What Messiah Do I Look Best As?

Sabbatai Sevi has a nice Jewish beard, a massive biography by Gershom Scholem to smite unbelievers and a hip kabbalist prophet for a sidekick. Antichrist has a nice pair of Jewish horns and controls the White House. Sabbatai is really sneaky in how he converts to Islam to spiritually undermine it. It is not like anyone is going to be fooled when the president is elected pope without even becoming Catholic. Of course Antichrist gets cooler toys and more world destruction, but perhaps descending into the mystical dark forces of the klipot would be spiritually more rewarding.

2011 in Reading

So for the year 2011, between Kindle, iPod and traditional print, I read or listened to about 100 books. Here are my nominations for the best books. Some of these books are recent, others are not. I would be curious to hear from readers any thoughts on these particular books or favorite books from their past year of reading.

Non-Fiction Related to My Dissertation

1)      The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers by Carl L. Becker - A series of lectures on the Enlightenment, which Becker viewed a product of rather than a simple break with the Middle Ages. If I ever teach a historiography course this book will be assigned along with Sir Herbert Butterfield's The Whig Interpretation of History for the topic of the Whig narrative and why it fails to explain the origins of modernity.

2)      The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement by Pawel Maciejko - The best history hands down on the Frankists, an eighteenth-century heretical movement in eastern Europe, which resulted in a mass conversion of Jews to Catholicism. I would particularly recommend this back as an example of counter "great man" history. Not in the sense that Jacob Frank was a pretty infamous character, though he was, but in the sense that Maciejko places the Frankist movement as the center, as opposed to Frank himself. In fact, Maciejko's central argument is that a strong Polish Sabbatian movement existed apart from Frank and outside his control; Frank reacted to and was the product of "Frankist" movement much more so than the other way around.    

3)      Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History by David Ruderman - There is little original with this book, but Ruderman does a great job bringing the major issues of interest to me regarding early modern Jewish history together, particularly the relationship between conversos, Sabbatians and the early Enlightenment. As I am doing with my own discussion of Sabbatianism, Ruderman places a heavy emphasis on mobile networks of individuals.

Non-Fiction Not Related to My Dissertation

1)      Infidel: My Life by Ayaan Hirsi Ali - A powerful autobiography by a Somali ex-Muslim. What particularly impressed me about Hirsi Ali is that she is remarkably non-bitter and non-polemical in her account of her family and of Islam, particularly if you consider how easy it would have been for her to have made it so. Yes she places Islam as a threat to Western Civilization, but this book is hardly of the "Muslims are evil" or even the "religious people are evil" genre. I particularly relate to this book as someone who has taken a step away from a fundamentalist religion, though not as radical a step as Hirsi Ali, via means of classical liberalism. This is a conscious rejection of the authority of community and tradition in favor of the individual and reason, backed by a nation-state. Because of this experience, Hirsi Ali thinks in terms of either classical liberalism or religious fundamentalism. Her objection to modern multi-cultural liberalism is precisely that it fails to appreciate the attraction of religious fundamentalism. As I see it, how can someone appreciate the attraction of something that never appealed to them in the first place and which they cannot seriously imagine themselves having followed? This unwillingness to take religious fundamentalism seriously at an intellectual level means that modern liberals are not prepared to go up against fundamentalist apologists, who use modern liberalism's own abandonment of the absolute authority of the individual, reason and the placement of any type of national culture as fascism to justify the continued existence of fundamentalist enclaves funded by public tax dollars.    

2)      The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto - As with the previous book, this is a defense of classical liberalism that focuses on the experiences of those outside the West. De Soto makes the libertarian case that government bureaucracy causes poverty in third world countries. More importantly, de Soto, following in the tradition of Frederick Hayek, is an eloquent defender of rule of law. He is not anti-government; on the contrary, he believes in government based on principled rules as opposed to arbitrary whims of politicians and interest groups. As in the case of Hirsi Ali, I think there is something about living in a society where a belief in liberal principles is not a given and where one must consciously defend such positions against intellectually serious non-believers to force one back to the basics of liberal principles. In de Soto's Peru and the other countries he describes there is no two-hundred-year history of a constitional system which commands the loyalty of the entire political system. If one is going to take a stand for constitutional government and the rule of law then that stand must be a principled one or stand in line with those willing to use force of arms and politics to take what they believe to be rightfully theirs.       

3)      Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas - If I ever were placed in charge of Artscroll's hagiography division for the writing of gedolim biographies I would assign this book to everyone working for me as an example as to writing inspirational biographies. There is little need to use over the top rhetoric to make Dietrich Bonhoeffer sound heroic. He was an anti-Nazi German pastor, who returned to Germany right before the start of World War II because he felt he needed to actively oppose Nazism on the ground in Germany. He did not survive the war. With that out of the way, Metaxas is free to spend the book explaining Bonhoeffer's theology and offering some background on early twentieth century Protestantism. This book also makes some useful arguments for viewing Nazism as something other than a conservative movement.  

4)      Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis - Certainly the most interesting book on sports I have ever read. For those who like the Freakonomics/Malcolm Gladwell style counterintuitive arguments, Lewis offers a different way of thinking about sports and possibly about life as well. If you wish to articulate why sports announcers are full of nonsense, who consistently fail to say anything useful about the game this is the book for you. What I particularly took from Moneyball is a lesson on the vulnerabilities of self-replicating elites; they tend to recruit people who look the part rather than genuine capability. Baseball scouts tend to jump for athletes who are tall, well built, fast and can throw over 90 miles an hour as opposed to hitters who can rack up walks. One wonders if the Haredi leadership and the journalists who empower them place too much emphasis on people who come from the right families, make the right public statements and are photographed at the right weddings as opposed to engaging in actual scholarship.   

Fiction (I Will Leave It as an Open Question as to whether Any of This is Related to My Dissertation)

1)      Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill - One of the best-written horror stories I have ever come across. It takes a very simple concept, a suit with a ghost attached to it, and scares the pants out of you with it. It makes little use of graphic violence; who needs gore when you have a deliciously psychotic dead hypnotist to talk people into suicide. The book also features lead characters who are actually likable as opposed to a parade of hunks and blondes just lining up for the slaughter. If the writing sounds a bit like Stephen King's, the author happens to be his son.     

2)      Elantris by Brandon Sanderson - There is something to be said for handing characters over to true destruction, the sudden loss of family, position, and reputation. Death is too easy and for it to actually matter it almost needs to render the character narratively useless. So it is to Sanderson's credit that he can craft a truly unique vision of a Hell on Earth to cast his Christ-like hero. As with Orson Scott Card, Sanderson's stories are first and foremost about characters and relationships. In this case, a hero faced with the task of rallying the denizens of an inescapable Hell into a community. (He does this brilliantly as well in Way of Kings.)

3)      Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson - More Sanderson. This one features a pair of princesses, one of them in a Queen Esther type scenario, a pair of comic henchmen, who go off into libertarian style monologues in defense of their profession and a really cool system of magic involving colors and souls.  Sanderson's fantasy is not about heroes off questing to defeat evil dark lords and save the world. Keeping to the best of the Tolkien tradition, Sanderson is a world builder. If Tolkien built his worlds through language, Sanderson works through systems of magic. Imagine a world governed with a slightly different set of physical laws (Sanderson's magic is always based on clear and consistent rules) and ask yourself what sort of society would spring up under such circumstances. Any system that allows a minority of people to become even slightly more powerful than most is going to be hierarchical, but what sort of hierarchy and how might it become vulnerable?        

4)      Song of Fire and Ice Series by George R. R. Martin - Murder, sexual immorality and idolatry and I am loving the series. I have never read a fantasy author who gets the medieval mindset like Martin does. These books should practically be classified as historical fiction. Is it that big a deal that the books do not actually take place during the War of the Roses and involve some dragons in one of the side plots?

Life Update

Sorry for not having posted anything these past few months. I have been really busy getting married and all.

There has also been my dissertation. Over the past six months I have written over one hundred pages. This is either a very good sign that I am making progress or that I am plodding down a new path in my writing that will make it run over five hundred pages and take me another year before I discover that it makes no sense and have to go back to last year.

With my very busy life, it is amazing how I still manage to indulge in my ultimate time waster, video games with complex story lines, allow me to take over the world and are just plain violent. In this case Dragon Age II.





My wife is very understanding and has even offered to get me the new Knights of the Old Republic game as a Hanukkah present. I love my wife dearly, but certain kindnesses I am probably better off without.

My conscious calls to me. Enough of this wasting time on video games, a wife and a dissertation. I need to blog more. (As Izgad was meant to raise the moral consciousness of the blogosphere, I think it is perfectly valid to consider it my consciousness.)

Rampant Obesity and Celebrating Ten Years of Idolatry: Ami at a Crossroads (Part I)

In this month's edition of Ami magazine, Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein has an article, "Modern Orthodoxy at a Crossroads," on the challenge posed to Orthodoxy by Rabbi Avi Weiss and his attempt to ordain women. I respect Rabbi Adlerstein as a usually thoughtful Haredi perspective and he deserves credit for presenting Modern Orthodox Jews as human beings and serious Jews. That being said, this article is an exercise in the sort of self-congratulatory sanctimoniousness whose only purpose is to pat the author, and by extension the reader who agrees with him, on the back, while completely ignoring the issues at hand and inhibiting any actual discussion.

In Rabbi Adlerstein's narrative, a small click of supposedly "Orthodox" rabbis have conspired to undermine elements of Jewish tradition, such as having a solely male clergy and not calling women up to the Torah. These "extreme radical leftists" present themselves to the secular media as Orthodox mavericks challenging the status quo, putting pressure on more "moderate" Orthodox rabbis to go along.

As I have written previously, I am not interested in debating the issue of how Orthodoxy should respond to the social and political changes in the status women over the past century. I do not have a set solution to the problem. My concern is not over whether or not women will be ordained (I assume though that it will happen whether I like it or not) or what title they will be given. I only insist that whoever makes these decisions does so based both on traditional sources and an awareness of the social realities on the ground that brought these issues to the table. For example, it is a non-option to tell women to stick to children, kitchen and synagogue (behind the mechitza).

What concerns me about Rabbi Adlerstein is that he is someone involved in making these decisions yet he clearly does not grasp the social realities behind the issues. Just an example of how out of touch with reality he is. He dismisses the Los Angeles Jewish Journal as being "read almost exclusively by the non-Orthodox." I read it and know other Orthodox Jews who do. It should be axiomatic to him that the Jewish Journal's readers are precisely the people that Orthodoxy needs to reach out to; those Jews who care enough about Judaism to read a Jewish magazine, but for "some strange reason" are not reading Ami.  Nowhere in the article does Rabbi Adlerstein consider the possibility that his opponents, instead of "plotting" to hoist "politically correct" values on an unsuspecting Jewish community, are on the front lines of trying to save Orthodox Judaism and are having to make some hard decisions. The fact that Rabbi Adlerstein's community does not yet have to deal with these issues, should be cause for thanks to be expressed by thoughtful planning for the moment the crisis comes to have acceptable options. (I imagine that a Haredi leadership that spends the next twenty years convincing its own members that it honestly cares about women might be able to hold off on women rabbis when Haredi women decide they might want to be rabbis.) It should not be an opening for sanctimonious judgment as to who is "Orthodox."

Rabbi Adlerstein de facto eliminates any consideration of social issues by specifically knocking Modern Orthodox rabbis for their lack of source skills, while saying nothing about whether Haredi rabbis are qualified to comment about an issue regarding liberalism, without a deep understanding of liberalism and actual liberals. Education is a zero-sum game. You cannot talk about rabbis needing to be more knowledgeable about Jewish texts without also implicitly saying that they do not also need an understanding of political theory, history and a little bit about the sort of actual real life people they are going to be offering spiritual guidance to.

(To be continued ...)

Guidelines for Studying History

Clarissa recently put up some pointers for the study of history, things to remember and questions to ask:

Things to remember when reading, watching or researching history:

a. There can never be a fully objective account of history

b. Don’t read accounts of history to find out what happened. Read them to discover what their author says happened

c. Only by accessing and contrasting different accounts can we figure out what took place

d. Every account of history is always ideological

e. There is always a hidden reason for why a person writes about history

Questions to ask:

1. Who is the author?
2. What do I know about this author? Country of origin, political affiliation, profession, etc.
3. How does this knowledge about the author change my understanding of his or her text?
4. What is the goal the author is trying to achieve with this text?
5. What kind of data is used to support the author’s conclusions?
6. What kind of attitude does the author have towards the readers of the text?
7. What are the central concepts that organize the author’s thinking about this subject?

My criticism: While one should initially focus on what the author says happened, the long term goal has to be to come to certain conclusions as to what really happened. All historical accounts are ideological only if you use ideology in its most general sense. Yes there is such a thing as responsible historiography even if the author is a capitalist, a communist, Jew, Christian or a goddess worshiping feminist. This is important as it gives us a standard from which to judge historians of all ideological persuasions and removes ideology as a fig leaf for poorly written history.

I think these are great points to make to students, where I would slightly differ with Clarissa is in the emphasis on the subjectivity. To be clear, we really can never actually reconstruct history "as it was" or make any claims with absolute certainty. That being said we have a historical method that allows us to recreate the past with a reasonable degree of accuracy. While moving students away from a model of "Gospel Truth," it is important not to overstate the subjectivity of historical study. Miguel Cervantes fighting at the Battle of Lepanto was real in ways his Don Quixote fighting windmills is not. To downplay the very real possibility of historical truth (lower case letters) only serves to leave the field open to the Gospel Truth crowd, which I know is the last thing that Clarissa wants. Perhaps part of the difference is one of history versus literature. With all due respect to Clarissa, as a historian it is important for me to be able to look down at literature scholars like her and thumb my nose; my field deals with objective reality and yours does not. Of course I imagine that science people thumb their noses at us historians for our lack objectivity and they in turn can be mocked by continental philosophers and analytic philosophers can feel superior to everyone.    

I would add: 

1. Figure out your source's agenda. Cross out anything that supports it and highlight everything that goes against it.

2.  Treat your sources as a police officer would a witness. You are going to wade through a lot of self serving nonsense,  but every once in a while you are going to strike gold. But even when you do not you can always count on a liar to tell the truth every once in a while if by accident. 

3. At the end of the day reasonable people are going to disagree about events and that is ok.      

Clarissa is teaching about Bartolome de Las Cases, a sixteenth century Spanish Dominican, who wrote about the Spanish conquest of the New World. Las Cases was horrified by the Spanish treatment of Native Americans, believing that such actions stood in the way of their conversion and the Second Coming. Las Cases' genuine concern for Native Americans led him to defend their rights, most famously in the Valladolid debates with Juan Gines de Sepulveda. The fact that Las Cases was a Spaniard eviscerating the Spanish, gives him a lot of credibility and I am willing to assume, based on Las Cases, that massacres of natives and their enslavement really did take place. The discovery of the New World was not just an exciting adventure in expanding human horizons. That being said I would also use Las Cases himself to paint a more nuanced picture of the Spanish. They were not all a bunch of greedy hypocritical religious bigots. Furthermore I would point to the example of Las Cases and other sixteenth century Spanish thinkers like Francisco de Vitoria, Juan de Mariana and Domingo de Soto. These were all in their own ways very "liberal" thinkers, who had all the basic "right" ideas about human rights and that non-Europeans were human beings too. They did influence Spanish policy, at least as far as Madrid was concerned, yet they ultimately failed to create the critical revolution in human thinking of the Enlightenment. This fell to seventeenth and eighteenth century thinkers in Holland, England and France. Why did all of this not happen in Spain?    

    

Asperger/Autism Tutor

While I continue to work for Kline Books as their Judaica Cataloger and the writer for Tipsy, I am starting a second enterprise as a tutor for grade school and high school students with Asperger syndrome/autism. The idea is to help students on the autism spectrum navigate school, both academically and socially, and hopefully eventually prepare for college. In addition I would also serve as a bridge to negotiate between student, parents and teachers. The underlying assumption behind this is that there are a lot autistic students out there who could theoretically handle mainstream school if it were not for certain "buts." I can help pave over these "buts" by being there for students as a resource that they can talk through issues with, whether school papers or how to deal with other students and teachers.

This idea has been germinating in my mind over the past several years as it combines the different sides of my life. I taught high school and college level history, came to identify myself as an Asperger and by extension a member of the wider autistic community and served as a mentor for those following a similar path. One of the things that I took from my time with Aspirations and ASAN was the need to rethink autism from the ground up even to the point of creating a different language to discuss it from that of the medical establishment and special education.

Most of the focus on autism is on those who fit the "classic" model of autism. And there is certainly good reason for this. That being said this leaves a gap for those who do not fit the traditional model of autism, who in theory could make it in a regular school, but also need help in ways that are sometimes difficult to precisely identify. (Of course once one accepts the existence of autistics who can speak, read, write and even get a graduate degree one is forced to rethink the treatment process of those across the entire autism spectrum.) I take particular inspiration from the example of Ari Ne'eman and his successful campaign to place himself within a mainstream high school.

In a previous post I expressed some concern with emphasizing mainstream schools as the goal. I still stand by my earlier position. That being said, I do recognize that a mainstream school is preferable to any autism school based around a disability model. Schools like the Haugland Learning Center are an important step in the right direction, but it is unlikely that they could support more than a small fraction of autistic children. Even if they could, until we create an autistic version of Gallaudet University, getting autistic students ready for integration into mainstream colleges will have to be the goal even for schools like Haugland. So for now I feel perfectly comfortable in advocating for both separate and mainstream schools depending on the particular situation. Those autistics who wish to go to a mainstream school should receive the necessary help to get into and stay in one. Those who wish to go to a separate school will still need the skills to make mainstream school a viable option.

What attracts me to the idea of doing more work with autstic students, besides for allowing me to take my previous involvement with advocacy a step further, is that it fits my particular set of skills as a teacher. I relate much better to children than to adults. Children tend to like the fact that I am genuinely interested in them and do not speak down to them; furthermore they are not put off by my eccentricities. At the same time my manner of speaking is highly academic and even adults have a hard time understanding me. This could be the perfect boon to an Asperger with specific interests to have me in his life to engage in running discourses about whatever interests them.
So if anyone out there knows someone in the Los Angeles area who can use my services feel free to contact me.

Tipsy on Books - A New Job and a New Blog

I mentioned previously that I have been blogging less because of my new-found social life. There was another reason for this. In July I started working as the Judaica book-cataloger for Eric Chaim Kline, Bookseller in Panorama City north of Los Angeles. This is a high end not your usual used book store (though I love shopping at those places); we handle a lot of antique and academic books. Eric is a great boss, who, in the few weeks I have been here, has taught me a bunch. What continuously strikes me about him is that he truly loves books (perhaps more than is good for a man in the business of trying to "rid" himself of them.) The greatest part of the job is that I get paid to handle all sorts of really interesting books and type in descriptions of their content and condition onto a computer. There is an inventory here of over 250,000 books so the quicker we put them into the system the quicker we can sell them.

When I first spoke to Eric before the summer about taking on this job, I suggested to him that, as part of my job, I could be his official blogger. I showed Eric some of my posts here on Izgad and he really liked the idea. So I have now started Tipsy on Books: Dispatches from the Tavern. It is going to be similar to the more academic posts I do here. It will be informative, mildly provocative with a generous sample of tongue-in-cheek. The difference is that I will be focusing on material here in this store.  So I welcome all of my readers to visit my new blog and to check out the Eric Chaim Kline, Bookseller website.  I am confident that this is going to be an even better blog. Now, instead of just me, my brain and my big mouth, it is going to be me, my brain, my big mouth and all the stuff I get to put my hands on.

Now for a bit of business. No Tipsy on Books is not going to be about trying to sell you stuff, though every book I discuss is on sale and there will be a link to the book's page on the store website if anyone wishes to buy it. That being said Eric is sponsoring the blog. As with any sponsorship if this does not lead to more sales then he is going to have to cancel this project and put me back to just book cataloging. If on the other hand Tipsy is successful then perhaps he will allow me to devote more time to it, allowing me to write more posts.

Speaking to other bloggers; if Tipsy succeeds then perhaps other businesses will take up the practice of sponsoring their own bloggers. That would be good for the entire blogging community. If you put up a link for me I would greatly appreciate it.

Eric has been kind enough to give me a job and take a chance on an unconventional advertising project so I would appreciate it if everyone could check out his site and see if there is something they could purchase. (If you mention that Tipsy sent you then all the better.) I admit that most of our collection is fairly expensive. That being said we do have top of the line material that you are not going to easily find in other places. 

It is not my intention to retire Izgad. I intend to still occasionally post material here that would not fit in with Tipsy. All past posts will remain up for your reading enjoyment. That being said, I will not be posting regularly so I will take this opportunity to say goodbye (at least for now). It has been a wonderful 4.5 years of blogging. Here is to better things, both in my personal life and to blogging.



 

Speaking at a Chabad House (About Messianism No Less)

In South Pasadena, where Miriam and I are living, there is not much in the way of Orthodox life. We have a Chabad house 3.5 miles away where we pray. It is a small, but very diverse group of people. They have been very good to Miriam in the past and are now very accepting of me. I am happy to be part of this family. While most of the people there became religious through Chabad, as with most Chabad places, beyond the two Chabad rabbis and their families it is not a Chabad community.

A few weeks ago someone put forth the idea to me that, as a Jewish historian, I should give a class on Jewish history possibly on what I am writing about. I am an academic historian, writing about messianism; how many sentences do you think it is going to take before the rabbi pulls the plug on me? Somehow this person managed to convince me to go for it and, even more surprisingly, convinced the rabbi to give me a platform. So this past Sabbath, I gave an "Introduction to Jewish Messianism." I guess the biggest shocker was that over twenty people stuck around in the afternoon to listen to me. It was the sort of lecture that I like giving. It went on for about an hour before tapering off into an informal question and answer session. I took a number of questions while I was speaking, which sent me off on lots of side tangents. The problem with this is that it sometimes makes me difficult to follow. I try to balance this with a sense of humor. If people have no idea what I am talking about they should at least think it is funny, whatever it is I am actually talking about. Well apparently everybody liked my presentation so it looks like we may do this again, perhaps make it a monthly event.

Believe it or not, I do have a plan as to how to keep myself from being too offensive. Keep everything theoretical. I am simply reporting on what is going on in my field. Phrase things in questions. I am simply explaining some of the major debates going on and offering points for consideration. Above all else, I should avoid talking about Chabad messianism. As a historian, I should have no problem keeping things in the eighteenth century or beforehand.

Ok, so I did talk about Chabad messianism. I raised the question of calamity based messianism; do messianic movements come about in response to major physical disasters? Isaac Abarbanel writing three books on messianism several years after the expulsion of 1492 and as the Jews of Portugal were being forcibly baptized sounds like calamity messianism. Jews in Poland responding to the Cossack attacks of 1648 by embracing Sabbatai Sevi in 1666 might be calamity messianism. (Of course, that would still not explain why Jews everywhere else did too.) Why did Chabad in the 1980s and 90s turn messianic? What great physical threat did Lubavitchers living in the United States at the end of the twentieth-century face? If you are going to say that this was in response to the Holocaust then why did the Lubavitcher Rebbe not come out in the 1950s with his "bring Moshiach" campaign? (The previous Rebbe, in the 1940s, started a messianic campaign, but it faded away for several decades.)

So no trouble yet. One of the attendees has asked me if, for my next lecture, I could talk about traditional Jewish claims that there will be no Messiah or that all messianic prophecies were already fulfilled with King Hezekiah and the Second Temple. What could possibly go wrong with this?         

Engagement Party

Miriam and I are having an engagement party on August 14th. If any of my readers from the Los Angeles area wish to come feel free to contact me and ask.

I am Engaged to a Wonderful Jewish Asperger Girl (Part II)

(Part I)

So how did I propose to my one and only dream Jewish Asperger girl? Well, like in most relationships I suspect, she really proposed to me while allowing me the pretense of going through the motions of asking her to maintain the facade of my manly control in this relationship. So a few weeks ago Miriam announced to me that she intended to have an engagement party in August. Naturally, I was curious as to who would play the role of the groom at this engagement party and decided to volunteer my services before some other guy tried out for the part. This past Sunday, I took Miriam to the Aquarium of the Pacific. In the last post, I mentioned that Miriam's special interest is the South Pacific. It is actually much more specific than that; it is in Palau. In case you have never heard of Palau they are a group of islands several hundred miles to the east of the Philippines. (Lionel Spiegel had heard of them because of some of the tropical life off its coasts.)

(Here I passed her test to find Palau on a map, thus making myself a suitable partner for marriage. Naturally, any person with designs on world conquest has to know something about geography.)


The aquarium possesses an entire section on coral reefs based on the ones off Palau. Thus making it the perfect set piece to stand in for Miriam's favorite place in the universe.

How to make it a surprise? The disadvantage of being an Asperger is that it makes you a really bad liar. The advantage of dating an Asperger is that they are very easy to lie to. So I simply told Miriam that I was taking her out on a simple date to the aquarium with a picnic dinner. She believed me. To confirm her belief she checked on a bottle of wine we had just bought to see if it was still in its place. It was. I simply grabbed it afterward when she was not looking and stuck it in my knapsack.

So we headed to the aquarium. As a good boyfriend, I obviously let Miriam take the lead and she took me straight to the Palau exhibit. That finished we went through the rest of the museum. (For some strange reason the people who run the aquarium think that people want to do things that have no connection to Palau like pet sharks.) Heading out of the aquarium, I suggested that we go back one more time through Palau. I then told her to find the most magical place in the exhibit. She parked herself right in front of the red snapper fish. (Miriam, like me, tends to associate love with eating even as she fails to apply this philosophy to its logical conclusion of kitty and human.) While having her stare into the fish tank, I stood behind her and said: "I know nothing of the customs of Palau, how they ask certain questions, but as a western imperialist, I feel entitled to simply make up whatever Palauan customs I wish. So I going to do it this way. Miriam, would you turn around?" She turned around and I asked her the question that was burning on my mind at the moment. "Would you have dinner with me by the shore?"

So we walked to the shore and had a sunset picnic dinner with leechee fruit, which grows in Palau, for dessert. Afterward, we walked along the shore toward the setting sun. I then had Miriam look out to over the water to the sun and once again spoke to her: "This is the closest we can get to Palau without a boat or plane, but I promise we will go there eventually."

She then turned around, and I had pulled out the bottle of wine. She then went into gasps of "oh my god" a bunch of times, before eventually kindly allowing me to ask her an embarrassing question that did not involve food.

I already know where we are going for our honeymoon. I hear some of the islands near the Philippines are quite magnificent. The natives do not particularly care for nuclear weapons so I guess I will have to give up on conquest.

   

I am Engaged to a Wonderful Jewish Asperger Girl (Part I)

For starters, I would like to apologize for the lack of posts this past month. Things have been happening in my life that I could not talk about with my readers. Now that things are official I am very pleased to share everything you.

This past February I received a call from my aunt. She had been telling people about me and someone had contacted her about a girl in South Pasadena named Miriam Albin.

My aunt informed me that Miriam was really smart, into anthropology, had Asperger syndrome and was quite pretty. At which point I stopped my aunt to tell her that I was already looking at a picture of this girl. As soon as I heard the name I Googled her and found her Facebook page. (Life in the twenty-first century.) Soon afterward, I received an email from Miriam. Apparently, she had Googled me in turn, found this blog and failed to be offended by its contents. So we started talking, largely through Skype. (Long distance dating in the twenty-first century.)

There was something absolutely refreshing about dating an Asperger. While we do have our differences (she likes the South Pacific and is all bubbly and friendly, while I like European history am usually found lurking in a corner contemplating taking over the world), it is amazing how similar our learned defense mechanisms are. We both fear accidentally giving offense to people over things beyond our understanding so constantly ask people whether we are bothering them or what they would like. Applying this method to another Asperger leads to some good comic exchanges:

"Is it socially appropriate for me to say this?"    
"I have no idea."
"Do you care if it is socially appropriate?"
"No."
"Oh good."

And then there are the back and forth monologues to be mediated the following way:

"Sorry for going on a random side tangent. I can stop now if you are not interested."
"Is this one of your special interests and does monologuing about this topic make you happy?"
"Yes."
"Ok as long as you do the dishes while you monologue."

Being informed that there are aspects to building a relationship that cannot be conducted over Skype, I flew out to Los Angeles in April for a weekend. I met her parents and they found me to be an Asperger, who is also responsible. Following quid pro quo logic naturally, she flew out in June to meet my family and they found Miriam to be an Asperger, who is also lovable.

The next step was for me to make this a short distance relationship so I moved out to South Pasadena. Miriam's parents liked me so much that they agreed to put me up. Miriam lives nearby in a different house. Admittedly this was an unconventional living arrangement, but I think we both gained a lot from it. We have been doing all the day to day things that a married couple does besides actually sharing a house and sleeping together. Things like preparing dinner, cleaning the dishes and figuring out whose turn it is to monologue.   

(To be continued ...)

Orthodox Feminism or Back to the 1950s

I was just shown a brochure for a women's baalat tshuvah (newly religious) yeshiva called Shirat Devorah. I have never been to the place, I am not affiliated with it nor do I even know anyone who is. Perhaps it is a wonderful program, but some things in the brochure struck me as troubling.

For example:

Shirat Devorah engages each student's intellect, heart, body, and soul in her education. We honor the intelligence of all these aspects and use them as tools for integration. For example, the laws of Kashrut [kosher] and Shabbat can be learned from a book, but are best absorbed and understood through hands on application. In our Kitchen Laboratory, students apply these laws by cooking nutritious meals to experience what it means to live Jewishly. 

I am certainly not opposed to hands on education, but this suspiciously sounds like good old fashioned home economics. If you are making this the center of your school system as opposed to "mere book learning" then forgive me if I suspect you of simply training girls to pull in a man, one of few tasks in life in which being able to cook as opposed to being able to produce an independent thought and argue for it can be an advantage.

The school's non-interest in book learning show up again.

At Shirat Devorah, we use women's connection to intuition, creativity, community, and processing to create a holistic environment. During hikes, Lab, and workshops students practice the Jewish women's tradition of imparting meaning through focused intention. We thus create tangible memories that students can draw upon in the future.

How do you run a lab with a "women's intuition?" I guess the same way you gain an education through hiking. It is a mystical sort of learning beyond the understanding of non-intuitive people like me.

For a school claiming to be about using Judaism to empower women, there is surprisingly nothing about sitting down and critically interpreting texts. Instead what I hear is that women are special; since they have this intuition they do not need a solid background in in critical thinking honed through reading books and analyzing texts. I would accuse them of being sexist except that historically I know the real conclusion of this sort of thinking; women are little more than children, beautiful to behold (as well as do other things to) and can be trained to do useful tasks around the house like cooking and cleaning, but never to be taken seriously as a social and intellectual equal.  

Let Jewish Teenagers go into Monasetaries and Soon They will be Texting on Shabbos

A decade ago, when I spent my post high school year in Israel, I attended Yeshiva Ohr Hadarom, headed by Rabbi Shalom Hammer. He is a good speaker and a decent person, though we failed to get along due to a personality clash and intellectual differences. Rabbi Hammer, for all intents and purposes, is a Haredi rabbi, operating in Modern Orthodox circles due to his religious Zionist politics and, one suspects, simple economics; it would not have been practical to get a position as the head of a Haredi yeshiava, a Rosh Yeshiva, so he tried playing Rosh Yeshiva with a bunch of Modern Orthodox teenage boys in the hope that they would be in the market for that sort of thing. Much to his frustration I was not looking for a Rosh Yeshiva to give me a connection to Judaism and God. I treated him as the adult authority figure in charge; I did not and he complained about this to my face that I did not give him the respect "he deserved" as a "Rosh Yeshiva."  

In a recent blog post, Rabbi Hammer discusses an incident where a bunch of his daughters' friends went into a monastery.

Considering that all of the teenagers on the trip are from Orthodox home and that according to most Orthodox rabbis it is forbidden to enter a church or monastery, my daughters were particularly upset that this considerable group of their friends would casually breach Orthodox halacha. Even more disturbing to them was that when they told their friends that they would not enter the monastery as it was forbidden according to rabbinic halacha, the majority of the group reacted explaining that this was only a Rabbinic prohibition and not worthy of serious consideration.



Rabbi Hammer connects this willingness to be lenient in this matter to the recent scandal breaking out in the Orthodox community that many Orthodox kids text on the Sabbath. These kids believe that it is ok to make compromises in Jewish law so they pick and choose what to keep as it suits them.

I see a connection between entering a monastery and texting on the Sabbath, though it is not the connection that Rabbi Hammer makes. I certainly oppose texting on the Sabbath and would see any person who does as being outside the Orthodox community. (This, of course, does not mean that they are bad hell-bound people, with whom I will not be friends with.) That being said, I think the root of the problem, at least in part, lies in the attitude toward Jewish law taken by people like Rabbi Hammer and imbibed by the kids he tries to teach in which everything is either permitted or forbidden.

Take the example of the monastery. Now, before I continue, I should confess that I do enter churches despite the fact that I do recognize that there are real problems with doing so. (See "What Church Services have Taught Me about Prayer.") I do it because I study Christianity professionally; I also do not associate the Church with persecution nor do I see it as necessarily something idolatrous. (If I am willing to walk into a Chabad house and give Lubavitchers the benefit of the doubt of not worshipping idols despite the giant rebbe picture then I must give Christians the same benefit of the doubt with their crucifixes.)

Whether I am doing the right thing or not, any competent halachic authority would recognize that entering a church or a monastery is in a completely different league from texting on the Sabbath. For that matter, of all the places a teenager might think to go to, we should rather teenagers visit a monastery, where they just might learn something about history and other religions than go drinking at a club. This needs to be brought over to students in a tangible way beyond simply muttering something about rabbinic and biblical prohibitions. You wish to enter a monastery, fine; make the case to me, based on Jewish sources, that this is ok. If you can hold a straight face and make a plausible case then I will let you go. Regardless of whether I agree with your decision, I will accept the fact that you are part of the halachic process that is Orthodox Judaism.

What happens when rabbis and teachers take the shortcut with students and write off everything they oppose as wrong and against Judaism? The result is not that students will accept all these injunctions as serious prohibitions to be obeyed absolutely. On the contrary, they will, in turn, take shortcuts of their own and treat all prohibitions as simply an opinion to be accepted or rejected as they see fit. If going into a monastery is simply something that rabbis claim is a serious prohibition even when it is obvious that it is not, then when rabbis say you should not text on Shabbos they must also just doing what they usually do and forbidding even minor things. So one can text in good conscious and still be an Orthodox Jew.

Wishing all my readers a good non-texting Sabbath.