you." Hopefully, these pieces I have written, will help readers confused about where to place me religiously and offer some context for understanding this blog. 

The Epicureanism of the Good Place's Finale

(Spoilers Ahead)

As much as I love The Good Place, its ending struck me as anti-religious in much the same way that Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol is anti-Christian. At first glance, it sounds preposterous to consider a Christmas Carol anti-Christian. What could be more Christian than a greedy miser having his soul saved through the power of Christmas? This is true until you realize what is missing from the story, Jesus. We can assume that the mean Scrooge at the beginning of the story has not accepted Jesus as his savor. The kindly Scrooge at the end of the story does not seem to have accepted Jesus either. In keeping with the Victorian era, Dickens subversively offered a Christianity stripped of anything actually Christian.

Likewise, on the surface, Good Place sounds like a straightforward religious tale. It is about the afterlife in which people are judged based on how they lived on Earth. From the beginning, it is made clear that we are dealing with a non-denominational heaven where no one gets in simply for having been a member of the right religion. This is a minor issue compared to the absence of God.

When our heroes finally get to the real Good Place, they are faced with the problem that this heaven is actually not much of an improvement over the Bad Place. A world in which every wish is granted and every pleasure instantly gratified becomes mind-numbingly dull and its own form of torture. Eleanor's solution is to allow the residents the option of ending their own existence when they have had enough. This sets up the inevitable final episode (one of the finest in the history of television) where the characters, after however many Jeremy Bearimys, come to that state of peace with themselves where they have done all they could ever want and make the decision to walk through the door and move on.

What we have here is the standard argument against pleasure, all pleasure is ephemeral, simply applied to the afterlife. The show's solution is merely the Epicurean solution to not having an afterlife. By accepting that you will cease to exist, you can find meaning in your limited lifespan and even cease fearing death; if death is merely a natural part of life, it is not evil to be rejected but a good to be embraced. Jason's going away party for himself, in fact, reminded me of David Hume's last few months. Even though he knew he was dying, Scotland's most infamous unbeliever remained in good cheer and dining with friends. He wanted his death to be a model of serenity even without the hope of an afterlife.

What is missing here is the existence of a deity and the possibility of having a relationship with him. To believe that God created human beings means that humans can only truly be happy in him. This does not mean that material pleasure is bad. On the contrary, as God also created the world and everything in it as a means of bringing us to him, nothing worldly can be, in of itself, bad. The problem comes the moment we value something, besides God, for its own sake then it becomes an idol and needs to be smashed.

The same problem that applies to earthly pleasure also works for heavenly pleasure. Jason wanting to play the ultimate game of Madden Football receives no elevation when it is carried out in heaven. The same applies to Tahani wanting to make a Nick Offerman-approved chair or even to Chidi wanting to become a great moral philosopher, teaching the ultimate class of Ethics of the Afterlife to a room full of philosophy professors. All of this will eventually become meaningless without God, leaving suicide as the only option.

In truth, this makes sense for a show about ethics as ethics is fundamentally in conflict with theism. As we know from the Euthyphro dilemma, ethics can only be meaningful if it is a system outside of God that God is answerable to. Anything else is simply God's will. The more repulsive the action, the more we are being "truly" ethical by submitting our will to his (think the Westboro Baptist Church). The show referenced Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and that it is about taking a leap of faith. What bears mentioning is that this leap of faith is precisely the rejection of the ethical.

This conflict is at the heart of the Old Testament. Abraham is morally superior to Noah precisely because he challenges God's morality in destroying Sodom. The prophets challenge the sacrificial cult under the banner of justice for the downtrodden. This raises the question of the purpose of ritual. A God who values righteousness should not care at all about ritual. How do you build a religion around such a God?

Come to think of it, perhaps this could have been the basis for a good continuation of the show. Our characters, having nothing meaningful to exist for, walk through the door and meet God, who offers himself to them now that they have exhausted all alternatives. (God should not be depicted. Instead, we should have a place of supreme beauty and the people living there should describe voices in their heads as if the place is speaking to them.) Chidi goes full-blown Lucifer because he cannot submit himself to a force outside of his ethical framework. He then recruits Sean to help him create an alternative heaven for those whom God has cast aside. By the end of the show, this alternative heaven will have turned into the Bad Place with the inmates being tortured with philosophy lectures and extreme ethical conundrums.

Joseph's Adventures in Communism and College

Previously, I talked about my great-grandfather, Rabbi Moshe Eliezer Shapiro, and the late Prof. Louis Feldman of blessed memory as examples of antifragile Judaism, people who created Jewish lives for themselves under unplanned circumstances. In the world of antifragility, what looks good on a day-to-day basis is not necessarily what will work in the long run because what makes such systems look good is precisely what can bring it down in a once-in-a-generation disaster. I would like to return to this issue of antifragility and its implications for Judaism.

Critical to Jewish survival has been its ability to adapt to situations to which our faith, as envisioned by previous generations, was not designed to handle. The most extreme example of this was the rabbis after the destruction of the Second Temple, who reimagined Judaism without its central sacrificial cult and without the majority of the biblical commandments. This requires us to rethink who the heroes of Jewish history are from those who lived ideal religious lives under ideal circumstances to those who lived non-ideal lives precisely because their circumstances made such ideals impossible. 

The biblical Isaac is someone held up by the rabbis as a person who was able to live his life in Israel in purity without sin. As Rashi teaches, Jacob wanted to live that life but God sent him the calamity of Joseph. Joseph lived his life in Egypt as a slave, a prisoner, and finally as viceroy. Joseph had to carry on for all those years under the assumption that he had been cast out by his brothers and that there was no future for him as part of the Children of Israel. It is Joseph who not only physically saved his family but also made it possible for Israel to spiritually survive 210 years in Egypt. It is not for nothing that, every Friday night, Jews bless their sons to be like Joseph's children, Menashe and Ephraim, who grew up in the court of Egypt. Similarly, we have the later models of Daniel and Esther in the courts of Babylon and Persia, cut off from Israel and with no hope of being able to return. In Esther's case, she even intermarried.

Let us be clear as to what the challenge is here. Ignore the strawman argument that Egypt or Persia (or America) is different. This is easily countered by "we, the faithful, do not change." This strawman argument, though, covers an alternative utterly devasting attack of not that the world has changed but that you have changed. The moment a person wakes up and sees themselves as different and irreparably cut-off from their former selves with no hope of returning, then casting off one's former beliefs and practices becomes natural. One realizes that the hard act of changing has already happened and now it is only a matter of accepting the reality of the situation. In fact, the very tenacity that one held on beforehand, insisting that the new circumstances did not matter, will come to work in favor of giving in as it will make the break, once it happens, that much more obvious.  

Imagine trying to train a twentieth-century version of Joseph. It is the year 1900 and your newborn student lives in Czarist Russia. You have him until he is seventeen. In 1917 the Bolsheviks are going to take over and put an end to open Jewish observance. Your Joseph will have to live out his life without the support of a Jewish community and his observance will be compromised at best. What can you give him that will allow him to maintain a Jewish identity in his own mind and pass it along to his own Menashe and Ephraim to the extent that when he dies in 1991, with the fall of the Soviet Union, it will be as a Jew surrounded by a Jewish family?

The members of my family who came closest to living out this story were my maternal great-grandparents, Yitzchok Isaac and Feigy Schwartz. (Note that both my father’s father and my mother’s grandfather were named Yitzchok Isaac.) They survived the Holocaust only to go back home to a Soviet-controlled Hungary where they raised three daughters. As a teenager, my grandmother took advantage of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution to flee to the United States because there weren't any good Jewish men to marry. My great-grandfather passed away when I was a kid. I only knew him as an old man sitting in a dark corner of my grandmother's house, who did not speak English. Frankly, he scared me. (I confessed this as an adult to my father and he laughed telling me that I had no idea what a kind man he was.) If I could talk to him now, I would want to ask him how he found it in himself to raise a Jewish family with no Jewish community to rely upon and offer hope for a future.  

The 20th century gave us Communism, the Holocaust, and ultimately the destruction of Eastern European Jewish life. Jews in 1900 could not have prepared for this but, at the end of the day, all of their efforts to build up Judaism that were not centered around the United States and Israel were going to be little better than futile. I have no idea what this century will bring. That being said, is it not unreasonable, for those in the United States to construct an educational system on the assumption (whether or not you are Haredi and oppose college on principle) that students are going to go college for four years without meaningful Jewish support. You have kids from the age of 5 until they are 18. What can you teach that will allow a student to go to college and, regardless of the compromises that they might make there, they will have a Jewish identity that will persevere to the extent that they will seek to rejoin the Jewish community afterward and raise a Jewish family? Anything that is not clearly focused on this goal needs to be cast aside as a waste of time and a distraction.  

Whether we are dealing with the extremes of Communism and the Holocaust or the mundane challenges of college, I assume that a successful pedagogical strategy will try to build a strong Jewish identity backed by theology and a deep emotional attachment to Judaism. Jewish identity here means a knowledge of ritual practice as well as a sense of Jewish history. Theology means having open and honest discussions about God and not simply assuming that kids believe in God just because they are ritually observant. Developing an emotional attachment to Judaism means getting away from threats of hellfire and, instead, making sure that Jewish practice is both joyful and meaningful. This is not to be confused with being fun and entertaining as that will have little staying power. A Passover Seder is not very entertaining but it can be effective if conducted by adults who understand what the Seder is about and are not simply going through the motions. Discussions about identity and theology should best be conducted over a Shabbos cholent or during shabbatons/summer camp along with plenty of singing. 

Take away a Jewish community and a person with a strong Jewish identity will continue as a Jew because, at a fundamental level, they see Judaism as essential to who they are and not merely a culture they grew up in or a set of practices they used to follow. To abandon Judaism would become unthinkable as almost a form of suicide. For all intents and purposes, it would be a different person living that non-Jewish lifestyle. A strong identity can allow a person a continuous sense of self that is not broken by anything that happens on the outside. Defending a Jewish identity requires a theology in the sense that our Joseph should be able to answer the Wicked Son's question of "what is this service to you." Having a theology is useful precisely when there is no community to give meaning to your identity. One thinks of the example of Maimonides, who lived for several years as a Muslim and developed the first list of Jewish doctrines. You could have a person living their entire lives without ever being able to practice Judaism. They are still Jewish because they are able to believe certain things even if it is only in their heads. Finally, all the arguments in the world are not going to keep an intelligent person Jewish if they do not already love Judaism. If a person sees Judaism as a burden to be carried in the hope of getting into heaven, a college campus will provide plenty of intellectual justifications for discarding that burden.  

If we accept this model of Jewish education then it raises some difficult questions about Haredi education. Frankly, Talmud, at least how it is conventionally taught, becomes a kind of "spork," in theory good for a lot of things but fails to do any one thing particularly well and is better replaced by alternatives. For example, there are better ways to teach halakha. It is even more difficult to use Talmud to teach theology. Talmud, with its jumping across generations, lacks a clear narrative in contrast to the Bible. The Talmud's strongest selling point would be that it can build Jewish identity by allowing students to develop a sense that they are a continuation of the rabbis with their discussions. Note, though, that while this form of Jewish identity, is well suited for people operating within a Yeshiva system, it is likely to crack precisely when that community is no more. Our Joseph, whether in college or under Communism, is not going to be a rabbi. That option is closed. If our Joseph is to remain Jewish it will be precisely because his sense of himself as a Jew transcends his being a rabbi. 

I readily acknowledge that the Haredi system is better at producing Jewishly knowledgable and fervent kids than the Modern Orthodox schools. Clearly, if the question was keeping kids religious tomorrow, Haredim would win easily. But the lesson of antifragility is that you have to prepare for the extreme. Breaking Haredi kids should be relatively easy. There is no need to argue with them. Take away their tzitzit and yarmulkas; clip their peyos and let them see themselves in the mirror. No need to force them to eat non-kosher, just let them feed themselves from a dining room not designed for kosher eating and make their own compromises. The fact that these compromises may be quite defensible will not change the fact that they are compromises. Once you create a break with their past selves, the rest should follow easily. 

Remember that Haredi kids have not been trained to imagine themselves living outside a Haredi community. On the contrary, they have been conditioned to make that imaginative leap impossible. Thus, the moment you take them away from their community, they will likely see themselves as different people. This is not the case with Modern Orthodox kids, who have identities distinct from their Judaism. This might make them less fervent and more likely to abandon the faith on a day-to-day basis. It also might allow them a stronger sense of continuity even under difficult circumstances. As long as mental continuity exists then Jewish identity stands a fighting chance. 

The Anti-Judaism of the New Doctor Who

I am a long-running fan of Doctor Who. One of the things I respected about the show has been its ability to be liberal in ways that were subtle and did not get in the way of smart storytelling for people of different ages and across the political spectrum. This was possible because the writers knew how to pick their shots and let their values flow from the narrative. Doctor Who, at a fundamental level, is a show about tolerance founded on curiosity about the other. The hero is a time-traveling alien, who takes people on journies across time and space. From this perspective, human concerns about race, religion, sexuality, and gender are going to seem rather provincial. There is no need to preach tolerance. On the contrary, the show's valuing of tolerance should emanate naturally from its very premise. This brings me to my problem with the newest season. While I was excited for Jodie Whittaker becoming the first female Doctor, as she was excellent in Broadchurch, the show has gotten into the habit of wearing its politics on its sleeve which is not only boring, it is also counter-productive for getting its message across.

This embrace of liberal polemics goes beyond giving the Doctor his usual humanist speeches in keeping with a character who is a talker. Furthermore, the show regularly used to turn its liberalism on the Doctor. From his own perspective, the Doctor is the liberal humanist that he is because he has seen the dark side alternative within himself when he became the War Doctor during the Time War and was willing to destroy his own people, the Time Lords, in order to rid the universe of the Daleks. This sense of guilt, most notable in Christopher Eccleston and more recently with Peter Capaldi, often allows the Doctor to empathize and try to reason with the villains. I cannot think of a show in which the "big scary monster" is more likely to not simply be a bad guy in need of being destroyed. This willingness to avoid easy answers was part of what made Doctor Who's lessons in tolerance so effective; it habituated viewers, in ways like no other show, to question the Manichean good versus evil framework that comes so naturally to us that ultimately is the root of intolerance.

This hard-earned embrace of tolerance is discarded in this new season in an effort to engage in virtue-signaling. Just in case anyone doubted where the show stood on race and gender, not only is the Doctor now a woman but she now has, as companions, a black guy, a Pakistani woman plus a middle-aged white man to provide some diversity. There are episodes dealing with Rosa Parks and seventeenth-century witch trials in England. The show "bravely" teaches us that racism and sexist witch-dunkings are bad. A useful contrast here is the last Capaldi episode which gets much of its humor from confronting the highly patronizing attitude toward women in the early incarnations of the show back in the 1960s.

I would like to focus on one particular incident from the Witchfinders episode, which, for all of its flaws, is partially redeemed by Alan Cummings' portrayal of King James I. The Doctor confronts a witch-hunter, who quotes from the King James Bible, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" (Exodus 22:18).  The Doctor responds: "In the Old Testament. There is a twist in the sequel, 'love thy neighbor.'" First, on a basic factual level, the Doctor is mistaken. "Love thy neighbor" comes from the Old Testament in Leviticus 19:18. The New Testament simply quotes the Old. The second but more disturbing issue here is that the show is playing into the stereotype of the Old Testament as the book of judgment in contrast to the New Testament with its love and tolerance. This is the true foundation for Christian anti-Judaism, far more pernicious than the notion that the Jews killed Jesus.

While Jews have been convenient scapegoats, Christianity has never truly needed to blame Jews for killing Jesus, particularly those Jews who were not alive during the first century CE. The real Jewish challenge for Christianity has always been that Christianity could never escape the fact that the New Testament serves to modify an already present scripture. Unless there was something wrong with Judaism that Christianity could realistically improve on (obviously, neither religion has ever lacked for pious hypocrites), Christianity makes no sense. For traditional Orthodox Christianity, the solution has been that the Old Testament lacked the Son of God dying to atone for the sins of the world. This, though, raises the question of what was the point of the Old Testament if it could not save. The answer is that the Old Testament teaches us about sin by showing us how we utterly fail to keep the Law (Romans 7:7-25). As such, Christians need to read the Old Testament as the law that condemns despite everything the Old Testament has to say to the contrary. If the God of the Old Testament knows that we are imperfect sinners but will forgive us if only we truly want it then there is no need for Jesus. On the contrary, Jesus becomes a denial of God's perfect forgiveness.

To be fair to traditional Christians, their anti-Judaism can be kept in check with an Augustinian embrace of man's total depravity. From this perspective, Jews, even as Christ-killers, can never be worse than depraved humanity as a whole. Any other group of human sinners would have failed God's test just as badly. At least the Jews have the advantage that God chose them despite their utter depravity.

With modern liberal Christianity, this problem of anti-Judaism actually gets worse. As Amy-Jill Levine argues in The Misunderstood Jew: the Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, liberal Christianity's desire to escape from traditional dogma easily turns into a backdoor for precisely the kind of negative stereotypes of Jews that it was supposed to have transcended. If the point of Jesus was not that he was the Son of God sent to atone for sin then it must be that Jesus taught a new value system. This means that the old system must have been really backward and in need of replacement. For example, if Jesus came to liberate women then Judaism must be some oppressive Taliban-like religion. If Jesus helped the poor then Judaism must be the religion of the greedy rich. If human beings are not all depraved then there was something wrong specifically with the Jews that caused them to reject Jesus' message of peace and love. 

If you think that attacking the Jewish scriptures is not an attack on members of the Jewish religion then consider what it means to attack the Koran. If the Old Testament (or the Koran) does not simply have problematic texts that believers have to struggle with but teaches hatred then that religion is tainted and its practitioners must be condemned as haters as long as they do not formally abandon their religion. We would not accept "moderate" Nazis with their "liberal" reading of Mein Kampf as anything other than a sick joke and a cynical attempt to make anti-Semitism acceptable in polite society. By contrast, we can easily ignore those Jews in the past who might have killed Jesus as not real Jews as they failed to live up to the "true" teachings of Judaism, which is peace.

The fact that Christians believe in the Old Testament as opposed to the Koran only adds to the problem. The Muslim reading his Koran is outside of the Christian framework and can, therefore, be ignored. The Old Testament practicing Jew as an opponent who is also part of the Christian framework all too easily becomes the embodiment of Christianity's failures, allowing Christians to pass off whatever they secretly hate about themselves as really being the fault of the Jews. Since this Jew is a Christian construct without any real connection to actual Jews, it can flourish even in the absence of Jews. Hatred of this theological Jewish construct could fester unconnected to people who actually practice Judaism until it manifests itself in the actual murder of Jews.  For example, the medieval unbelieving Christian, who could not accept that Jesus really was present in the Eucharist was transformed into a Jew in spirit. This, in turn, got actual Jews killed as host desecrators.

This same formula helps explain witch hunts. You start with the construct of the witch as a servant of Satan. Since this fantasy has no connection to real people, it can evolve into something ever more sinister, capable of literally committing any depravity no matter how heinous, until someone is made to wear that label and die for it. In the hands of Doctor Who, witch-hunters in seventeenth-century England (which officially had expelled its Jews in 1290) become people in funny hats who quote the Old Testament without seeming to realize that there exists a New Testament; in essence, they are Jews. This is dangerous because, despite the fact that Jews were not responsible for European witch trials, viewers are being primed to associate Jews, as followers of a "harsh" Old Testament law, with witch-hunting and ultimately with the forces of intolerance.   

To be clear, I do not think the writers of a certain British science-fiction show actively hate Jews or consciously meant any harm. Furthermore, I do not believe that I am some paragon of tolerance who never makes harmful prejudiced comments. I beg the indulgence of members of the practically limitless groups that I am not part of for my ignorance. You are human beings (or perhaps aliens) and my failure to treat you as such is simply an oversight on my part. If you are a member of such a group, feel free to point out where I have treated you unfairly. Since I am not claiming to be a tolerant person, just someone who tries to be, I have no reason to reject your criticism and might just take it to heart. Likewise, I should forgive the writers for not being on top of the history of anti-Semitism and its role in Christian biblical exegesis. There is plenty of evil out there in the world and I should not take it personally if writers wish to focus on other issues besides anti-Semitism.

Here is the problem though. The show has now made a point of its great tolerance, allowing itself the moral authority to treat those possessing the various failings of very real historical prejudices as caricatures. We are no longer dealing with a show in which tolerance is a tool for self-examination but a weapon to castigate others. If the writers believe that they are some model of enlightened tolerance for others to look up to then any demonstration of prejudice, even a small one, ceases to be innocent. We now have no reason to assume that they would accept that, even through oversight, they are guilty of prejudice as this would undermine the very moral authority that saves them from being Puritan Pharisee Jews, whose obsession with the prejudices of others has blinded them to their own prejudices.   

Just so we are clear, I have no objection to Doctor Who criticizing the Old Testament. It has many problematic passages. My problem is that the show did so in a way that is factually incorrect. Worse, it used this falsehood as a means of propping up the New Testament, making the central argument of Christian anti-Jewish biblical exegesis. This is not an innocent issue but one with real blood attached to it. The writers owe the Jewish community an apology and a commitment to educating themselves about anti-Semitism. Perhaps this can be the basis for an episode next season. Might I suggest that the Doctor team up with the Golem of Prague to stop a blood libel?