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Indra’s Net: The Photography of Uncle Boonmee
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, opens with a still portrait: a long mid-shot of a water buffalo tied to a tree somewhere in the Thai countryside. Shot in twilight, the dark greens of the jungle blend seamlessly with the brown of the buffalo’s hide. While the opening shot [...] -
The Blog Wags the Dog
Once in a while a writer hits an idea so squarely on the head that society unconditionally embraces it. Such is the case with Orwell’s concept of “Newspeak” in 1984. A language autocratically contrived to limit imagination and willpower, Newspeak may be the most pervasively integrated science fiction term in civic discourse. By the 1960s [...] -
Fathers on Wax: On Syl Johnson
Syl Johnson. Photo by Masahiro Sumori. On a Friday night in December, I joined a sold-out crowd at Southpaw in Brooklyn to see the soul musician Syl Johnson. Johnson had recently released a comprehensive box set which was panned by music writer Douglas Wolk in his review on Pitchfork Media, creating a minor controversy. In [...] -
Religion Is Bad, and Other Responses
Ha'aretz's opinion page says religion is bad. The recent furor over a declaration issued by several Israeli rabbis, headed by the chief rabbi of Safed, Shmuel Eliyahu, urging Jewish residents not to rent apartments to Arabs, has been heated in all quarters. The primary angle taken by the Ha'aretz opinion page is that this shows why religion is bad. I want to talk about the response of some of the most prominent Israeli Orthodox rabbis who came out against the declaration.
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The Glorious Painted Life of New York
Herbert Katzman New York City may be, as Tony Judt writes, a city in decline. Its artistic and industrial regency has steadily weakened while “the intellectual gangs of New York have folded their knives and gone home to the suburbs,” and though the city remains culturally diverse, its days of global cultural ascendency are numbered. [...] -
Halakhic Death
The Rabbinical Council of America, the largest organization of Modern Orthodox American rabbis, recently released a controversial paper regarding the halakhic status of organ donation. The involved and controversial topic has been, for the past week, the subject of much debate. At stake is the basic question of whether modern orthodox Jews should be allowed to participate in organ donations: both on the giving or the receiving end. In what follows, I’ll try to give a very basic account of the issue. For those who are interested in a (much) more intricate discussion, I’ll direct you to this very educational post on Hirhurim.
Throughout halakhic history, the classic legal definition of death has been drawn from the circulatory system: If a person’s heart is no longer beating, it can no longer supply the rest of the body with blood. In a very short amount of time, this will result in the death of all the rest of the organs.
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Greek Thought
Different people celebrate different aspects of Chanukkah. In liberal and progressive circles, people tend to emphasize the general theme of political and religious freedom that the Maccabees embodied, given that they fought for the right to practice their religion. In more traditional and orthodox circles, however, one often hears the theme talked about differently: Hanukkah celebrates the independence of Judaism from the seductive and evil Greek culture and thought that threatened to lure the naïve Jews away from their Judaism. Read More...
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Question Authority: Who Rewrote the Bible?
The Dialogue Between Tamar and Judah, With Scribal Commentary Marked Last year, I chanted the story of Judah and Tamar; my partner Sarah chanted the preceding chapter. The Tamar story interrupts the larger Joseph narrative, splitting the brothers’ betrayal from Joseph’s experience in Egypt. Though the narratives are independent – and indeed the Tamar story [...] -
Typed Cartoons and Epistemology
I was recently forwarded a Youtube video that was made from the program that lets you create cartoons by simply typing dialogue.
It is very entertaining and worth a watch, but for those who don't have time, or have difficulty bending their ears around the computerized reproduction of ashkenazic pronunciations of Jewish legal and exegetical technical terms, I'll give a short run-down.
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The Ungrateful Heart
The MGTOW Symbol I. I hesitate to write about current events for this blog unless I feel that those events are somehow paradigmatic. Unfortunately, that seems to be the case with the beatings of leftist protestors by Tea Party activists in the last weeks before the midterm elections: a particularly vicious head stomping in Kentucky, [...] -
The Star of Redemption (From Depressing Kantianism)
Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) remains as famous for his novel approach to Jewish philosophy and religion as he is for his fantastically unclear prose style in The Star of Redemption. Everything he writes is packed, and there’s no way I could try to reduce him to even a few sentences, even if I did think that I had any sort of handle on his general philosophy, which I don’t. So instead I’ll just mention one interesting point of his. Read More...
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How to Wait for the Bus (and Why)
Probably nothing is as important to the a city’s identity as its public spaces. Parks, buses, and sidewalks are home to the quintessential interactions of city life. Anyone from tourists to mayors arguing how friendly or dirty or vibrant a city is will most likely cite anecdotes from public spaces. Food carts, street performers, vendors, [...] -
Jews Doing, um…
A common phrase that used to be heard in Campus Hillel mission statements was: “To maximize the number of Jews doing Jewish with other Jews.” Yet, as familiar as many of us may be with this formulation, it has today disappeared from nearly all Hillel websites and promotional materials (with a few exceptions). Why?
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What to Do about Maimonides
On the first day of the semester, a certain professor of mine unreservedly characterized the great 12th-century Rabbi Moses Maimonides as “the most influential figure in Jewish rabbinic history.” While there certainly might be other contenders for that distinction, the fact that my professor was willing to make that claim is telling. Maimonides’s groundbreaking theological and philosophical positions, to say nothing of his titanic Jewish legal work, the Mishneh Torah, have made an indelible mark on Jewish religious history. Read More...
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A Reasoned Religion
Looking at the picture of Hermann Cohen on the cover of his opus Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, it is a bit difficult to believe that he was a rock star. Not in the sense that he wrote brave contemporary music that spoke to the minds of the people, garnering an immense following and becoming a household name in his country, but rather that he did exactly that in the field of philosophy.
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A Curmudgeonly Interjection
I don’t like to weigh in on Israel issues in public forums. Everyone’s mind is already made up, the disagreements are about first principles, reasoned argument takes a back seat to party politics, and discussions as such tend to dissolve into cacophonic stupidity of endlessly escalating volume. Forgive me for being hopeful this time around. Read More... -
Modernity is the Size of an Olive
A 2,000 year old Olive Tree in Israel Recently, Ben secularized the idea, paralleled in Mircea Eliade’s study of religion, of “homogeneous” history. For Eliade, profane time – that is, time without divine intervention to organize it – is a vast, homogeneous expanse, the meaningless tohu vavohu (unformed and void) that precedes creation. Significant theological [...] -
Outreach!
The fireworks were flying in a meeting staged last week at Yale Hillel prefacing the search for a new Orthodox campus rabbi. Yale Hillel, like many Hillels across the country, are in a state of change, shifting and adapting to make room for new priorities, and it was therefore not surprising (though perhaps, to some, unwelcome), when the Hillel executive staff announced that the job description for the new rabbi would differ somewhat from what it has been in the past. Read More... -
The Terrible and the Horrible
We all know that Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook was, in his time, a passionate advocate of vegetarianism within a traditional Jewish philosophical framework. But Shmuel Hanagid? Seriously? Read More... -
How to Attack My Religion (and How Not To)
This post is being cross-posted at The Philosopher’s Stone, a fascinating blog which has gone from hosting Robert Paul Wolff’s full autobiography (!) to hosting an interesting discussion on the future of the left. Jews are sometimes called "People of the Book"; fine, but it's not this book. In a recent post on religion, Professor [...] -
The Agony and the Ecstasy (or, Where Kant Got It Wrong)
In only a couple hours, traditional Jews will be sitting down at their tables and eating of fine linens for the "seuda mafseket": the final meal eaten before the fast of Yom Kippur begins. According to the custom, the seuda mafseket is to be eaten in state, using the fine linen and dishes of a Shabbat or a festival meal -- though the day before Yom Kippur is not a festival.
Why the celebration?
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Talmudic Medicine and Halakhah
Those readers who have been following the daf yomi ("Daily Page" – a popular global Talmud study initiative) will have been having a good time recently. The program is currently working on the middle of Tractate Avodah Zarah, which deals with relationships between Jews and non-Jews generally, but has a lot of other good stuff thrown in as well. This past weekend, we were treated to an exposition on Talmudic medicine, ranging from pages 28a-29a. The passage contains statements like this (the translation is Soncino's):
Said R. Safra: A berry-like excrescence is a forerunner of the Angel of Death. What is the remedy for it? -- Rue in honey, or parsley in strong wine. In the meantime a berry resembling it [in size] should be brought and rolled over it: white [berry] for a white one, and black for a black one.
For all the prescriptive relevance that the Talmud and its intricacies have for Jews today, passages like this are seldom taken seriously, insofar as even many stringently Orthodox pay them no heed. I recall that during my time studying at an Orthodox yeshiva in Israel, I heard two of the brightest students engaged in heated debate over whether or not to 'just skip the medical parts.' One argued in favor of skipping because the passages were didactically useless. One argued studying them anyway, despite their being didactically useless.
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Bad Romance: Gaga and the Jews
Being religious, I am always happy to encounter blasphemy; it shows people still care. Katy Perry, apparently, does not agree: she’s been attacking Lady Gaga’s new music video, “Alejandro,” for combining “sex and spirituality.” This beef appears looks like the … Continue reading →
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Halakha and Homosexuality: why language matters
On July 22, a group of Orthodox rabbis put forth a statement of principles on homosexuality; The statement contains an error of language, one which reveals the way in which traditional Jews now talk about homosexuality. Eleven of the statement’s … Continue reading →
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Music Has Brought Us Together: Evolutionary Musicology?
I am Ben Miller–a new blogger about whom you’ll learn more soon. Raffi’s last post explored the idea of music as text—a Geertzian participant in its cultural context. The Breslovers yearn for their artistic product to find an integrated role … Continue reading →
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Rebbe Nachman and the Tape Player
Suppose that I spent this Saturday afternoon copying music of the Breslover Chasidim from my dad’s old cassettes onto my computer. I say “suppose that” because by copying the tapes onto my computer, I might have broken the law; the … Continue reading →
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Reading: it’s all in the family
The last post begins by considering whether Rousseau believes in a legitimate state—political authority—and finishes by questioning whether Dylan believes in legitimate interpretation—textual authority. By examining an old puzzle in Biblical textual criticism, I’ll connect these two problems, suggesting that … Continue reading →
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The Doctrine of Double Entendre
Dylan ends his post with a meditation on the entanglement of the subjective and objective experience. It’s all very nice to write poetry in which your head is the head-wrap, but how do you make laws if what’s in your … Continue reading →
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Post-Structuralist Golems
Here is a d’var torah (a word of teaching) that I gave tonight at the Drisha tisch. The subject was golems. -
Talmudicity or Why Blog?
Martin Buber privileges what he called “religiosity,” the individual’s spontaneous feeling of spirituality, over “religion,” the traditional outward forms and rituals of spiritual life. Similarly, Jacques Derrida contrasts “messianicity” with “messianism”: the former is a commitment to the possibility of revolutionary redemption, the latter the fact of an actual Messiah. -
Discipline and Punish lo hayah v’lo nivra ela mashal haya…
You might think that Foucault, a post-structuralist social critic, who helped open political science to the study of the human body and to what he called “bio-power,” would clash with the 1500+ year old religious legal code. Yet there are odd resonances, and even odder ironies. -
Post-Structuralist Golems
Here is a d’var torah (a word of teaching) that I gave tonight at the Drisha tisch. The subject was golems. A couple of points: 1) Tisches are, traditionally (or semi-traditionally–Chasidut is only a couple hundred years old) Friday night … Continue reading →
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Discipline and Punish lo hayah v’lo nivra ela mashal haya…
This month, I am learning at Drisha; in Talmud, we are covering the execution procedure for stoning. The post-modern yeshiva is a weird place; the dapei mekorot (source sheets) have included the non-canonical Book of Jubilees, the definitely non-canonical (for … Continue reading →
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On Jokes
I recently told my partner Sarah the following joke, from Woody Allen’s stand-up: I’m getting sued because I made a nasty remark about her [my ex-wife]. She lives on the upper west side of Manhattan, and she was coming home … Continue reading →
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Talmudicity or Why Blog?
Martin Buber privileges what he called “religiosity,” the individual’s spontaneous feeling of spirituality, over “religion,” the traditional outward forms and rituals of spiritual life. Similarly, Jacques Derrida contrasts “messianicity” with “messianism”: the former is a commitment to the possibility of … Continue reading →
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Objectivism and Objectivity (or lack thereof)
A Jewish friend of mine sent me this interesting and excoriating article about Ayn Rand, a Jewish writer and philosopher with remarkably un-Jewish beliefs. It was published in the Nation, the Jewish associations of which I am ignorant, which is not to say that they don’t exist. You can read the article here: http://www.thenation.com/article/garbage-and-gravitas?page=full -
Welcome!
Welcome to shibbolethmagazine.com, the website of a newly-launched journal on Jewish thought. Here you'll find, in addition to our inaugural issue, what promises to be a fruitful contribution to the plugta surrounding the future of modern Jewry.