A Regional Recipe for Creating Radical Movements

Those attempting to understand what is coming out of Iran today need to appreciate the extent of which the region of Persia has served to foster militaristic messianic movements. It is actually not just Islamic movements. In terms of Jewish history, this region gave us Abu Isa in the eighth century and David Alroy in the twelfth century. In many respects Persia can be seen as the Islamic world's equivalent of medieval Provence and Italy, regions beloved by modern medievalists for their tendency to do fun things like produce heretical movements and popular revolts. In trying to wrap my head around Persian history (both in terms of my modern interests and in trying to understand the context for the Jewish messianic movements in this region) there seems to be a number of factors that parallel the Southern European situation and have helped contribute to this state of affairs. I am mainly interested in medieval Persia, but these things seem to continue to be relevant to modern Iran.

1. 
   
   The ghost of an ancient advanced culture.
   Italy and Provence were the parts of Western Europe in which the Roman Empire exercised the strongest influence. In many respects, even after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the symbols of the Roman Empire did not go away, particularly in terms of physical monuments. Besides for centralized government bureaucracy, the other thing that the Romans did better than anyone else in pre-modern history was to build. One of the things that have struck me about Ahmadinejad of Iran is the close personal connection he feels to ancient Persia. This is perfectly understandable. The papacy still claims the title of Pontifex Maximus, high priest of the ancient Roman pagan religion. Persia was certainly a culture equal to Rome. The Parthian Empire was, for the most part, more than a match for Rome militarily. Do not underestimate our Iranians; they are a very sophisticated people, just the right amount to be both intellectually and militarily dangerous.
    
2. 
   
   The absence of a strong government.
   Medieval Italy was a collection of city-states. There was no unified Italy until the nineteenth century, a galling reality for classical republicans like Machiavelli, with dreams of reconstituting the Roman republic. Provence was outside the authority of the French monarchy until the thirteenth century. Not unsurprisingly, Provence was brought into the orbit of the French monarchy due to the Albigensian Crusade, when French forces came south to eliminate members of the Gnostic Albigensian sect, branded heretics by the Church and the original targets of the Inquisition.
   Since the downfall of the Sassanids up until modern times, Iran has had periods of strong centralized rule, for example the Safavids in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That being said, the dominant narrative is one of a region outside of the major centers of power. While Iran converted to Islam, it successfully resisted Arabization, maintaining a Persian culture. (The number one thing I repeat over and over again to my students is that Iranians are not Arabs. They do not speak Arabic, they speak Farsi.) Furthermore Persia managed, in the long run, to resist Arab military control. The Umayyads and later the Abbasids were never able to establish a firm control over the region. Unlike almost the entire Arab world, Persia managed to resist Ottoman control. This left Persia as a haven not just for Twelver Shiism which eventually became the dominant mode of Islam, but also numerous other brands of Shiism for Zoroastrianism, which survived the Islamic conquest. In terms of Jewish history, Persia was a major center of Karaism.
   
   

In creating radical societies, such as medieval Italy and Provence and Iran down to modern times, we are looking at two contradictory forces. While we want a history of an advanced society, with a legacy of strong government, that strong government should be lacking in the present day reality. We need to be far enough from established centers of political authority to avoid notice. This creates the sort of power vacuum that allows radical movements to flourish in the first place and not get crushed. But it is precisely these contrasting forces that allow for radicalism to work. While the lack of centralized rule on the ground allows for radicalism in practice, it is precisely this history of strong centralized government that forms the ideological basis for such radicalism. Here political history serves as the perfect State, all the more convenient for it being a non-existent State, open to be claimed by anyone willing to use it.

Jack Bauer’s Last Hobbesian Battle: Some Final Thoughts on 24 and its Politics

I must admit that I did not particularly care for this last season of 24. Looking back, I wish the show had ended with season five (seasons one, three and four are the truly brilliant ones). Seasons six and seven, to say nothing of the truly horrendous made for TV movie, lacked the energy and the writing to keep them interesting. 24 may not be a well written show in the conventional sense, but at its best it stands as the most truly addictive show in the history of television. This came from a manic intensity and the show's utter unpredictability. As the perfect show for our ADHD generation, it was always who is going to get killed next, when is the next bomb going to go off, and who is going to be the next person to be revealed as a double agent? At the center of this was Kiefer Sutherland's Jack Bauer. Sutherland brought an aggressive power to this role, tempered by a humanity that makes Bauer the secret agent/cop hero against which all future such roles will be judged. The last few seasons descended to parodies of 24 as the same plot-lines were recycled with utter predictability, the writers followed by the actors just going through the motions.

Season eight of 24 was, for the first two thirds of the season, running steady for being the worst season of the series. Then a sniper took out Jack's love interest, Renee Walker, and Jack went off the deep end. This, in of itself, is fairly standard 24 fare. Added to the mix, though, was the reintroduction of the Nixonian former president Charles Logan. (Jack took him down in season five for his part in the conspiracy to take down the beloved President of the early seasons, David Palmer.) Logan manages to worm his way into the confidence of President Allison Taylor and convinces her to cover up evidence that the Russians were behind the events of the first part of the season (including the assassination of the president of a foreign country and a dirty bomb nearly going off in New York) in the hopes of keeping them at the peace table.

President Taylor might never have been the moral rock that President Palmer was, but she was decent enough. Her corruption is rendered plausible since it is the capitulation to that basic politician's conceit that what they do, the deals they negotiate and the pieces of paper they sign, are actually what matter and not the military reality on the ground. This sort of politician's conceit has played itself out tragically in real life with the British government covering up from the public the fact that Germany was rearming out of the fear that the public would force a war. The British eventually signed the Munich agreement to bring "peace in our time." Similarly the Israeli government signed the Oslo accords with Yasser Arafat. Throughout the peace process, whenever things broke down the reaction of the political class was that the parties needed to come back together to negotiate another round of accords, regardless of whether Arafat could be trusted to keep it. The dictum "war is politics by other means" has it backwards. Politics is warfare by other means. The natural state of affairs is for nations to wage wars of destruction with each other. Peace treaties are our attempt to find a better solution. No one has an innate right to live in peace. You earn the right to live in peace by convincing others that you can be trusted and that it is their interest to let you live. I support peace in the Middle East, even land for peace and a Palestinian State. These things will only happen when the Palestinians and the Arab world at large believe that the choices are either peace and acceptance of Israel or the destruction of their cities and countries as was done to Germany and Japan. (My brother refers to my politics as "Liberal Machiavellianism.")

Jack reacts to President Taylor's betrayal by going on a killing spree, taking down the people involved one by one, carving out the guts of one Russian operative and impaling the Russian ambassador. This climaxes in the final episode with Jack putting Logan and President Suvarov of Russia in the scope of a sniper rifle. I find Jack's actions to be perfectly morally defensible. Even to the question of whether assassinating the president of Russia will lead to war, I would respond that an international politics with leaders who initiate assassinations of other leaders and WMD attacks on other countries in order to scuttle legitimate peace treaties, is going to lead to a major war anyway. Better take your chances with attempting to remove such leaders. For treaties to mean something then those who would violate them must not be allowed to benefit from them. I was actually hoping that Jack would kill President Taylor. Governments are based on treaties with their citizens, no different than the treaties between nations. The treaty is that citizens should obey their leaders and not murder them and leaders agree to follow their own laws. Taylor violated that treaty and therefore undermined the very legitimacy of her government. She even went so far as to implicitly allow for Jack to be killed. This leaves only Hobbesian war and Jack is certainly someone capable of waging such a war. Jack could even be excused for the innocent civilians that get hurt or killed along the way. Taylor allowed herself the moral license to allow civilians to be hurt. Jack, in order to fight this Hobbesian war, has no choice but to arm himself with the same moral license. This is the reason why one needs to keep treaties. Treaties only mean something when the consequences of breaking them become too horrifying to contemplate.

What a great way for the show to go out for Jack to assassinate the President. Instead the show got cold feet and sold out. Jack does not even kill Suvarov and Logan. Instead he allows Chloe to talk him down to try to reveal the cover up. As part of the plan Jack orders Chloe to kill him, knowing that the government would never allow him to live. It would have been great if Chloe had followed through and the show could have gone out with the loyal Chloe killing Jack. Instead Chloe only shoots him in the shoulder. The plan fails, but the day is saved when Taylor repents her actions after seeing Jack's video where he explains his actions and refuses to go through with the treaty. The early seasons of 24 deserved something better for an ending.

Between Baron and Scholem

In his eulogistic review of Salo Baron, "The Last Jewish Generalist," Ismar Schorsch criticizes Baron and the last ten volumes of his eighteen volume Social and Religious History of the Jewish People for adopting an external view of Jewish existence, one that privileged sociology and economics, over an internal view of Jews, focusing on religious experience. According to Schorsch:

Ours is a politically secure generation hungry for the sacred. Its guide to the past is not Baron but Gershom Scholem, and its own historians tend to concentrate on subjects of religious import often studied from an exclusively internal perspective. If Scholem fertilized all sectors of Jewish thought with his lifelong study of kabbalah, contemporary scholarship is rediscovering the magic of midrash. The present temper prefers text to context, literature to history, meaning to significance, and regards Baron as the pinnacle of positivistic Wissenschaft.

For those of you familiar with the state of academic Jewish history, does Schorsch's declaration from 1993 still stand or was he crowing victory a little too soon? I find his declaration in favor of Scholem to be ironic, considering that, when he made it, Moshe Idel had already become the flag carrier for the revisionist movement in Kabbalah studies against Scholem, a trend that has only accelerated in the past seventeen years. Furthermore only several years ago Schorsch himself, when he stepped down from being the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, delivering a "what is wrong with the Conservative movement" farewell address in which he lamented the fact that the Conservative movement had abandoned the sort of scholarship represented by, wait for it, Gershom Scholem.

In terms of general historiography, I am wondering as to what extent the trend Schorsch describes is representative of the study of European history in general. Baron can be seen as a Jewish version of the sort of socio-economic history represented by the likes of such early and mid-twentieth century historians as Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel. So where are we historians at, dropping dry technical sociological studies in favor of a history of "meaning?"

Jack’s Last Battle: Some Final Thoughts on Lost and C. S. Lewis

This past week saw the series finales of two of my long-running favorite shows, Lost and 24. Without them, I will probably get more work done. So here are some final thoughts of these two (usually) brilliant and revolutionary shows.

To deal with Lost first, I have long cherished the fact that they included C. S. Lewis in the guise of Charlotte Staples Lewis among the great philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau, and Hume to be named on the show. So I was particularly intrigued by the fact that they chose to pull off an ending reminiscent of how Lewis ended the Chronicles of Narnia with the Last Battle. Lewis famously (or infamously) had almost all the major human characters from the series killed off in a train accident and taken off to Aslan's kingdom where they all live happily ever after. Keep in mind that we are dealing with a series of kid's books. Most infamously of all, Lewis has Susan left behind, because she had abandoned "belief" in Narnia for her adult cares, mainly nylon stockings. Many have argued that nylons were meant as code for sex and that Lewis was telling kids that if they have pre-marital sex they will go to hell.

Anyone familiar with Lewis' wider body of work, not just Narnia, would tell you that, for Lewis, it really is about the small things, such as nylons, to such an extent that if Lewis had written that Susan was not going to be saved because of her sex life, sex is really code for all the petty vain things, like nylons, that are really at the heart of the matter. In Lewis' theology, it is always the small sins that are important and which damn us. The big sins are merely the end result of all the small sins. For this reason, it is of little importance that, in Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Edmund betrays his siblings to the White Witch. The real issue at hand was Edmund's pride and jealousy, present from the beginning of the story. A chastened humble Edmund is a savable Edmund, regardless of the consequences of his misdeeds. On the contrary, having to live with the consequences serves all the more as a chastisement to cure the original sin. The real problem with sex is not the act itself. The real issues (at least potentially) at hand are the pride that led one to think they are above conventional morality, the desire, not so much for physical pleasure, but to be part of the inner circle of people in the "know" and the rebellion against conventional morals. As Lewis points out in his essay, the Inner Ring:

Freud would say, no doubt, that the whole thing is a subterfuge of the sexual impulse. I wonder whether the shoe is not sometimes on the other foot. I wonder whether, in ages of promiscuity, many a virginity has not been lost less in obedience to Venus than in obedience to the lure of the caucus. For of course, when promiscuity is the fashion, the chaste are outsiders. They are ignorant of something that other people know. They are uninitiated. And as for lighter matters, the number of people who first smoked or first got drunk for a similar reason is probably very large.

A person could easily come to regret a sexual action, in of itself, and repent. It is not so simple to repent from the pride that led to it. Without facing the issue of pride there can be no meaningful repentance for sex and the deed will be repeated and worse things will follow.

The major mystery with Lost in the final season was what to make of the alternative parallel universe, populated by versions of the main characters, that came into existence, seemingly after Juliet Burke set off a nuclear bomb on the Island at the end of season five. I was hoping for Desmond Hume to bring back John Locke from the alternative universe to save the Island from the smoke monster, who had taken the form of Locke. (Hats off to Terry O'Quinn for the range he showed over the series, playing the noble John Locke with his struggles with faith in the Island for four seasons, the smoke monster pretending to be Locke for one season, and the utterly satanic yet chillingly charming smoke monster this last season. Whatever qualms I may have with the quality of the writing of this show at times, I cannot stress enough how talented a cast of actors Lost had.) The alternative universe Locke would be followed by the rest of the people in the alternative universe, who sacrifice themselves and the happier existences of the alternative universe to cross back over and save the Island.

I was always far more of a John Locke fan than a Jack Shephard fan. Shephard might be important as the political leader of the survivors, establishing a community, but it was Locke, who confronted the big questions of meaning and the purpose of the Island. (I never cared about the Jack-Kate-Sawyer love triangle.) I would compare the relationship between Shephard and Locke to the relationship, I once discussed, between Peter and Ender Wiggin in the Ender series. Instead of letting this play out, the writers decided to let Jack take on what should have been Locke's role as the faith leader to save the Island.

To top it all off, in the end, the alternative universe ends up playing no role in the final conflict with the smoke monster. It is a gateway world where all the characters who died during the show along with the characters who survived but will one day die have been gathered together to fix their relationships before moving on together. The "Jew" Benjamin Linus is even given a truly moving repentance scene that Lewis would surely have approved of. Linus asks Locke for forgiveness for trying to kill him; the sin he focuses on is not murder, but the jealousy that drove him to it. That being said, this gathering together was a cop-out that dodged the major issues and failed to give six seasons of mystery the ending it deserved. Whatever else you can say about what Lewis did to Narnia in the Last Battle, and it certainly is the most difficult of the seven books, at least his narrative made sense.

Asperger Discrimination: Some Self Evaluation

One of my recent posts dealt with some of my reactions to being let go by the high school I was teaching at. I used an email sent by a member of the administration, which praised the job that I did for them even if I they would not be able to have me back as a launching pad to muse about the nature of discrimination and where one draws the line between saying that those with certain character traits are ineligible for a job and saying that members of certain minority groups are ineligible when the characteristic in question is closely related to a specific minority group. The example I gave was that of a black teacher. We need to be honest that integrating society and creating a more tolerant one is not a simple or painless task. Having a black teacher teach a white class is likely to create friction. A world in which blacks carry the burden of integration, of making sure that there is no friction and of having the right "touch" in dealing with students civil rights is one in which civil rights would never get off the ground. Every act of bigotry can be hid behind a smile and the claim that unfortunately the person fails to socially integrate himself. As an Asperger, I see myself as a member of a minority group and feel we should receive everything that society grants to other minority groups such as blacks and gays. Looking back at the post I can see how it could have been misread by people, not familiar with my thought processes, casually glancing at.

To be clear, I was not arguing that I had been discriminated against. I specially pointed out that, even in my black teacher scenario, it is not clear to me that our black teacher would or should win. It would be touch and go. I practice, I suspect, it would come down to the school being able to demonstrate that they are acting in good faith in dealing with blacks and the struggle with students was not simply an excuse or a more politically correct way of framing discrimination. This piece was also not meant as an attack on the school for daring to fire a teacher as "talented" as me. I specially said that I was very grateful to the administration for the opportunity. My whole argument is dependent on the fact that it was very kind of them to write me this letter. A person is never truly in a position to evaluate himself so I have no desire to argue one way or another as to whether I am a "good" teacher or not. I took the stance that overall I did a good job on all things subject to empirical evaluation since that was the school's stance and because it sets up the whole theoretical issue, which I wished to discuss.

My evaluation of myself is pretty much in keeping with how I think the administration saw me. I have a very strong background in the material and I am a good lecturer. I still need to work on my back and forths with students and my tendency to just wind myself up and speak for forty-five minutes straight. My ability to control a classroom is a major problem. I may love teaching and honestly care about the students in my classroom, but I certainly do not have an easy time relating to them. I am brash, loud, and students often find me intimidating. This leads to situations where issues that should have been easily defused blow up into major issues and reach the attention of administrators, by definition a losing situation for me. If I were an administrator, I would have questions about rehiring me since I am one more thing to worry about and a parent brought lawsuit waiting to happen. In the end I think I am a very good teacher for certain types of students. My ideal teaching job would be what Dr. Louis Feldman has at Yeshiva University teaching Classics to two students. I could be the quirky teacher at some college off to the side with his pack of students. This sort of job, of course, is rare in this day and age and is unlikely to come my way.

Any final judgment of my teaching comes down to a question of values. What is the most important part of teaching, being a fountain of knowledge for students to tap or someone that students like and avoids trouble?

Vote Cthulhu for Your Planet’s New Deity

I finally got around to reading Eoin Colfer's attempt to step into Douglas Adams' shoes And Another Thing …. Those who are not already familiar with Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, with its very British intellectual insanity, are not likely to understand nor appreciate this book and would be better served in starting from the beginning (when the Earth is blown to bits by the Vogans to make way for an interstellar highway). Hitchhiker fans are unlikely to go for this new entry either. It is not that Colfer is not capable of imitating Adams' particular manic writing style and his random storylines; Colfer can certainly effectively imitate Adams. The problem is one of Colfer being capable of resurrecting Adams in body, while ignoring the spirit. This may sound counter-initiative, but in a random absurdist story like Hitchhiker, character and plot matter all the more. However absurd Hitchhiker might become, we need to care about Arthur Dent and his travails. His relationships with Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox, Marvin the depressed robot, and Trillian have to work on a very human level. The absurdity is not an excuse to ignore this; on the contrary, it makes it more important. If we have nothing else to hang on to that makes sense we need to be able to grab on to the characters. The other thing to consider is plot. Hitchhiker worked best when it had a plot, no matter how ridiculous, to guide the story. The reader needs to be heading to some recognizable destination whether it is finding the ultimate question (the answer to which is 42) or saving the universe from cricket playing assassin droids. Without a goal, the story descends into a random sequence of acid trip jottings. (Adams did claim to have conceived the whole idea for Hitchhiker while drunk.) In all fairness, not even Adams was capable of consistently living up to this standard.

There was one short sequence that I found worthwhile and worth sharing. The planet Nano, and its leader Hillman Hunter, decide they are in need of a deity. They, therefore, turn to consider none other than H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu. (Do not bother trying to figure out how to pronounce it. It is not designed to be pronounced by human lips.) For those of you not familiar with Lovecraft, he specialized in macabre short stories and novelettes mainly about humans using science and dark magic to cut through the thin veil of their earthly reality. At which point they look out into a universe bereft of any benevolent deity, but instead populated by monstrous "ancient ones" like Cthulhu, a prospect that generally drives the unfortunate humans into insanity.


A huge anthropoid was seated uncomfortably in the interview room's office chair, its grotesque, scaled torso squirming in the confines of the small seat. Tentacles dripped from its chin like fleeing slugs, and hard black eyes glittered from the depth of a pulpy face.
Hillman Hunter shuffled the pages of the creature's resume.
"So, Mr. Cthulhu, is it?"
Hmmm," said the creature.
"Good," said Hillman. "A bit of the ineffable, I like that in a deity." He winked conspiratorially. "Still, it wouldn't be much of an in-depth interview if we couldn't get a few facts out of you, eh, Mr. Cthulhu?"
Cthulhu shrugged and dreamed of days of wanton genocide.
…

"I see here you were in people's minds a lot a few centuries ago thanks to Lovecraft. Not much since then?"Cthulhu spoke in a voice of meat and metal. "Well, you know. Science and all that. Put a bit of a kibosh on the god business." Clear gel dripped from his tentacles as he spoke. "I kicked around Asia Minor for a while, trying to drum u a little fear. But people have penicillin now, even poor people have reading material. What do they want gods for?"
…

"Next question. Our last god was a less is more kinda guy. Sent his son down, but didn't show up too often himself. I think, and no disrespect to the man himself, that was probably a mistake. I honestly believe that he would put his hand up to that himself now if we could ask him. What I'm asking you, Mr. Cthulhu, is: Are you going to be a hands-on god or an absentee landlord?"Cthulhu was ready for that one; he had been practicing his answer for that very question with Hastur the Unspeakable only the previous night.
"Oh, hand-on, absolutely," he said, leaning forward to make clear eye contact as Hastur had advised. "The days of blind faith are over. People need to know who is blighting their crops or demanding virgin sacrifice. And now I am going to look away, but only because prolonged eye contact will drive you insane."
Hillman shook the sudden torpor from his head. "Good. Good. Quite a stare you have there, Mr. Cthulhu. Handy weapon to have in the arsenal."
Cthulhu accepted the compliment with a flap of one prodigious tentacle.
"Let's move one, shall we? Where do you stand on the whole Babel fish argument? Proof denies faith and so forth."
"My subjects will have proof and faith," rasped Cthulhu agitatedly. "I will bind them to slavery and trample the weak underfoot."
"I seem to have hit a nerve there," chuckled Hillman. "Again, I think you're on the right track; maybe you might want to pull back a little on the slavery and the trampling. We have quite a lot of weak people here, but they are big supporters of the church, whatever church we eventually pledge to. …"
"So. An old standard next. Presuming your application is successful, where do you see yourself in five years' time?"
Cthulhu brightened. Thank you, Hastur, he beamed into space.
"In five years, I will have razed this planet, eaten its young, and stacked your skulls high in my honor." He sat back satisfied. Succinct and informative, a textbook answer.
A spluttering cough blurted from Hillman's lips. "Skull stacking! Come on, Mr. Cthulhu. Really? Do you think that's what god do today? These are interstellar times we've got here. Space travel, time travel. What we need on Nano is what I like to call an Old Testament god. Strict, sure. Vengeful, fantastic. But indiscriminate eating of young? Those days are gone."
"Shows what you know," muttered Cthulhu, crossing his legs."

(Eoin Colfer, And Another Thing … pg. 91-93.)

Jewish Philosophy and Politics: A Challenge from Yitzhak Baer

Traditional liberal thought castigates its religious opposition as being superstitious and otherworldly. The idea being that the more rational one is the more one is going to consider problems of this world. This framework is translated into a framework of good guy philosophers who are liberal and tolerant and their close-minded religious opponents. The Jewish historian Yitzhak Baer (1888-1980) was famous for turning this framework on its head. His History of the Jews in Christian Spain heaps scorn on the Jewish courtier class, with their Averroism and Maimonidean philosophy, as people of weak faith, who undermined the Jewish community and abandoned the Jewish people at the first sign of danger. This is in contrast to the simple Jews and the anti-Maimonidean rabbis who exemplified the true spirit of the Jewish nation. In his short book, Galut, Baer challenges the political pretensions of Jewish philosophy. According to Baer:

Philosophical exegesis, when it does not lead to skepticism, occupies itself with the problem of the relationship between faith and knowledge, between Jewish and secular education, between Jewish and Christian doctrine. The contrast between the Jewish world and the larger world is reduced to scholastic problems of dogma. Jewish philosophy is helpless when it approaches the problems of political and historical life, while at the same time many Jews occupy the most prominent positions in the political and economic life of their countries. Here the gap between the religious-historical vocation and real life is widest. (Baer, Galut pg. 50)

So I put it to my readership, do you agree with Baer and what might the implications of this be for Jewish thought? Are all intellectual forms of Modern Orthodoxy doomed to an ivory tower?

Rabbi Yigal Sklarin’s Defense of Gershom Scholem

Prof. Gershom Scholem famously devoted a large portion of his nearly thousand-page biography of Sabbatai Sevi to arguing that Lurianic Kabbalah in the sixteenth century led to Sabbatianism in the seventeenth. In Scholem's narrative, Isaac Luria revolutionized Jewish thought by fashioning a kabbalistic narrative focused on a process of metaphysical exile and redemption. The very act of creation caused the breaking of the divine vessels, causing the power of the divine light to fall into the hands of the forces of darkness, the klipot (shells). The practice of Jewish ritual, armed with the specific Kabbalistic interpretations of Luria and specific penitential practices would lead to the redemption of the divine light and heal the cosmos. Scholem assumed that by the mid-seventeenth century, Lurianic Kabbalah had spread to all Jewish communities in Europe and the Near East. Hence by the time that Nathan of Gaza declared Sabbatai to be the Messiah in the spring of 1665, Jews everywhere were prepared to accept this radical Sabbatian messianism with its explicit antinomianism. When Sabbatai converted to Islam, Nathan was ready to explain away the action as the Messiah descending into the forces of darkness to achieve the redemption of the divine light.

Prof. Moshe Idel, in his essay "'One from a Town, Two from a Clan': The Diffusion of Lurianic Kabbala and Sabbateanism," challenges this narrative. His main objection is this assumption of Lurianic Kabbalah becoming the dominant force within Judaism by the mid-seventeenth century. Idel argues that few people, even rabbis were in a position to understand Kabbalah and the Kabbalah that came through Europe was by and large not Lurianic, but that of Rabbi Moshe Codovero. Idel goes so far as to suggest that Scholem had his cause and effect backward. Lurianism did not spread Sabbatianism; Sabbatians spread Luria. Finally, Idel argues that Scholem overplayed the messianic elements within Lurianism. Those reading Luria in the seventeenth century would not have been jumping to some new radical form of messianism.

In a recent essay in the Bernard Revel journal, "In Defense of Scholem: A Re-evaluation of Idel's Historical Critiques," Rabbi Yigal Sklarin attempts to defend Scholem. Sklarin offers the case of R. Abraham Gombiner's Magan Avraham as an example of a popular work written before the outbreak of Sabbatianism that included distinctively Lurianic practices and concepts. Of particular interest to me is the fact that Sklarin attempts to use Gershon Cohen's theory of messianism to explain the popular spread of Sabbatianism. In "Messianic Postures of Ashkenazim and Sephardim (Prior to Sabbathai Zevi)," Cohen argued that Jews in Sephardic countries, unlike their Ashkenazi counterparts, were far more likely to start messianic movements due to the influence of philosophy. If the philosophical ideas current in rabbinic circles could gain popular currency and create a mass movement then why could not Luria have gone from rabbinic circles down to the masses to create Sabbatianism?


I am certainly intrigued by the prospect of rehabilitating the Luria-Sabbatianism connection. That being said, I find Sklarin's arguments against Idel to be very problematic. Yes, Cohen argued that Spanish culture was more open to messianism and less open to martyrdom due to the influence of philosophy. If I understand Cohen correctly, this was not simply something within the rabbinic elites, but on a mass cultural level. Regular people (or at least the literate ones) had some awareness of philosophy, particularly of astrology, and were willing to therefore willing to engage in messianic calculations. With Lurianic Kabbalah, we agree that this was something reserved for the rabbinic elites, not something that the masses would have been directly aware of. I fail to, therefore, to see how the analogy holds up. Furthermore, Sklarin seems to accept the premise that the Lurianic Kabbalah that reached our rabbinic elite was not the messianic Luria so how are the masses getting Lurianic messianism from the rabbis if even the rabbis are not getting that message? This leaves us with having to find some other solution besides for Lurianic Kabbalah to explain how Sabbatianism became a mass movement in the summer of 1665.

I am a Good Goy Now; I Believe in Yoshke, Pray to Getchkas and Eat Chazor Traif

Here is a poem by the converso Anton de Montoro (1404-77):


O sad, bitter clothes-peddler
Who does not feel your sorrow!
Here you are, sixty years of age,
And have always said (to the Virgin):
"You remained immaculate,"
And have never sworn (directly) by the Creator.
I recite the credo, I worship
Pots full of greasy pork,
I eat bacon half-cooked,
Listen to Mass, cross myself
While touching holy waters –
And never could I kill
These traces of the confeso (pejorative for Converso)

With my knees bent
And in great devotion
In days set for holiness
I pray, rosary in hand,
Reciting the beads of the Passion,
Adoring the God-and-Man
As my highest Lord,
And because of the remnants of my guilt
I cannot lose the name
Of an old Jewish son of a whore (puto).

(Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos - Split Identity and Emerging Modernity pg. 112)


So do we believe that this man was sincere in his profession of Catholicism; was he a secret Jew or just an all-round religious cynic?

Columbus OH and Sabbatianism

I came across the following comment about the Rabbi Jekuthiel Greenwald ztl, who was the rabbi of Beth Jacob in Columbus OH, in the early twentieth century:

Rabbi Jekuthiel Judah (Leopold) Greenwald, a prolific and eclectic scholar, best known for his halakhic work on the laws of mourning, Kol Bo 'al Avelut, after emigrating from his native Sighet, Hungary [This is the same city that Elie Wiesel is from. Now it is part of Romania.] to the United States, served as orthodox rabbi of Columbus, Ohio. One of his many interests over the years was Sabbatianism. He published in Weitzen in 1912 a full-fledged work, Le-korot ha-Shabta'im be-Ungaria (Annals of the Sabbatians in Hungary). In his Sefer ha-Zikhronot (Book of Memoirs), published in Budapest in 1922, Greenwald recalls how as a soldier stationed in the Balkans during World War I, he stumbled on to the grave of Shabbetai Zevi in Albania.

Rabbi Greenwald's son, a Denver advocate, informs me his father's literary estate contained no unpublished papers on the subject of Sabbatianism. Yet perhaps now that the Iron Curtain has been lowered in Eastern Europe, it will once again be possible for an enterprising researcher to have a look at the Sighet city archives. (Bezalel Naor, Post-Sabbatian Sabbatianism: Study of an Underground Movement pg. 107-08.)

Asperger Discrimination

As I have mentioned previously, I was let go by the high school I was teaching over the fact that, while I was a good lecturer and put together intellectually stimulating classes, I failed to properly "connect" with students. One of the administrators was kind enough to send me an email, thanking me for what I had done for them, even if they could not bring me back:


Benzion—you have done a lot of good things this year.  The effort that you have put in to your classes and to the school has been nothing short of exemplary.  Your knowledge of the material is superb, your preparation for your classes (with the Powerpoint notes) was admirable, and the level at which you taught was sophisticated and challenging.  Your willingness to engage the students in questions and discussion improved over the course of the year, and while there is much growth still necessary on this front, I applaud your effort in making some positive changes.

All of that being said, your way of relating to kids made it a challenging learning environment for them and contributed greatly to the classroom management problems that existed all year.  Whether in comments on report cards or in class, there seemed to be a constant series of difficult interactions that helped to create a gap between you and the students.  You tried hard to overcome that gap, and worked very hard to become part of the greater fabric of the school, and you deserve a lot of credit for that effort.  Still, this gap remained and I believe will continue to be an obstacle for you in teaching this age of students.


You are very bright, thoughtful and knowledgeable and I believe that you have a bright future ahead of you, but I also believe that working in a university or an adult setting—people who will appreciate your expertise and your knowledge for their own sake—is one that is better suited for you.

…

You began to explain to me on Wednesday the challenges your Aspergers poses for you.  In many ways, I don't truly understand them--just as you probably don't truly understand the way that I see and read people--the difference being that you probably have thought a lot about these differences whereas I have not thought about them all that much.  Given what you describe, though, I can tell that you have worked very hard to overcome most of these challenges and probably are conscious of it every day. 

Over time, with experience and learning, you may well become a very good high school classroom teacher, but I still believe that your strengths would be better used either with adults or in a setting such as a library, where you can be extremely helpful to those who need it but would not need to worry as much about group dynamics and classroom management. 


I must admit that I was impressed by this administrator's willingness to take Asperger syndrome seriously as a legitimate way of viewing the world and not simply as a disability. As I have said before on this blog, I view myself, as an Asperger, as a member of a minority group.

Here is a thought experiment I offer readers to consider how to understand my situation. Imagine this school had a black teacher, who was very talented, but for some reason did not relate well to the students. This is perfectly reasonable; there likely would be a major gap in terms of style and personality between such a teacher and our white student body. Maybe he teaches history as if he were a black preacher, expecting "amen" responses and likes to stick it to students as he challenges them about "white privilege," precisely to make them uncomfortable? (I actually teach very much in a preacher mode. Usually the second thing people notice about my teaching is that, besides for being very smart, I am also very intense.) What if our administrator were to write this black teacher the letter he wrote me, saying good job but you lack the right "touch" with students? There is a good chance this teacher would sue the school for discrimination on the grounds that what was really meant was that he was black. It is not clear that this person would win, but the school would certainly be hard pressed to respond. Where does one draw the line between color and ethnic background and personal relations, particularly as it is precisely the person's color and ethnic background that is causing the difficulty with personal relations?

The opposition would argue that part of multiculturalism is that the school has to prepare students, as part of their education, to deal with all sorts of people even those they might not naturally feel comfortable with. How are the students going to be prepared to deal with black superiors unless they have had the experience of being taught by black teachers? Does the school simply assume that blacks cannot or should not be in positions of authority so students do not have to worry about it. The school would be challenged to distinguish between the administrator's actions and the white shoe law firms of early twentieth century America, who did not hire Jews on the grounds that they did not "fit" with their sort of clientele.

One of the great lessons of the civil rights movement, and a confirmation of an "Asperger" truth, was the necessity of judging people by hard empirical standards as these are the only kind that are actually meaningful. All vague claims of comfort or how someone affects group dynamics are meaningless; merely cover for those in power. What these claims really mean is that "the person is not like us so we do not want him."

The Place of the Personal in Law

With the recent Supreme Court nomination of Elena Kagan (See David Brooks for his very classy takedown of her unwillingness to go on the record with any controversial opinions.) we can expect another round of public debate over whether justices should rule simply according to the law or with the desire to see social justice on the ground. President Obama assumedly has nominated someone who shares his vision of judges having the proper "heart" and liberal values to rule in accordance with a "living Constitution." Needless to say I view such sentiments as a betrayal of law. Law can and must only deal with universal principles for it to mean anything. The submission to abstract laws is justice; the submission to the personal opinions of others is tyranny and sic semper tyrannis. This is not because I see the legal system simply as a set of rigid principles; on the contrary I see a lot of room for personal judgment, just not at the level of the Supreme Court. I would propose a sliding scale to law; the higher you are and the more power you have to make laws the more you are restricted in your ability to apply personal judgment. On the flip side those at the bottom of the legal system, who are not in a position to make laws, have full power to apply their judgment as to how the law is carried out.

The policeman on the street does not make laws. It is simply his job to enforce them and cite or arrest those who violate the law. As a libertarian, I personally am opposed to all drug laws. Rational adults should be allowed to put any substance they wish into their bodies. If I were to serve as a policeman I would have no control over the fact that marijuana is illegal to various extents throughout the country. That being said, I am not obligated to arrest every person I catch in possession of the substance. A neighborhood with me on patrol would have fewer drug arrests and more lectures to kids about not using drugs. The law recognizes the existence of my personal judgment and expects me not to willfully destroy the lives of teenagers for making just one mistake and taking a puff of a joint. I do not have to take down the local drug dealer knowing full well that he will be replaced by someone who sells to kids and laces his material with potentially poisonous substances.

When we move up the legal system to the DA and the local judge, we are in a similar position. These people do not make laws nor do they have control over who is arrested. They are left, though, to consider as to what extent they will throw the book at those in the dock. What kind of plea bargains and sentences will they offer? They may have the power to put minors behind bars for possession, but that does not mean that they should. At the top of this part of the system, governors and the President may not make laws either, but they have the power to grant pardons. If I were the Governor or the President I would declare an open house on all those arrested on drug charges and offer pardons.

As a member of Congress or a senator I would have the power to make laws. It would be my job, as entrusted to me by my constituents, to enact laws according to my personal opinion as I think best for the country. I would do my utmost to end the war on drugs and legalize them. That being said, my very office would bar me from having any control over how any of these laws are put into practice. I would have to make the best laws I know and trust others to use their best personal judgment in carrying them out.

The top of the legal system is the Supreme Court. They have the unchecked power to declare laws to be unconstitutional and there is no higher authority to appeal to. This greatest of all powers must place the greatest of all limitations. Not only do justices have no control over how laws are carried out, they should not even have the right to use their personal judgments. Their very power stems from the fact that they are perceived as ciphers for the principles contained in the Constitution. If were to go on the Supreme Court, I would lose the ability to fight against the drug war. There is nothing in the Constitution that says that the government cannot do foolish things like ban adults from engaging in actions that do not cause direct physical harm to others. Actually, since liberal justices were kind enough to invent a right to privacy, I would be free to apply this law across the board, including drugs, but that is a side issue.

In Search of a Sense of Wonder in Fantasy: Some Thoughts on Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut

Teel McClanahan III was kind enough to send me his novelette Lost and Not Found - Director's Cut. I read many novels and the occasional short story, but the hundred page novel is an experience in its own right that does not come around very often. This is certainly not an easy genre to work with. I can think of only one truly great short novel, Stephen King's Shawshank Redemption. The pitfall of writing at this length is that it is too long for the simple short story concept and not long enough to establish the character and plot of full length novels. This certainly applies to McClanahan's whimsical account of an unnamed former lost boy, who returns to Neverland as an adult and runs off with Tinkerbell. I was intrigued by the main character and some of the world's McClanahan describes, but there is no real plot or character development to allow for a meaningful story. While it might be acceptable to the world of post-modernism to eschew plot and character, as a reader of fantasy, I have distinctively old fashioned tastes and literary values. Most of all I desire from fantasy a sense of magic and wonder, something that establishment post-modernism can only look askance at.

McClanahan's attempt rethink the Peter Pan story has its parallel with the movie Hook and Dave Barry's Peter Pan prequels. His deconstruction of fantasy has its parallel in Neil Gaiman. Post-modernism and deconstructionism get a bad rap as a means for academic elites to sit on their thrones and arrogantly heap scorn over anything that does not fit in with their politically correct values and sense of what counts as literature. The thing that I admire so much about Gaiman, with his Sandman graphic novels and American Gods, is that while he is busy deconstructing mythology he does it from a perspective of love and admiration for it. One never gets the sense that he is talking down to his material. Rather it is his desire to find a way to make mythology meaningful in a post mythological age. I would contrast Gaiman with Gregory Maguire and his Wicked series. While I loved the musical version of Wicked, I find his books to be effused with this arrogant cynicism. His deconstruction of the Wicked Witch of the West seems to stem not just from an innocent desire to rethink the world of Oz, but as a put down to L. Frank Baum as a sexist male. To me, fantasy is about a sense of wonder. Even if we go into dark places; it should be as a sense of tragedy. If the hero is going to go down it should be in saving the world that he loves and that we the reader love in turn. A good example of this, again in a fantasy with a strong deconstructionist element, is Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series. Snarky moralist preaching of either the traditional or post-modern kind has no place in fantasy. While I love C. S. Lewis, this is the major weakness of the Narnia series. I think Lewis serves as a good lesson here, though, in that he can get you to overlook his Christian moralizing with the sheer sense of wonder he offers in Narnia. (That and a killer sense of satire that allows you to take his preaching with a wink and a nod.)

Lost and Not Found falls into the camp of Maguire. McClanahan walks into the world of Neverland not out of a childlike sense of wonder, but out of an adult's cynicism. I do not get this sense that he loves Neverland or Peter Pan. On the contrary, Peter is a contemptible child and Neverland, a child's world, is to be replaced by something more "adult" like Haven. The one thing about Neverland that he seems to like is Tinkerbell. If I were to sum up the novel it would be as his personal sexual fantasy with "Tink." (I assume it is not for nothing that the main character goes unnamed.) Not that McClanahan's love scenes, while numerous, are that graphic. That being said, they felt out of place and wrong and in that sense pornographic.

As a lover of fantasy literature, I look forward to the day when fantasy achieves the literary respect it deserves, when Lord of the Rings is seen as not just great fantasy, but one of the greatest works of twentieth century literature period. As much as I want this, I would not have it by selling out to post-modern deconstructionism. Fantasy should be the bastion to stand against such cynicism. If that means that we never get the respect of the "literary" types then so be it.