Kidnapping Kalman: A Lesson in the Exodus

This past Monday, Miriam and I hosted a kiddush in honor of Kalman's third birthday. This came with speaking privileges, which I decided to take advantage of. 

Do you see this Kalman here?  I am sure many of you would like to kidnap him. How would you go about doing it? On the surface, it would seem to be a simple task. Pick the boy up and walk out. Now here is where things get tricky. You see, even though Kalman is small, he can kick, and scream and he really likes Mommy. So brute force would not actually be practical for more than a brief period of time. What is needed would be to keep Kalman from realizing that he is being kidnapped for as long as possible. Tell him: "Let me help you find your parents. ... Your parents asked me to look after you for a little bit. ... I will take you home in the morning." Eventually, Kalman will realize that you are lying to him. (He is a very smart boy.) That being said, if you keep control of him long enough, you will eventually be able to make the case that he has been abandoned and that no one loves him anymore. He has no one but you so he might as well make the best of the situation. It should be noted that, in the case of most kidnapping cases, this can go on for years as the victims come to engage in behavior that appears from the outside to be compliance with the captor and even downright acceptance of their situation. 

One of the interesting questions in regards to the Exodus story is why bother going through the whole process of speaking to Pharoah, inflicting the Ten Plagues upon him, and then baiting him into destroying his army at the Red Sea. With the might of God, Moses should have been able to march the Israelites right out of Egypt without even having to talk to Pharoah and get his permission. A way of thinking about it is to say that the real story was never really about getting Pharoah to let the Israelites go, but getting the Israelites to agree to leave. The Israelites loved their Egyptian masters and would have never agreed to leave on their own. Moses, therefore, needed Pharoah to order the Israelites to leave and to trick the Israelites into believing that they were just going for a few days to worship God. Hence, Moses only asked for a temporary leave and told the Israelites to borrow vessels from their neighbors. What kind of borrowing is it if you are never coming back? 

The Exodus did not free the Israelites. They were "kidnapped" from being Pharoah's slaves to God's. In this, the crossing of the Red Sea played a critical role. Once the Israelites saw Egyptians dead on the shore they knew that this was not some temporary outing, but that they were never going back. Pharoah was no longer their master, God was. Israel needed to accept that and make the best of the situation. 

Nearly six years ago, I came out to Pasadena for the summer. I somehow seem to find that I am still here with a wife and a Kalman. My parents have told her: "No backsies." So I guess I am stuck; I might as well make the best of the situation. I love my wife and my Kalman and do not want to be free from them. 

Toward a Lockean Theory of Halakha

In the previous post, I argued that Haredi Judaism, to the extent that it accepted charismatic authority in the form of Gedolim, must be seen as an anti-halakhic movement. Charismatic authority is implicitly antinomian in that the only way for someone to demonstrate their absolute loyalty to the charismatic authority figure, as opposed to some textual authority, is to violate the law as interpreted through text. For example, Sabbateans were known to secretly eat a cherry on the fast of Tisha B'Av to demonstrate that they did not really need to fast on account of the coming of Sabbatai Sevi. On the contrary, the way to now truly fulfill the commandment of fasting was to eat. The real purpose of fasting was to signify faith in the coming of Sabbatai, the Messiah. So by showing such faith in Sabbatai, as to do what might look like a sin, you are the one who is really fasting, as opposed to the fasting non-believers, who are really the ones eating. Similarly, if you believe that it is impossible to know the law through one's own intellectual efforts, but require the aid of Gedolim, then the logical way to demonstrate this faith is to commit a sin like taking a bite out of that traif sandwich at the command of the Gadol.

In a post-Enlightenment world, there are good reasons to be tempted by charismatic authority. It very neatly solves the challenge to authority both from potentially heterodox methods of interpreting the world (such as science) and, most importantly, from non-believing clergymen, working to bring down the faith from within. Charismatic authority, if we accept it, clearly trumps science and offers an a priori religious authority that makes liberal clergymen irrelevant. We see this logic at work within American Protestantism as well, where the Evangelical use of charismatic authority has beaten the text-based authority of the mainline denominations.

Let me suggest an approach to religious authority that might redeem text-based authority in the modern world, making use of John Locke style social contract theory in which everyone is free to follow their own understanding of Judaism and free to reject other opinions as demonstrating that the person is not serious about their Judaism, all the while being subject to everyone else having that same power. Here is another thought experiment. As a scholar of Jewish history, I have just made an important discovery in my university library, a set of Gemarah and Shulhan Arukh. Our parents and grandparents were all committed socialists, who raised us on kibbutzim. So despite the fact that we all strongly identify as Jews, none of us know anything about halakha. Even after we started believing in God again, we felt that there was something missing in our relationship to him. Observing the laws in these books look like the perfect solution we have been praying for.

We are going to start a club called the LOJS (Local Orthodox Jewish Synagogue). We will gather together on Saturdays to engage in Jewish worship, as set forth in the books I found, and to listen to lectures on how to observe the many strange laws found in these books. (Can you believe it, but we are going to have to baptize our dishes.) Sessions will be presided over by a Jewish studies professor, whom we will call a rabbi. There is nothing special about him and people should feel free to ignore him. It just makes sense to have someone in charge to be officially not obeyed.

Word of the LOJS club is spreading and soon we will have chapters in many different cities. Now, in trying to recreate some form of traditionally observant Judaism, we will face a number of challenges related to authority. We are trying to create a religion based on what we read in a set of books. These books say a lot of things, much of which is blatantly contradictory (do we listen to Bait Hillel or Beit Shammai) or simply difficult to understand, leaving a lot of room for interpretation and reasonable disagreement. So even if everyone was totally committed, we would have people wanting to practice different versions of Judaism. Since we are all baalai teshuva trying to figure things out, none of us carry any real authority that others should listen. To make matters worse, all sorts of people are applying to join our club with different levels of observance. Most people are more in the market for a few rituals to give some spirituality to their lives, but not to refashion themselves with a complete set of laws that must be accepted in totum. Furthermore, everyone is coming to Judaism with previous social and ideological commitments, which they are not about to give up now that they are joining their LOJS. For example, we have the nice gay couple who want to be married in the club, the feminist studying to be a rabbi, the libertarian-anarchist who has no intention of praying for the restoration of any Davidic monarchy and the Christian who believes that Jesus is his Jewish Lord and Savior. Different LOJS clubs are going to make their own decisions about where to draw the lines and who can be members, but no one is in a position to force their views on anyone else.

The sensible solution to these problems of authority would be for every individual person and LOJS club to proceed with creating their own standards all while showing the spirit of charity for all those other clubs setting their standards. God did not speak to me and I am not the heir of any special tradition. I am just a scholar trying to read and apply a manual like anybody else. Furthermore, we have to accept that everyone is coming to Judaism with some kind of previous ideological baggage, which sets boundaries on how they will interpret laws. For example, classical liberal Jews might refuse to kill homosexuals and Amalekite children. We have to accept this for the simple reason that we have no greater divine authority than they do. Just as we need our opponents to accept us even when they disagree with our interpretations and look askance at our ideological commitments so too must we be consistent and accept them despite our disagreements.

There is one limitation I would place in order to keep everyone honest; we are free to reject anyone, who does not appear to us to be acting in good faith and seems to be using Judaism as cover for some other ideological agenda. A greater level of personal observance should be a cause to give the benefit of the doubt over those who are less observant. That being said, overzealousness in rejecting other LOJS clubs should serve as prima facia evidence of using Judaism as cover for another agenda, much as a lack of ritual observance would. For example, even as I, much like Chabad, welcome people who drive on the Sabbath, are intermarried or even gay, I would reject the membership applications of members of Jews for Jesus and Jewish Voices for Peace, finding that they perform little in the way of Jewish practice and their Judaism consists mostly of using their Judaism to castigate other Jews for failing to believe in Jesus or make suicidal concessions to the Palestinians. Clearly, their agenda is simply to call themselves Jews in order to convert us to their actual religion. Similarly, I might reject applications from Satmar on the grounds that despite their meticulous observance, their eagerness to denounce other Jews and place themselves on some kind of moral platform indicates that they are less interested in Judaism as a way of practice and to relate to God than they are in setting up an anti-modernist cult. In making these decisions, I recognize that I make myself vulnerable. Not only should I not expect any tolerance from those who I have rejected, but reasonable people might also come to question my motivations in the particular lines I draw and decide that they cannot accept me.

Clearly, there would be nothing to stop a Jews for Pork group beyond our ability to reject their application as a Jewish organization. (I would make a point in distinguishing Jews who incidentally did not practice kosher in their homes and ideological traif eaters.) That being said, we should be able to avoid the problem with antinomianism. There are no hard hierarchies let alone charismatic authorities so there is no reason why there should be any antinomians in our midsts, particularly if we do our job in rooting out those trying to use Judaism as cover for other agendas.

Social contract theory is often criticized for being ahistorical. There was never a moment when non-civilized men came together and agreed on any kind of social contract, whether the Hobbesian, Lockean, or Rousseauean versions. This criticism misses the point that the social contract was never something that happened in history, but is happening every day. The United States government stands because every day the vast majority of Americans, not me, get up and agree that the government has moral authority over themselves and their neighbors even to the point of killing them. The moment that even a small percentage of the population begins to question this then you get the Bastille and the Berlin Wall.

Similarly, many people might question the applicability of my scenario as it lacks any FFBs (frum from birth). What you have are some Jewish Studies majors deciding that they are really interested in halakha and getting other people to listen to them. (Granted that no one would ever take us seriously.) For me, this is precisely the point. Living post-enlightenment and emancipation, there are no people truly born religious. Being observant Jews is something that we decide every day. Furthermore, there is no power of tradition to give anyone any inherent authority over anyone else. My father might be an Orthodox rabbi, but I grew up in Columbus, OH as a product of American culture. Just as a genetic test would demonstrate my utter lack of racial purity, even a casual reading of this blog should be enough to demonstrate that my ideas are hardly pure of gentile influence. I do not claim to be anything more an American with classical liberal values and conservatives politics, who grabbed onto the Judaism he found around him, trying to give himself a community and some meaning to his life. I challenge anyone to demonstrate that their Judaism is any purer.

There are many Jews out there, who lack my Jewish education. I am not smarter or more virtuous than them and claim no intrinsic authority over them. I am sure, if they wish, they could study the same texts that I studied and surpass me. There are certainly many Jews who are more learned than me. I am sure that, if I applied myself, I could remedy that. Such people may be compared to my in-laws, brother-in-law, sister-in-law and younger brother, who all, unlike me, have medical degrees. It may be prudent that I take their medical advice seriously, but none of them can claim any kind of authority over me; I remain free to shop around for medical advice. Most importantly, I deny that any of them are intrinsically smarter or virtuous than me (besides for my mother-in-law). If I wanted to, I could go to medical school and become a doctor as well.

Let us do away with charismatic authority and even the hierarchy of tradition. Let us be the People of the Book.

The Antinomian Implications of Gedolim: Are You Willing to Put Your Traif Where Your Mouth Is?

A prominent feature of Haredi society today is the belief in the infallibility of their rabbinic leaders, the Gedolim. These Gedolim are supposed to be miracle workers, whose knowledge supersedes that of ordinary mortals like you and me. In essence, Haredim took halakhic Judaism, premised on textual authority, and replaced it with charismatic authority in which religious leaders are assumed to receive some kind of divine revelation. There was a good sociological reason for this. It was charismatic authority, ironically, that was best suited to defend religion against modernity's challenge to religious authority. As a simple Jew, why should I not listen to the Conservative rabbi, who says that it is ok to drive to a synagogue on Shabbat if I live far away and would otherwise not be able to celebrate Shabbat as part of a Jewish community? Even to make a halakhic argument against driving on Shabbat will be counter-productive. You might fail to convince me and I will, therefore, go drive. Even if you succeed this time, you will have implicitly conceded to me the premise that, in the absence of any religious authority with coercive powers, I am my own ultimate halakhic authority and am free to rule however I wish.

The Haredi solution was to declare that there was a body of men whose opinions, a priori, cannot be challenged. It is not just that these Gedolim are really smart and have good arguments for their positions. I like to think that I am a smart person too so tomorrow I will come back with even better arguments, at least to my mind. The Gedolim must not just be smarter than me, their intelligence must be of such a different kind that I could never imagine being in the right against them.

A large part of the Haredi success has been due to its ability to claim for itself the mandate of being the defenders of Jewish Law; are not Haredim the strictest in terms of religious observance? This is in large part due to the Haredi world's clear lines of authority. But as with any Faustian bargain, the price to be paid is high. Part of what of I find fascinating about the Haredi use of Gedolim is that their practical use in the defense of ritual orthodoxy does not change the fundamentally antinomian implications of charismatic authority and may come to serve as the perfect cover to destroy halakha.

For those who would defend the absolute authority of Gedolim and also claim to be loyal to halakha, I propose a thought experiment. Imagine that the Gedolim were to call you into a secret room and order you to eat the ultimate traif sandwich. Would you listen to the Gedolim or would you, in your "arrogance," dare to place your limited understanding that there is such a thing as kosher over their wisdom and refuse to eat it? Some simple Jew, who recalls that, according to Leviticus, a pig is not kosher as well as stories about Maccabean martyrs, is going to think he has the right to lecture the Gedolim about kosher and accuse them of not following the Torah? Does he not know that without the Gedolim we would all be lost like sheep without a shepherd, prey to Reform and Conservative Judaism with their women rabbis?

Note that there may be a very good reason for the Gedolim to want you to eat traif. Eating traif is a useful signaling device as to who really is loyal to  Haredi Judaism. A person who is not willing to listen to the Gedolim and eat traif, but prefers to follow his own understanding of Judaism today might turn around tomorrow and not accept that Judaism opposes women rabbis. Alternatively, a failure to eat traif on the command of the Gedolim might endanger Judaism by opening up the possibility that some Jews might, at some future point, question the rulings of the Gedolim regarding kosher and refuse to eat in the homes of other Haredi Jews. An Orthodox Judaism in which members are not united in eating each other's food is liable to fall apart. Such a divided community would lack the moral standing to defy the liberal denominations on women rabbis. Clearly, it is better to eat a pig than to accept women rabbis. (Or at least that is the impression I get from the OU.) We can even add "who made men and women in their places" in addition to the traditional blessing for traif: "who permits the forbidden." Only a godless heretic could be against saying more blessings when we all know that a single amen has the power to change worlds.

One might take support from the story in Rosh HaShanah in which R. Gamliel forced R. Joshuah to violate the day of Yom Kippur as he calculated it. Allowing there to be two Jewish calendars risked destroying the religion and needed to be stopped at all costs, even violating the religious consciousness of R. Joshuah. (Perhaps the Dead Sea Sect supported women rabbis in addition to their solar calendar.)  I should note a distinction between R. Joshua violating his Yom Kippur and our traif case. R. Joshuah had every reason to believe that R. Gamliel was acting in good halakhic faith, adhering to the principle that one is not allowed to travel with a stick and a money belt on Yom Kippur. R. Gamliel might be wrong in his astronomical calculations, but he made his mistake as part of a legitimate halakhic process based upon textual analysis and not charismatic authority. In our traif case, the Gedolim want you to eat what they acknowledge to be a pig on the assumption that they are not bound by any text-based halakhic process. In fact, their goal is to destroy the practice of text-based halakha as a heresy that would allow any person with a Judaica library to become their own halakhic authority.

A Judaism in which every person is free to do what is right in their own eyes as long as they can point to a Jewish source cannot be called Haredi. A Judaism in which it might be ok to eat traif, even in secret antinomian rituals, cannot be called Orthodox. Take your pick, text or charismatic authority. I vote for there to be such a thing called halakha even if that puts me in charge of my own religion.

Mormons Have Nothing to Fear From the Federal Government

(Start at about 3:50.)

Like Samantha Bee, I oppose Donald Trump. I believe it is particularly important for conservatives and libertarians to be out in front in denouncing Trump, because not only do Trump's policies go against conservative and libertarian values, there is a very real danger that our opponents will accuse us of supporting the very kinds of policies that we have long denounced. Think of the milage that liberals have gotten out of claiming that the "free market" policies of George W. Bush caused the financial collapse of 2008. It is important that this resistance to Trump be peaceful and should focus on not granting him any kind of respectability or moral authority. For example, journalists should not agree to interview him or his staff or even attend his press conferences. His rallies should not be covered. Entertainers should not agree to perform at his events. In this cause, conservatives and libertarians should be willing to reach out to liberals whenever they are willing to offer a big tent opposition (which the Woman's March was not).

While I believe that musicians, who played at Trump's inauguration concert should be denounced, I must admit to finding Bee's comments about the Mormon band Piano Guys to be disturbing. She mocks them saying: "You are four white Christian guys from Utah. Things are going to be ok for you." Her statement, reveals an incredible ignorance of history. There is no religion that the Federal government has worked harder to destroy than the LDS Church. This ranged from passively allowing Mormons (including their founder Joseph Smith)  to be murdered by mobs to actively seizing church property and mass arrests of Mormon polygamists. (Bee would be better served reading the Supreme Courts' 1878 Reynolds decision rather than make snide remarks about polygamy.)  Even after Utah became a state, Mormon Apostle Reed Smoot was not allowed to be seated as a Senator from 1903-07 because of his leadership position within the Church. (If only the Senate refused to seat him for being one of the worsts protectionists in American history.) So Mormons have good reason to fear the Federal government. It should be noted that government persecution of Mormons continues today. Mormons are very good at providing social services and keeping their needy off of welfare. So to make a Mormon pay taxes to fund social services on top of what they already donate to their Church's social programs is not only theft but a violation of their First Amendment rights. If we apply strict scrutiny, the government should not be allowed to pass a law that so blatantly harms a specific religious group, particularly one that the government has conspired in the past to harm.

Will Trump directly go after Mormons? I consider that unlikely, but then again I consider most of the liberal nightmare scenarios being thrown around to be unlikely. The danger of Trump is less what he might actually do in office and more the precedent he sets for someone with the intelligence and ideological willpower to do something truly terrible. This is in much the same way that Obama and Bush must carry a share of the blame for what Trump is going to do because they gave him the precedents in abusing executive power.

Bee's "hate speech" and "Mormonophobia" is a good example of the Left's hypocritical lack of universalism. They do not march to protect all groups. Some groups are "more equal than others." You only count as a minority group if you march in step with the liberal agenda. Get out of line and you will be transformed into "white Christians" and your history of persecution will be conveniently sent down the memory hole.

Religion Reading List

My Episcopalian aunt (she is married to my wife's step-uncle) works in her church's Sunday school and is interested in improving her religious education so she asked me for a suggested reading list. Here are my recommendations. My criteria were books that are intellectually sophisticated that avoided the obvious polemics from either an orthodox or anti-religious positions. I also made a point of including books dealing with Church attitudes towards Jews and women. I would be curious as to what other suggestions blog readers would make. 


Bible:

Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book by Timothy Beal.

Prophets by Abraham Heschel.  

The Year of Living Biblically by A. J. Jacobs. 

In God's Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible by Michael Walzer. 


Judaism:

Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism by Sarah Bunin Benor. 

American Judaism: A History by Jonathan Sarna. 

The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles Reappraised by Marc B. Shapiro. 

This is My God by Herman Wouk. 


Jewish and Christian Relations:

Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism by Daniel Boyarin 

Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism, 1500-1750 by Elisheva Carlebach.

Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages by Mark Cohen. 

Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Jewish Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times by Jacob Katz.

Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages by Hyam Maccoby.  

Early Christianity:

Jesus, Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium by Bart D. Ehrman. 

When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger. 


Medieval Christianity:

Holy Feast and Holy Fast: the Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women by Caroline Walker Bynum. 

The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements by Norman Cohn.  

Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages by Dyan Elliott.

Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 by R. I. Moore. 


Modernity:

Theological Origins of Modernity by Michael Allen Gillespie. 

God is Back How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. 

Secular Age by Charles Taylor.

United States:

Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics by Ross Douthat. 

Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction by Kathryn Gin Lum.

Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Mark Noll.  

Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know - And Doesn't by Stephen Prothero.

American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell. 

The Unlikely Disciple: a Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University by Kevin Roose. 

Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back by Frank Schaeffer.


Psychology:

Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt.

Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion by Rodney Stark and Roger Finke. 

2016 in Reading

Between my tutoring work and taking care of Kalman, I have not had time to blog much. As my tutoring has me driving into Los Angeles three time a week, I still get to listen to a lot of books. (God bless Audible.) As such, I would like to give a shoutout to some of my favorite books from the past year, books I would have loved to blog about if given the opportunity. None of these books are explicitly libertarian, but they are all worth the attention of lovers of liberty.

For psychology there is Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and  Elliot Aronson. As someone who likes being right, this humorous book sometimes cut a little too close for comfort. Considering how terrible humans are at admitting mistakes, one of the great virtues of the market is that it forces you to admit that you were wrong after a fashion. (It is called going bankrupt.) Can you trust a system like government designed to take people who are even worse than most at accepting blame and protect them from ever having to do so? The chapters on police interrogations and wrongful convictions are frightening. Has the art of criminal investigation really improved much since the Middle Ages?

Dr. Alan Brill used to tell us that people during the Middle Ages were not irrational. On the contrary, they would call us irrational. So for Judaism let me recommend his Judaism and Other Religions: Models of Understanding. In a post-Enlightenment multi-cultural world, the greatest challenge to any religion is how to grant legitimacy to other religions while still being able to justify the continued existence of yours. I greatly respect Brill for his ability to draw a line between offering textual background and advocacy for any particular solution. This book categorizes different Jewish stances regarding non-Jews ranging from saying that they are completely trapped in error to relativists positions where no one has any claim to objective religious truths. There is one point where Brill breaks his academic neutrality to acknowledge that a particular position is racist. Even this case serves demonstrates Brill's fairness as he does not attempt to sugarcoat Jewish tradition to make it palatable to moderns.  

Donald Trump's rise and electoral victory have drawn attention to the plight of white America. For this, I recommend Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones. This is top of the line journalistic history using a powerful narrative of nice Mexican boys dealing black tar heroin to white suburbanites in the midwest to make a general argument on how we need to rethink our conceptions of drug use and addiction. As this is a rare tale that takes us from Columbus, OH to Los Angeles, I feel a special connection to this book. Quinones is intent on blaming pharmaceutical companies for pushing painkillers ignoring their potential for addiction. I see a tale of moral hazard. The American government, with its regulation of the drug market, created a two-tier system of doctors prescribing legal drugs and a black market of drug dealers. This left Americans defenseless against the dangers of prescription drugs. My doctor with his lab coat and framed degree would never give me anything dangerous. He has nothing in common with the smelly villainous street corner dealer. We can see the problem even in our use of language as "drugs" have come to mean only the illegal kind, implying that there is a meaningful difference between them and the legal kind.

For History, I recommend Imbeciles: the Supreme Court, American Eugenics and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck by Adam Cohen. Buck vs. Bell stands along with Dredd Scott as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in American history. The State of Virginia conspired to have a perfectly ordinary woman declared to be mentally incompetent so she could be sterilized for the crime of being poor, uneducated and a rape victim. This is a kind of horror story for me as I can so easily imagine the government today using the same tactics to go after autistics. Just as the line between mental deficiency and being poor and never being allowed to finish grade school is easily blurred, so to can the lines between mental deficiency and not being able to function in a traditional classroom also be so easily ignored by those with an interest in doing so.

For fiction, my recommendations come from science-fiction. We have the Three Body Problem series by Cixin Liu. This Chinese mishmash of the Cultural Revolution and War of the Worlds is one of the most learned works of science-fiction I have ever encountered. As with anything by Neal Stephenson, it helps if you have a graduate level background in the history of science. This series competes well with Atlas Shrugged and Moon is a Harsh Mistress for being the greatest pro-liberty science-fiction story ever written. The heroes of this series are all fundamentally individualists, who act for their own personal human reasons as opposed to the large elaborate plans of governments.
  
Influx by Daniel Suarez is another highly intellectual novel in which the hero has to struggle against a vast bureaucracy staffed by people who act in the "public interest" to withhold advanced technology from the public. They have a complex argument, based on computer simulations, as to why they need to be in charge of all of humanity that could only be comprehended by a computer. There is a particularly harrowing torture sequence in which the hero faces off against a machine intelligence, who demands he cooperate with him in replicating human ingenuity. Failure to comply is met with the step by step destruction of his own personhood.

It took awhile for me to get into the Red Rising series by Pierce Brown. I got that it was going to be Hunger Games on Mars. Young Adult dystopian novels were beginning to bore me. Then something happened that shocked me and this was not the early murder of Darrow's wife, which, while well handled, was hardly surprising. If Darrow draws parallels to Katniss, he is far more morally tainted. The second book pushes the series even further into Game of Thrones territory. Book three contains one of the best pro-capitalism speeches in all of fiction. It comes suddenly and from a character that you had not realized was one of the good guys.  

Attack of the Yeshiva University Faculty

Recently, political commentator Ben Shapiro spoke at my alma mater, Yeshiva University. He mocked transgenders as "mentally ill." Shapiro came under attack by many faculty members in a signed letter to the YU Commentator. Among the signers were some people I respect such as Steven Fine and Elizabeth Stewart. In addition, R. Shalom Carmy, the man my younger brother predicted I would be in a few decades, wrote his own letter.

I have criticized Shapiro in the past over his treatment of Islam. In this case, I do not support treating transgenders as mentally ill for the simple reason that I find the entire notion of mental illness to be meaningless. There is no empirical basis for calling anyone mentally ill. The only difference between saying that transgenders are mentally ill and saying that they are just born that way or that they are pursuing an "alternative lifestyle" is a value judgment. If you think there is something inherently bad about a transgender lifestyle then transgenders must, by definition, be mentally ill to desire to pursue such destructive ends. If, as most westerners today, you find nothing problematic about transgenderism than transgenders are not mentally ill. There is no empirical fact that could change your mind in the absence of a value judgment. What remains of mental illness is the political category of people that cannot be trusted within the framework of the social contract. For example, I could not care less if the people who believe that I am the High Comrade of the Young Elders of Zion should be deemed "mentally ill."  They need to be locked up or, preferably, sent to gas chambers. Their belief presents an implicit threat to my safety and the only true solution is to eliminate such people. 

The fact that the very concept of mental illness is absurd makes the faculty letter, in turn, very problematic. The signers point out: "Shapiro is not an expert on transgender experience or mental health, and his opinion does not reflect the current understanding of these very serious issues, in which people’s lives are literally at stake." 

I agree that Shapiro is not an expert on transgenderism, but then again no one is. We are dealing with a non-empirical non-rationalist concept so no one can claim any kind of objective knowledge about it. Even transgenders themselves can only describe their own personal experiences, not the wider experience of "transgenderism." It is important to keep in mind that psychiatry is not a science. It does not make any empirically predictive claims nor is it united by any kind of consistent methodology. Take any side you wish on the question of the sanity of transgenders and try to construct a test that might even hypothetically be valid. Therefore, an expert psychiatrist is in the same category as an expert theologian. Anyone can claim to be an expert theologian. Therefore, there can be no expert theologians.   

Because we are not dealing with objective physical reality, but only with subjective personal feelings, lives, by definition, cannot "literally" be at stake. If a transgender person immediately walked out of Shapiro's speech went home and blew their brains out, Shapiro would not be responsible in the least. He did not physically cause the death nor is there any reason to assume he conspired to bring it about. If anything, the faculty is endangering Shapiro's life. It is plausible that the government will use this kind of argument to pursue ideological opponents. It should not be too difficult to find a case of someone committing suicide less than twenty-four hours after reading a Shapiro column, giving the government a pretext to arrest Shapiro for murder. (Of course, by this logic, professors can go to jail if a student commits suicide after failing a class.) It would not be unreasonable to charge the signers of this letter with state collaboration and conspiracy to initiate violence. Such charges are not physical acts of violence but are violations of the social contract.  

I would like to conclude with a challenge to those who condemn Shapiro. If Shapiro had questioned the sanity of someone, who wanted their doctor to slice off their left pinky because they felt that they were really a "nine-fingered person," would you have denounced Shapiro with equal vehemence? From a purely logical point of view, there is no difference between someone whose happiness depends on surgically altering their hands or their privates to suit their subjective conceptions of themselves. Both cases would be irrational (as would any kind of plastic surgery). That being said, as a libertarian, I accept that humans are not beings of pure logic (more Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments than his Wealth of Nations) and it is their right to pursue their subjective desires as long as they do not initiate violence against anyone. By that same logic, I accept that people will have irrational distastes for certain behaviors and will express them through mockery.         

Haredi Theology Making Itself Irrelevant: Some Thoughts on Gates of Emunah

As a Maimonidean, I do not just disagree with Haredi theology, I stopped, long ago, taking it seriously. Haredi theology can be divided into two schools; there are those Haredim who are blatantly idolatrous (Chabad) and then there are those, who really do not have any theology at all beyond a vague sense of tribal supremacy. God must exist and have given us the Torah, because if he did not, how can we turn our noses up and talk condescendingly about the "goyim."

A good example of this is Gates of Emunah - The Principles of Faith, based on the lectures of the late Rabbi Shimshon Dovid Pincus. I was struck by his opening chapter as to the extent that, for a work that is supposedly about theology, how little the writer cares about actually making arguments. For Pincus, the arguments for Judaism are so obvious that they do not even need to be stated. Even a child should be able to figure them out. If you disagree with this then it can only be because you are spiritually tainted and maliciously desire to reject God. This leads to a counter-intuitive argument, but one that is distinctively Haredi: "Someone who studies the property laws of maseches Bava Basra is fulfilling the mitzvah of emunah because in this way he draws himself closer to Hashem. He becomes connected to Hashem, so he thereby attains emunah." (pg. 9) For Pincus, faith has nothing to do with abstract arguments or even clearly stating principles to believe in. Study tort law from the Talmud, something that has nothing to do with God and you will have somehow believed; in what, it is not at all clear. Of course, this line of thinking raises an interesting question; why should anyone, after reading this passage, bother to continue reading this book? You should immediately throw away the book as a waste of time and open a Gemara.

To be clear, I do not reject all arguments from subjective experience. I think that there is something to C. S. Lewis style apologetics where we believe in God because our world makes more sense with God in it. It is important to realize, though, that, for Lewis, this argument comes out of a dark and despairing place that recognizes that, at a sheer intellectual level, the argument against God is quite powerful. For example, in the novel the Silver Chair, when the Lady of the Green Kirtle tries to seduce the children into believing that there is no world above, no sun, and not even an Aslan, Puddlglum counters that it is amazing that they managed to somehow make up a better world to such an extent that he would rather die searching for their "childish fake" world above than continue to live in her "real" one.

Part of the irony here is that Puddlglum's argument gains its strength from the fact that logically the witch is right and that he seriously contemplates what it might mean to live in her Aslan-less world. The utter horror at this prospect suggests the faint possibility that perhaps there is something she has missed. It is important to keep in mind, though, that Puddlglum does not refute the witch. On the contrary, it is acknowledged that she has the better argument and that the evidence lies on her side.
It is sometimes easy to forget because we think of Lewis as a children's writer, how really dark Lewis could get. For Pincus to follow Lewis' path, would be to make his readers uncomfortable with themselves, which is the one thing his theology cannot allow him to do. His book exists not to convince his readers about what the right answers might be, but to reassure them that they already have the right answers and need to think no more about them.

While we usually refute arguments through contradictions or reductio ad absurdum, the proper approach here is to note that Pincus' theology makes itself irrelevant. I am reminded of Allan Bloom's argument against cultural relativism in his Closing of the American Mind. Imagine an idealistic college freshman sitting down for his first English class taught by a committed post-modernist relativist. If the teacher is effective at giving over the principles of post-modernism, our student should immediately abandon his English classes, go to business school and never open a book again. I would add that any intellectually honest relativist English teacher should immediately insist that their students go to business school, end the class and resign from their teaching post. At a practical level, one has to ask, why have elite universities been so ineffective at keeping their students out of the business world or keeping their schools from being turned into profit centers with students as mere customers? Perhaps students and administrators are learning the lessons of relativism a little too well and are better post-modernists than the professors running English departments.

If this Emunah book was honest, instead of Pincus' face, the cover should have a sign saying "do not waste your money buying this book or your time reading it." As with secular relativism, the consequences of taking this theology seriously go beyond financial bankruptcy for lecturers and book publishers. At the same time that Pincus claims that we do not need to study theology, he also laments the superficial nature of the observance of many Orthodox Jews. He blames secular influence but would it not make more sense to say that these Orthodox Jews have been influenced by the "theology" of writers like Pincus and reached the proper conclusions? Whether God really exists, there really is no reason to seriously think about it. Much better to study Talmudic business law, become a rich lawyer and a de-facto atheist. You should just practice Judaism because you like the community and being part of the chosen people helps your self-esteem. If you think about it, the commitments of Jewish rituals are not necessarily much greater than the cost most people pay to be part of a specific club. (Think of what students go through to enter fraternities.)

You might think that I am reading too deeply into things and that Pincus cannot really mean what I think he does. Except that, at the end of the first part of the book, Pincus openly comes out and informs us:

         If we were to speak of the ABCs of being a ben Torah, then the 'A' would be to grasp this point            of, "This is my God and I will glorify him." Someone who grasps this point no longer has to                study the Rambam's Moreh Nevuchim or the Sha'ar HaYichud section of Chovos HaLevavos.

Clearly, the only reason to study modern works of Jewish theology would be to understand the classics as the modern works might present material in a more accessible fashion. If there is no reason to read the classics, why should anyone waste their time with modern works like that of Pincus?

Tolerance For the Children of Gay Parents But Not for Orphans (or Contrarian Aspies)

As part of getting Kalman ready for pre-school, every other Friday, I take him to the Pajama Library Gan Katan at the Jewish Federation of San Gabriel and Pomona Vally. It is a great program and I love the people there. I am particularly grateful to the staff for going the extra mile to accommodate Kalman and me.  

This past meeting, I had an interesting exchange with one of the people running the program. In honor of the national holiday invented by Abraham Lincoln to drum up northern patriotism during the Civil War, we sang a lovely little thank you song.   

Baruch ata Adonai, thank you, God

Thank you for the candles
Thank you for the wine
Thank you for the challah
That always tastes so fine.

Thank you for my family
They love me when I’m happy
They love me when I’m sad.

Afterward, the group leader explained that originally the song said "thank you for my mommy, thank you for my dad," but they changed the lyrics to be more inclusive. I raised my hand and commented that "obviously, this was to be inclusive of orphans." The leader did not take kindly to this and said that this was not for orphans and asked me if I was being sarcastic. I responded that "as an aspie, I am incapable of sarcasm." I let the issue go and we actually had a much more pleasant conversation after group. 

To be clear, I strongly support tolerance for children raised by same-sex parents. It is not as if these children have violated any biblical commandments. I even support tolerance for homosexuals as I am morally opposed to initiating physical violence against anyone. Unlike the group leader, I also care at least as much about orphans, whom I am commanded by the Bible to not offend. I also care about people with sulfite allergies who cannot drink wine, people (like my step-mother) with celiac, who cannot eat challah, and people who struggle with depression, who go through long periods of not being able to be happy without actually being sad. If we were to be logically consistent and apply the same standard as we would to not offending children from same-sex families, the entire song would have to go. When asked if I was serious in saying that I was more concerned about people with celiac than I was about homosexuals, I responded that "as a classical liberal, I always place physical danger over non-physical danger. Since celiac itself presents an inherent physical danger while homosexuality does not, concerns about celiac should take precedence." 

Feel free to reject my conclusions, but note that I operate from a clear set of principles. If you want to disagree with me you are going to need to set forth your own principles and it will not be enough to say that you are tolerant as that just begs the question of whom. You cannot say that celiac patients should know that we love them and accept their challah-less lifestyles as it is equally reasonable to assume that children from gay families know that we accept them even with their two mommies or daddies.     

When it comes to not giving offense to homosexuals, there are two logically consistent positions. We can say that everyone, gay, straight, or celiac, must be protected from offense. Alternatively, we can say that society has established certain codes of speech and behavior and these include not using exclusionary language against homosexuals. Not that homosexuals are inherently more deserving of protection than those with celiac, but we recognize that society cannot protect everyone and so we must accept that society, for whatever arbitrary reason, has chosen homosexuals. Note that saying that society is being arbitrary is a more powerful reason than saying that it actually makes logical sense. I can always counter your logic. But if society is being arbitrary then I have no choice but to accept this as the price of membership. 

As it should be clear from the example of the song, total acceptance is not really possible. Whatever language you use, someone will always be excluded. This leaves the second option. If the group leader had rebuked me by saying that I was being impolite, then she would have been on solid ground. Of course, there is a price to be paid for such a position in that it is fundamentally a conservative position. If she did this, she would not be able to claim that she was being open and welcoming. Her argument would be as valid and morally useless as if she criticized my holding a fork and knife in the "wrong" way.

As an aspie, I get fearful whenever I hear liberals talking about acceptance that does not explicitly mention those on the autism spectrum. To not include those on the spectrum is to imply that we are not deserving of acceptance. I have no problem living in a society with arbitrary rules that I have to either take or leave as long as we are being honest about it. If we are going to talk about acceptance, then I demand the right to be accepted as a highly contrarian aspie, who fulfills his state of being by attempting to elucidate the most logically consistent position he can, regardless of whether neurotypicals feel comfortable. Anything less does not allow me to feel safe and accepted.     

Whose Vote is Really a Vote For Trump (or Hillary)?

From the beginning of this election, I supported Gary Johnson. I believed that there was a block of principled conservatives out there who would not support Donald Trump under any circumstances. Combine that with liberals seeking an honest anti-war candidate, armies of independents willing to go for something different and you get at least 20% of the vote. Maybe not enough to win, but respectable enough to make things interesting and create some momentum to push the cause of liberty forward. With Johnson polling at 5%, I recognize that he is not going to come anywhere close to winning. Thus I will be casting a protest vote. Many on the left will tell me that there is no such thing as a protest vote; a vote for Johnson is a vote for Trump. I find this argument to be very strange because, by the mere fact that they are agreeing to grant legitimacy to this election in the first place, liberals are the ones implicitly casting a vote for Trump.

I am a radical Lockean secessionist (to put in simplistic terms, an anarchist). Every property owner has the moral right to take their property and secede from their present country, forming their own new little state. I challenge anyone to come up with an argument against my position that could not have also been used by the British to invalidate the claims of the colonists during the American Revolution. One of the reasons why I am a secessionist is that I wish to avoid the conundrum of being morally compelled to do something immoral because it is the law. Read Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience and you will see an explicitly anarchist text. It is ok and even commendable to break an immoral law because your conscious precedes the authority of the law. The law can only have authority over you if you personally consent to it. Therefore, if you do not consent to the law because you find it immoral, the law never had authority to begin with and you never had any obligation to follow it. I challenge you to take a principled stand in defense of breaking the law even through non-violent passive resistance that does not rely on such anarchist premises.

Imagine that Trump wins this coming Tuesday. Come January, he is going to start rounding up eleven million illegal immigrants. We know very well that there is no way that any such plan could be carried out without mass murder. Trump has promised to eliminate any soldier that does not agree to commit war crimes so any soldier left is a de facto war criminal. What would be an appropriate response? According to my political morality, I am not bound to recognize any such Trump government. It is my right to pursue passive resistance and even to follow the lead of those British citizens in 1775, who claimed that it was alright to kill British soldiers. If you are not a secessionist like me, on what grounds will you claim that it is alright to do anything but comply with the will of the "people" and their President Trump?

What if the United States had a strong Nazi party, one that had the support of even 10% of the population? Could you accept an election in which they were even allowed to take part, as opposed to them simply being granted Idaho as an independent country or shipping them all to gas chambers? Even such a minority could easily leverage its support in exchange for the government having to agree to some seriously immoral compromises. Those familiar with the history of Weimar Germany know that during the 1920s the Nazis were a fringe party. Comes 1932 and there is the Great Depression so the Nazis get 33% of the vote. They then manage to pull a deal with the conservative parties to take power and once in power they do away with democratic elections. So instead of being in power for just a few months as an odd quirk in German history, the Nazis were able to stay on top for twelve years and start World War II. Most Germans never supported the Nazis, but the Nazis were able to manipulate a democratic system for their own ends. In essence, a fatal flaw of Weimar was that it allowed the Nazis to participate in the first place. Agreeing to be part of a liberal democracy in which Nazis took part meant accepting the Nazi takeover and everything that happened afterward.

The United States is a vast and diverse country with over 300 million people, the vast majority of whom I have good reason to heap contempt upon both their intelligence and moral judgment. This includes white men without college degrees, who believe that Mexicans are rapists and Obama is a Kenyan Muslim. It is precisely such people who are largely responsible for turning Trump into something more than a reality TV star on a joyride. Even if, as I hope, Trump loses, those hordes of angry stupid white men will still be there and they will still be voting American citizens. At some point, perhaps with a candidate who can forge an alliance with another angry and stupid demographic (it is not as if white men have a monopoly on those things), these angry stupid white men will win. What do you plan on doing then? Accepting that they will one day win is the price of having the United States. So either you reject having the United States and instead attempt to build a mini-state with only intelligent and moral people or you implicitly agree to support Donald Trump.

Remember that when this day of Trump comes (and it will), conservatives and spineless liberals will tell you that, while you are free to wait four years and vote against Trump, in the meantime you need to respect the fact that the American people voted for bigotry and intolerance. You can prepare yourself starting from today. Put your hand over your heart and repeat after me: I do not pledge allegiance to any flag, nor to any republic that does not even obey its own constitution. I follow my own conscience from God (however I choose to define him/her) and pledge to work for liberty and justice for all. If you are not yet willing to take this step, I understand (it took me years to get there). But please do not lecture me about how I am the one voting for Trump.

(To all the well-meaning conservatives out there, who reject Trump but feel that if they do not vote for him they are voting for Hillary, feel free to replace the name Trump with Hillary in this article. Rework my examples as you feel appropriate.)

The New MacGyver Reboot is Lame (and I am Not Just Saying That Because They Did Not Include My House)

A few months ago, my in-law's house was taken over for the shooting of a pilot for a reboot of the classic show MacGyver. For those unfamiliar with it, MacGyver features a genius secret agent, who manages to make all kinds of useful things on the fly from what he finds about himself. My in-laws got to live in a hotel for a week. Since we live in the guest house, we got to stay. It was cool to go outside and see the production. Everyone we encountered was really nice for letting us watch and not complaining that we got in the way. The episode was supposed to feature a wedding, shot in the garden. Miriam and I were married in that garden. How cool was it going to be to say we got married in the same place as a television wedding. The interior of the house itself was supposed to be MacGyver's house.

I was looking forward to seeing the show and being able to pick out what stuff was shot at the house. In fact, an early trailer featured a sequence shot on our front steps. It turns out that the original pilot was scrapped. So far it seems that MacGyver is going to be living at someone else's house. No hard feelings. It was a fun experience. What I find more frustrating, having become invested in the show, is that it is pretty terrible. The show's flaws are worth examing as an exercise in what can go wrong with an action/comedy.

It does not take much to imagine this show being pitched as a 24 with a tongue and cheek sense of humor, something like Chuck. If I were that producer, I am sure I would have been tempted to greenlight the project. The problem is, as my father once taught me, comedy is the hardest kind of acting to do. The material can sound great on paper, but you get out there and it just does not work. With drama, you can save some entertainment value even if things fall apart. There is no saving comedy that is simply not funny. What is particularly perilous about comedy is that it is all too easy to try saving a failed drama by deciding it is a comedy. You find the story stupid; well you do not appreciate that it was supposed to be funny.

This is exponentially the case when doing tongue and cheek. The temptation is to take material that lacks the laughs to be a comedy and lacks the plot and characters to be drama and call it tongue and cheek. To do tongue and cheek comedy properly you need something that works both as drama and as comedy. The difference between successful and failed tongue and cheek is the difference between Joss Whedon's Avengers and Zach Synder's Justice League or the original Star War films and the prequels. In both cases, the superiority of the former is matched by the difficulty in explaining why, particularly for anyone working on the project, not seeing the final product. With the later, we simply do not care about the characters or what happens to them so when they say something that is supposed to be funny it just sounds dumb.

The first episode of MacGyver (and here is to hoping it improves) featured plenty twists, turns and moments of peril mixed with banter packed into forty minutes that should have made it a fun ride. I mean MacGyver's love interest gets killed in the first few minutes in an operation gone south. The team needs to capture a biological weapon before it causes global mayhem. As it turns out, the love interest was a double agent who faked her death, leading to an intense standoff with MacGyver. In terms of action and peril, this episode probably outdoes most episodes of 24. On top of that, MacGyver has a sardonic older military side-kick and a clueless black roommate, telling jokes. So why do I think the show was a waste of time? Someone thought that peril and jokes could substitute for characters we care about when peril and jokes only work if we care about the characters. It is useful to compare the plot of MacGyver to 24. Season one of 24 ended with the revelation that Nina Myers had been a double agent the entire time and she murders Jack Bauer's wife. This was dramatically effective because we spent an entire season liking Nina and becoming invested in her complex relationship with Jack. She is his tech support and the main person he trusts at CTU even as they once had an affair and Jack is now trying to repair his marriage. Nina returns in seasons two and three and is an effective villain precisely because we get how she brings out Jack's anger and guilt. This emotional foundation allows Nina to be a formidable physical danger as well, capable of getting the edge on Jack.

I can easily imagine the material for the MacGyver episode working over the course of several episodes. After spending an entire season becoming invested in MacGyver's relationship with his techie, in a season-ending cliffhanger, she dies in a mission and MacGyver is left floating in a lake with a bullet in his shoulder. We pick up the next season with the bad guys still having their WMD and MacGyver coming back into the field. This would have provided some actual emotional heft for him to find out out that his love betrayed him. This would be a conflict with intrigue. Give me that and I might even start laughing at some of the jokes.

Let the Force be Your Guide

I recently started showing Kalman Star Wars. We can now add that to Wriggles, "Hobbes," and Superman to the list of things he likes enough to ask for by name. Out of curiosity, I ended up watching the original trailer for New Hope.

It is amusing as an example of a trailer cut by someone, who did not understand the movie or its true significance. A perfectly understandable mistake considering that George Lucas never understood Star Wars. Most obviously, at this point the iconic "a long time ago in a galaxy far far away" has yet to make its entrance, leaving us with the embarrassingly awkward "somewhere in space this may all be happening." In retrospect, implying that there is a romantic relationship between Luke and Leia is downright creepy. At a more profound level, though, the trailer misses the key feature of Star Wars, the Force. Contrast this with the prominent role played by the Force in Force Awakens trailers.

In a similar vein, if I were to create a trailer for New Hope, I would open with Obi-Wan Kenobi's monologue about the Jedi upholding order in the galaxy before the dark days of the Empire.
Instead of the Force, the original Star Wars trailer gives us this Flash Gordon-type adventure. Granted, this is what Lucas originally intended, but if Star Wars was all you see in the trailer, Star Wars would have been just one more campy space film from the 1970s to be treated with the same embarrassment as bell-bottoms. There are many cultural pieces from my childhood that I have no desire to share with Kalman; why Star Wars?

What makes Star Wars more than spaceships and laser guns is the drama of the Force. By this, I mean the struggle between the light and dark sides as played out on the galactic scale in the battle between the Republic and the Empire and on the human scale of the Force user tempted by darkness. As with J. R. R. Tolkien's Hobbit, Lucas initially introduced the Force as a device to move the plot forward without understanding its true importance. By the time of Lord of the Rings, Tolkien recognized that it was the ring that was all that stood between his story and a generic fantasy about a quest to defeat an evil dark lord and his army of orcs. As fans of the series know, Lord of the Rings is not about saving Middle Earth from Sauron. The real villain is the ring, which corrupts all who are near it. Frodo's quest is a personal journey to save his own soul from the ring. He fails to destroy the ring, but, providentially, saves himself along with all Middle Earth through his pity for Gollum. Instead of seeing Gollum as a monster, Frodo recognizes the fallen hobbit and realizes that, if not for grace, he would be equally liable to fall.

When evaluating Lucas, it is important to keep in mind how little he had to do with Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Those responsible for these films realized that Star Wars needed to be about something more than plucky Luke defeating the vast armies of the Empire with the magic of the Force. The big game-changer for Star Wars is in Empire Strikes Back when Darth Vader reveals that he is Luke's father. Instead of simply being a scary villain, Vader all of a sudden becomes a failed Luke. Now the threat of Luke falling to the dark side becomes frighteningly plausible. As we move to the climax of Return of the Jedi with Luke facing Vader and the Emperor on the Death Star, Luke's task is no longer to defeat the Empire, but to save himself from the dark side by not fighting his father. Luke also attempts to save his Vader by recognizing the human underneath the suit of armor. Luke's faith in Vader allows Vader to believe that there is good in himself and that he has a choice. In the end, it is not Luke's strength in the Force that prevails; it is Vader's human love for his son that saves the galaxy.

Writers of the Expanded Universe have appreciated the narrative possibilities of this tragic temptation and fall to the dark side along with the hope for redemption. Take a look at the graphic novel of Exar Kun, who is essentially forced to the dark side. Play Knights of the Old Republic, the greatest narrative video game ever, and discover the truth about Darth Ravan. The Darth Bane trilogy features an oddly moral, if murderous, Sith Lord. He does not seek power for himself. Rather, he selflessly works to advance the Force by training a student, who will one day possess the power to kill him and take the title of Sith Master. For Bane, being murdered by his student is not some kink in his system that he failed to perceive, but an essential point.

One way to see the failure of the prequels is how Lucas, having reasserted his control over Star Wars, failed to properly use the Force. We fans, who counted down the days until Phantom Menace in 1999 "knew" that we were going to watch the downfall of Anakin Skywalker culminating in the mother of all lightsaber duels between Vader and Kenobi. It is still shocking to see the extent to which Lucas ran away from that story, leaving it almost as an afterthought to the last half of Revenge of the Sith. By the end of Attack of the Clones, Anakin should have known Palpatine's true identity and have given himself, at least in principle, over to his Sith teachings even as he is yet to do anything irredeemably terrible.

The Force Awakens, for all of its flaws, understood the Force. Kylo Ren is a uniquely empathetic villain and not simply another bad guy in a mask. He is fallen, but he is still tempted by the light. In order to give himself completely over to the dark side, he murders his father, Han Solo. Someone who must go to such extremes to escape good must have a lot of good within him. Much of the success of the future films will depend on this continued struggle. Rey will have to defeat him, not in a lightsaber duel, but in recognizing his humanity. If Rey fails to see this and chooses to believe that brute force can win, she will fall to the dark side. Ironically, it is this struggle with the dark side that might allow her to empathize with Kylo, saving herself and the galaxy.

Teaching the Story of King David and Bathsheba: How to Groom Children for Abuse

Recently, during a study session with a student, I gave him a list of my five most disturbing stories in the Bible. I ranked the story of King David and Bathsheba as number three. For those unfamiliar with the story, King David has an affair with Bathsheba and then orders her husband, Uriah, killed off in battle in order to cover up the fact that he got her pregnant. The prophet Nathan rebukes David, who repents. Then, in the most troubling part of the story, God chooses to kill the baby, the most innocent person in this whole sordid incident, rather than killing David like he deserves (Samuel II 11-12).

In Haredi schools, the standard way to handle this story is to refer to the Talmud, which states that anyone who thinks that David sinned is mistaken. The reason for this is that soldiers traditionally divorced their wives before going to battle in case they disappeared so Bathsheba was technically single. She went to the mikvah so she was ritually pure. Uriah was liable to the death penalty because he placed Joab's name before David's. This line of thinking is used to buttress the notion that the biblical heroes were totally righteous. In essence, Haredim want to turn the Bible into the hagiographic biographies published by Artscroll. I can testify from my own experience as a student and from speaking to the kids I tutor, that this kind of education is spiritually destructive.

It occurred to me that there is a productive way to teach about David and Bathsheba, using the Talmud to make the opposite point. Yes, David did not sin and there are two things that you should learn from this. First, if you are a clever enough Torah scholar you could find a justification for anything, even adultery, and murder. To all my married female readers, if we think hard and creatively enough, we can find a way to invalidate your marriages. (The Catholics have gotten really good at this.) If we scour the corpus of Jewish mysticism we can even find reasons why it is a mitzvah to sleep with me. Clearly, it is not Pharisaic legalism that will keep me faithful to my beloved Miriam, but personal integrity. As my teacher, R. Aryeh Klapper likes to say: "The great secret of rabbinic Judaism is that you can justify anything on halakhic grounds. It is important that this remains a secret because the moment people realize this it will be the end of rabbinic Judaism." Ultimately, what stops us from declaring ham and orgies kosher is a loyalty to Judaism as a concept and a sense of what Judaism needs in order to survive.

This leads to my second point. David did not sin, but he deserved to die. We can accept every word of the Talmud's defense and it does not change Nathan's powerful denunciation of David one iota. On the contrary, Nathan's words gain strength as we are forced to reckon with the enormity of David's "wrongdoing" without recourse to simple sins such as adultery and murder. Imagine if we caught the world's greatest Torah scholar in a brothel. We drag him in front of Agudah's Council of Torah Sages to answer the charges against him. Because he is such a great Torah scholar, he might refute anyone who claims that he sinned. For example, the Torah upholds the world and is literally the equivalent of serving in the army. Thus, the continued studies of such a great Torah scholar are literally a matter of life and death. Thus, he must literally do "anything" to increase his Torah knowledge and it is a great mitzvah for any woman (as well as any man if that is what is called for) to aid him in any way they can. Obviously, in a time of such national emergency, things that look like sexual immorality are the acts of greatest holiness. It is people who fail to appreciate the true importance of Torah who are the real sinners. Does accepting his arguments redeem this man and allow him to return to his former position of respect in the community? No, the fact that he is able to defend himself so ably makes his actions all the worse. Now, he is no longer simply a tragic sinner, who could not control himself but a threat to the survival of Judaism itself. If his defense gets out, it will bring down Judaism in a way that a fallen Torah scholar never could. Thus, we would have no choice but to kill him.

I am frightened of the implications of allowing teachers to claim that what David did was ok and that God was only judging David very harshly because he was such a righteous man and he should not have done something that even looked improper. (Note that telling kids that this was anything less than a supremely terrible deed is saying that it was ok). We are teaching children that it is possible for something that looks like a great sin to be basically ok if it involves a "holy" person. Recent years have offered plenty of evidence that my Torah scholar in a brothel scenario is not a silly hypothetical. Whether consciously or not (it hardly matters) teachers are grooming students to become the victims of such men.

The problem of predators in our community is not simply a matter of a few bad apples but cuts at the heart of our educational system. I salute organizations like Project Y.E.S. and books like Let's Stay Safe for their efforts to bring about meaningful change.