[Back posts from the previous week will be showing up... uh, probably tomorrow. Or as soon as I get up the energy.]
If I really thought about it, I could probably map out a soundtrack to my life. Songs will get stuck in my head for several consecutive days, sometimes even weeks. They are often rather disturbingly apropos. In this case, though, I've had more than the usual excuse -- first I was teaching a book which paraphrased the song in question on several occasions, then I spent a good part of Thanksgiving afternoon canoodling on the piano with a hymnal at an aunt's house, and now some PBS Thanksgiving special ("American Folk Hymns"? Lots of songs I know, at any rate) has just wound up with a crashing choral version of precisely what I've been humming for the last week or so: "Come, Thou Fount Of Every Blessing." Although I am not, in any sense, a great fan of being "clothed... in blood-washed linen," who can't appreciate the concept of asking God to "teach me some melodious sonnet / Sung by flaming tongues above"? I mean, the visuals alone are great -- and the tune's extremely catchy.
As far as anyone can tell, this hymn -- here are some lyrics and a MIDI file -- was written by a fellow named Robert Robinson in 1758. Robinson (1735-90) had had a checkered adolescence involving London gang life and would go on to an even more dubious future involving Baptism and Unitarianism, but he wrote the hymn shortly after joining a Methodist church* and getting himself born again in proper evangelical fashion. Robinson's offering was promptly set to music and appeared in half a dozen hymnals before the end of the eighteenth century. It was especially popular with Methodists and Baptists (I was using a Baptist hymnal this afternoon). Although I have avoided asking my relatives, I disbelieve that any member of such a denomination could get through adolescence without a quick giggle over the line "here I raise my ebenezer," because, face it, it sounds kind of naughty.
It is, however, somewhat important for this post -- and if you already know what an "ebenezer" is, you are probably a Methodist, a Baptist, or a Hebrew Bible scholar. The referent is I Samuel 7:12, in which Samuel memorializes a divinely-assisted Israelite victory over the Philistines by -- well, the King James Version makes the most sense here: "Then Samuel took a stone, and set [it] between Mizpeh and Shen, and called the name of it Ebenezer, saying, Hitherto hath the LORD helped us."** In the words of the hymn:
Here I raise my ebenezer
Here by Thy great help I’ve come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.
Or, more prosaically: "so far, so good, God. Keep it up." This message (one might reasonably term it "prayer") seems particularly apropos on our (American) Thanksgiving Day.
You know that whole business about listing all the things for which we are thankful? I'd like to suggest the guiding idea behind Thanksgiving -- apart from the primitive and now entirely obsolete notion of using it to inaugurate our Christmas shopping season, and the famous Buffy description of "a ritual sacrifice, with pie" -- shouldn't be so much to list past thanks as to encourage future opportunities to give them. Yes, I could list all the things which I have been and am thankful for, but such a list would be laden with details sure to bore the lot of you stiff and would, frankly, lack the excitement I prefer to convey in this blog (e.g., "I am thankful for my recent success in foiling an evil overlord's plot to take over the world during my morning commute, using only my innate savvy and the dart gun concealed inside my lipstick case"). Such list-making, while fun and contentment-inducing, is also theologically puzzling: atheists should have nobody to be thankful to, and theists should have nothing for which they couldn't (or, according to some people, shouldn't) be thankful to God.***
It's not that I object to thanking God, much less praising Her, which is a different and much more palatable prospect. ("Streams of mercy, never ceasing / Call for songs of loudest praise," Robinson wrote, and I'm definitely on board with that, provided that tone-deaf people consider substituting thoughts of loudest praise). On Thanksgiving, I can praise God all I want, and I can even thank Her for what's worked out so far, but I can't quite block out all the things I'm still worried about, from the sublime to the mundane. Another couple of flight segments before the New Year. ("Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it....") Cancer (not mine) not necessarily in remission. Transmission problems with both my parents' cars. I Can't Believe It's Not Warfare with Iraq. Final exams for my classes. Having kids someday. Whether Boondoggle U's reimbursement for MPC #1 will reach me before the credit card bill does. People freezing on city streets. The fact that "homeland security" is making the concept of "scare quotes" uncomfortably literal. I could go on, but I won't. A good half of these things don't impact me directly, I guess, and many of them won't be resolved by next Thanksgiving, but I don't see why I should pretend that everything in my (essentially very happy) life has been resolved to my entire satisfaction so that I can sit down and make a list before I eat too much turkey and pumpkin pie.
I much prefer Samuel's approach. "Hitherto hath the Lord helped us." Nudge, nudge. You listening, God? Samuel was trying to inaugurate a winning streak, and surely the Pilgrims were thinking about the oncoming planting season.**** (It's sort of a pity that the American Thanksgiving tends to be a bit hazy on the actual commemoration part -- I mean, sure, it's embarrassing in retrospect that we wiped the Native Americans out with smallpox, but there was a communal meal sometime before that! With sweet potatoes!) Since we've pretty well dropped the commemorative part of our ritual, however, I prefer to combine the usual appreciative sentiments with a gentle reminder to the Lord (not to mention my fellow human beings) that we could always use a little more help, and not just in the recipes-for-leftover turkey line. In fact, belief in God is mostly optional for this version of Thanksgiving -- even if one considers prayer a spectacular waste of time, one can still spend the holiday figuring out ways to arrange for things to give thanks for the following year. Or, at the very least, arranging "safely to arrive at home." What you consider "home" is entirely up to you.
Safe arrivals to all of you, and happy Thanksgiving!
* -- The Methodists were not yet separate from the Church of England at this point; they were simply its super-pietistic-and-heavily-influenced-by-the-Moravians (or, more concisely, "left") wing.
** -- Presumably, "ebenezer" from eben ha-ezer, "stone of [the] help." Setting up this sort of pillar, of course, would be discouraged after the Deuteronomic reforms. And how Robinson, or anyone else, could raise what must have been a fairly substantial hunk of rock is anyone's guess.
*** -- Except reality shows. And genocide. And, boy, do I ever get the appeal of radical dualism right about now, but it tends to lead to really goofy creation myths. (Which brings us back to reality shows.) Incidentally, I'm not sure what agnostics should be doing in this situation, but I'd assume they're not sure, either.
**** -- In case any of my readers are about to point out that both Samuel and the Pilgrims were celebrating what they saw as out-of-the-ordinary divine interference: you're right, and that's not exactly a God-optional kind of deal. But that's not really what American Thanksgiving is about these days. How to give thanks for non-standard events, such as the foiling of Evil Overlords, will be covered, not at all coincidentally, somewhere around about the first day of Hanukkah.
If you've been following this blog for longer than a few months, you'll realize that I do a lot of traveling when I'm not teaching five days a week, which is to say anytime except this semester. I visit family, attend conferences, occasionally even come up with professional excuses to visit interesting cities. It's been almost three months since I last hopped on a plane, and that's unusually long for me. But I'm on one right now, and judging from the pretty cloud formations outside my window, I'm pretty sure we're over.. well, okay, a planet with an atmosphere.
For reasons which will shortly become obvious, I consider this an ideal setting in which to consider the issue of place. My timing is a litte off; I should have scheduled my flight a few weeks ago, when the Torah portion began with Genesis 28:10: "Jacob left Beersheba and went out towards Haran." There's a story, of course. On the way there, Jacob stopped overnight at a certain place, put a stone under his head, and dreamt of a ladder reaching up from beside him to heaven, with angels of the Lord climbing up and down it. Then the Lord showed up -- still, apparently, in Jacob's dream, although the details are extremely fuzzy -- and promised what God usually promises in the Book of Genesis: descendants, blessings, land, fame and fortune. When Jacob awoke in the morning, he said, "The Lord was in this place and I did not know it!" He named -- or, rather, renamed -- the place "Bethel," "house of God." If you were to read this passage in Hebrew, though, you would be struck by the recurrence of one word: ha-makom, "the place," usually modified by the Hebrew equivalents of "this" or "a certain."
Despite the specificity, however, we can't be sure exactly what place "this place" is. We do know that when Jacob returned from Haran decades later, again on the way to somewhere else, he would find a wrestling partner at Bethel.* But Jacob wasn't heading to Bethel in this story; Bethel was a convenient rest stop between Beersheba and Haran, a spot so lacking in amenities that Jacob curled up with a stone, a flyspeck on the map near an insignificant city called Luz. Jacob's descendants and ancestors spoke to God from the tops of mountains: Moriah, Horeb, Sinai, Nebo. They lifted their eyes unto the hills for a perfectly good reason. But Bethel wasn't a mountain; it was just a place. It had a ladder (or possibly a staircase), a manmade and relatively trivial connection between heaven and earth, which may only have existed in Jacob's dream. Indeed, Bethel only became meaningful -- only, in fact, gained its new name -- by virtue of God's happening to appear to Jacob just there.
It is, then, kind of ironic that this is the place where God opts to show Godself to Jacob for the first time. The rabbis didn't care for the relative unimportance of Bethel; they tried to argue that Jacob's "house of God" was actually Mount Moriah, where Jacob's father Isaac had nearly been sacrificed and where the Jerusalem Temple would eventually be built and rebuilt.** The historians of religion were equally devoted to assigning Bethel a geographic location, suggesting that it was probably a center of cult worship which was retroactively associated with Jacob in an effort to make it more acceptable to the Israelites. Certainly, there is a Bethel -- a center of unfortunate cult worship -- in the later histories of the kingdom of Israel. But it's not clear what, if anything, that has to do with Jacob's encounter.
It might be worth considering the textual distinction between "place" and "land." Jacob wanted to return to the land (ha-aretz) of his fathers, and after he named his rest stop Bethel, he told God as much in no uncertain terms. But at Bethel, Jacob wasn't in any particular land; he was simply at a place. If you think about it, an awful lot of the Torah takes place (ahem) while its central characters are traveling through or living on someone else's land. If God isn't telling someone to get a move on, they're probably fleeing vengeful relatives, looking for better pastures, attacking weaker neighboring tribes, avoiding stronger neighboring tribes, being sold into slavery, or escaping from it. Of course, the lifestyle being described in these stories is a nomadic one; the Israelites lived in tents and herded sheep. Abraham had to purchase a burial cave from the locals at a premium when his wife died; Jacob and three of his four wives were also buried there, while the fourth died and was buried on the road. Centuries later, the cave of Machpelah became part of Jacob's descendants' land; now it's on the West Bank, and nobody can decide exactly whose land it is. It's still a place, though. Lands are defined by ownership; places are defined by... well, what are they defined by?
One of the more traditional rabbinic takes on Genesis 28:10 (I'm paraphrasing Rashi, for those playing along at home) asks why we need to know that Jacob left Beersheba -- after all, the previous reading had quite clearly been set in Beersheba, and one doesn't often announce, "I am leaving home and going to the grocery store." The answer is that Jacob was a righteous man, and when a righteous person enters or leaves a place, s/he brings or takes away glory, light, and majesty. Hence, Jacob's leaving Beersheba was a significant event. Perhaps places are defined by who is present in them? But in that case, we must also sort out why rabbinic authors quite routinely take ha-makom, "the Place," as a name for God, "who is the Place of the universe, while the universe is not God's place."*** The Pirke d'Rabbi Eliezer further explains that God is properly called The Place "because in every place where the righteous stand, there He is with them."
Once again, it helps to return to the words of the Torah portion -- in this case, the words God spoke to Jacob (maybe in a dream) at the place Jacob called Bethel. After identifying himself as the God of Abraham and Isaac, God tells Jacob that "the land [ha-aretz] on which you are lying I will assign to you and to your offspring." That sounds like an ownership claim -- but God goes on: "Your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth; you shall spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south." Not so much with the specifics, then; Jacob's descendants will be all over. In fact, God predicts, "all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by [or possibly "through"] you and your descendants." Finally, God gets personal: "Remember, I am with you: I will protect you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land [lit. "earth," adamah, as above]. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you."
There are three levels of location working here. "Earth" is the simplest -- it's the same word as "soil," and it refers to the stuff you can point to or cup in a hand or plant trees in. "Land" is, I think, almost as simple -- it's a quantity of earth which belongs to someone or other, and it can be bought or borrowed or traded or sold. But "place"... if God is The Place, and if places are quantifiably changed by even a single righteous person's presence or absence, then a place -- whichever place -- is, presumably, defined by God's presence or absence. God will bring Jacob back to the land of his fathers, but God will always be in -- will, in fact, be -- whatever place Jacob finds himself in. Anywhere -- at least, anywhere where God appears, which is to say anywhere -- could be Bethel. The rabbinic efforts to condense all the places God appeared into a single geographic location were just a little too limited.
I enjoy gardening, so of course I'm fond of earth, and I look forward to owning land on which I can garden and build to my heart's content. But as for places... I don't think anyone can own a place. And there's something to be said for that.
* -- Between the wrestling and the ladders, in fact, I sometimes find myself imagining Bethel as the Ancient Near East equivalent of WWF Smackdown. No, I don't watch it, but I flip past it, and there are definitely ladders. Or possibly trapezes. Or maybe both.
** -- At its most developed, in fact, this theory equates the altar of Bethel with the place where the Temple was built, the altar of Isaac's binding, the place where Noah built an altar after the Ark landed, the place where Cain killed Abel (also an altar), the place where Adam first built an altar, and finally -- are you paying attention? -- the place from which Adam was created. This is extremely neat and tidy from a theological point of view, but it's geographically impossible.
*** -- Bereshit Rabbah 68:10.
I do not care for Jacobean tragedy. Greek tragedy is one thing: it's stripped down, with a looming sense of inevitability, a thorough lack of realism, a conflict (or two) between equally "right" characters, and a well-developed awareness that the remorseless gods are screwing with everyone. But Jacobean tragedy tries for some sort of realism, and is probably an ancestor of the modern horror film by way of the Gothic novel as a result. Think about it: exceedingly conventional morality ("never have sex" works in all three genres) combined with remarkably one-dimensional characters (hi, I'm the villain, and will demonstrate as much by murdering someone in Act One, Scene One), willful stupidity on the part of said characters (don't go down in the basem--uh, to Mass by yourself!), and an overall lack of non-victimized females anywhere in the vicinity (yes, going insane does count as being victimized).* I suppose we should be grateful to the Victorians for stripping out the venereal-disease jokes along the way, but really.
At best, the efforts of later Jacobean tragedians to up the ante and shock their audiences lead to unintentional and uncomfortable humor: when Giovanni enters holding his sister-and-incestuous-lover Arabella's heart aloft on a dagger in the climactic scene of 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, my inner Martha Stewart announces: "New Halloween hors d'oeuvres: it's a good thing." At worst, they simply bore people while trying to push the envelope. My internal monologue during The Duchess of Malta, for instance, included: "Hmmm, I wonder if they're going to kill off all the characters with important speaking parts -- no, they already did that in Hamlet. I wonder if they're going to mutilate -- no, that was Titus Andronicus. And the thing with the hot poker is so Edward II -- or am I confusing history with tragedy again? Oh, the kids are so toast, but I bet it's going to be offstage." I can't imagine that was the effect Webster was going for.
Other factors can positively influence my enjoyment of a tragedy -- historical interest, characters whose motives are actually explored in interesting ways. I like The Crucible, for instance, and I'm irrationally fond of David Edgar's Pentecost. I like those Jacobean plays which I can argue are more history or character exploration than tragedy -- Shakespeare's Richard III or Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, for instance. Historical interest aside, though, I'd rather not watch reality TV, even in a play. And the "reality" of Jacobean tragedy is about as close to lived reality as, yes, reality TV -- edited down to only the "good" parts, for maximum impact. I think it comes down to the fact that I approve of catharsis, but not of schaudenfreude.
Why am I thinking about Jacobean tragedy, you ask? Well, I was trying to decide whether or not I thought art had some sort of moral valence. (Opinions on this topic are welcome.) I suspect that, at the very least, I want it to. Otherwise, I don't think all the blood-wallowing in Jacobean tragedy (or, as I mentioned, modern horror novels) would annoy me so badly. Anything sufficiently different from my daily routine can be entertaining, but I'm not a freakin' Roman plebe, and there are things I don't think I should be entertained by. Gratuitously violent tragedy is one; gratuitously humiliating comedy is another. I'm not trying to argue for any sort of censorship of art on the grounds of my personal moral code and resultant aesthetic preferences, of course. I'm just saying that... well, mostly that I don't care for Jacobean tragedy.
Believe it or not, this post started out in an attempt to figure out why I no longer enjoy watching Angel. The answer, in brief, is that it too much resembles a Jacobean tragedy. All the doomed characters are just that: doomed. It's gotten so that every development on the show (or in spoilers, for that matter) induces in me one of two reactions: "Saw that one coming," or "That makes absolutely zero sense."** I think I prefer Buffy, at the moment, because it feels a little more like Measure for Measure. "If she be mad,—as I believe no other,— /
Her madness hath the oddest frame of sense, / Such a dependency of thing on thing, / As e’er I heard in madness."
On Angel, though, both the plots and the characters' options are starting to seem oddly limited. There's a big scary demon, as there often is. There are misunderstandings, as there often are. Everyone keeps falling into these godawfully dull romantic subplots, and all of those relationships are clearly doomed because it's a drama and nobody can live happily ever. Yawn. As Ferdinand says just before dying, after being stabbed by the murderer he and his brother recruited to murder his sister and his sister's children by her semi-legitimate husband, who is meanwhile -- anyway, as Ferdinand says in The Duchess of Malfi: "Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, / Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust." But Angel lacks even the Jacobean tragedy's -- or the contemporary horror novel's -- willingness to kill off apparently pivotal characters to move the plot along, so there aren't any diamonds to show for it.
Oh, well. Back to my utterly non-horrific conference paper.
* -- Don't tell me Hamlet's an interesting character, either; he's Angelo in Measure for Measure without the unmasking, and needs to get over himself in the worst way. Give me Richard of York as a tragic hero any day -- but he's not supposed to be a tragic hero, according to Shakespeare. Which explains why I prefer histories and comedies to tragedies, and those unclassifiable "tragicomedies" over all, in the First Folio. (I may be the only Shakespeare enthusiast alive who would choose a production of Measure for Measure over a production of Hamlet 99 times out of 100, even while acknowledging that the literary quality of the latter is higher overall.)
** -- Well, there's the third reaction: "Mmmmmm, Wesley." But I can't quite bring myself to watch a show for a single character's eye-candy factor, especially when he's acting like a doofus as well.
If posts are rather thin on the ground for the next week or so, you should know that I'm currently busy assembling a paper to give at Major Professional Conference #1 next weekend. I'm also planning side trips to Abelard, Balfour, and La Presse International -- because, you know, the exhibit hall won't have nearly enough books. (Yes, folks, the extra bookcase is history. Oh, and any of you who just figured out where I'm going from the bookstore names should consider yourself warmly congratulated, but don't spill the beans in comments.) With my usual unerring sense of priorities, I have already picked up the necessary junk food for the hotel room (my roommate is on job-search and will probably need extra chocolate), but am delaying on minor details such as doing laundry.
However, I couldn't miss the opportunity to point out an oncoming cultural collision of near-apocalyptic proportions: according to this article (via Tinka), there is a movie adaptation of Homer's Iliad* in the works. It is, accurately enough, entitled Troy. Brad Pitt is to play Achilles (whatever) and Orlando Bloom is to play Paris. Yep, Orlando Bloom -- Legolas to all the screaming hordes of Lord of the Rings movie fans. With any luck, there will be legions of thirteen-year-old girls flocking to see Troy and discovering that, wow, there just might be some homoerotic subtext among the ancient Greeks! And there will be a Troy fanlisting!** And people will write incredibly bad crossover Middle-Earth/Troy fics! And I will experience deep pedagogical satisfaction along with disabling fits of giggles! (If they want me to stand in line for the first showing of Troy, of course, they need to film it all in Greek....)
That reminds me: my "'fan fiction' may be a legal category, but it sure as heck isn't a valid literary one" argument continues to thrive. Check out these recent news articles: "Ghost-Writing Claims Hit Nobel Laureate" (that'd be Literature, 1989, Camilo José Cela) and "Booker Winner in Plagiarism Row" (that'd be 2002, Yann Martel, The Life of Pi). The marketplace of ideas is getting smaller and smaller every day. Then think about Troy. The way I figure it, if a successful Troy movie generates fanfic... well, how are we going to tell it's fanfic? Any stories featuring the characters in Troy (unless they add someone, and I can't imagine who they'd add who isn't already in the story someplace) would be legally and ethically fine to publish. Because, shockingly, rather a lot of other people have borrowed Homer's characters before. And I don't know that he'd've minded.
The title of this post, by the way, comes from John's Donne "First Anniversary: An Anatomy of the World." Donne is complaining about "new Philosophy" and recent advances in astronomy, but the lines in question have a more general application: "For every man alone thinkes he hath got / To be a Phoenix, and that there can bee / None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee."*** The point here is obvious enough: none of us is properly sui generis. "Originality" is an incredibly modern virtue (not one which Donne particularly approves of, I'd say), and it's a trifle short-sighted of us to assume otherwise. And that's just as well. Even though I say all sorts of negative things about translation, I do get that it needs to happen -- in many cases, it needs to happen a lot worse than more people need to embark on their Own Special Creative Projects. In the closest this blog is likely to get to discussing current events, I'd like to recommend Aviya Kushner's article in Poets and Writers magazine on why literary translation is "need[ed] now more than ever." Because, y'know, she's right.
There is a Big Serious Fandom-Related Post in the works, but I'm waiting until I can say things about the upcoming episode of Angel without ruining everyone's fun. Monday, then. Maybe Tuesday. And I really want time -- probably on the plane next weekend -- to read Umberto Eco's new novel Baudolino, which apparently makes amusing jokes about Otto of Freising's The Two Cities and the Fourth Crusade.
Hey, wouldn't The Two Cities make a great movie?
* -- I had a student recently -- a good one! -- who, it transpired from a passing reference in class, did not know who wrote the Iliad. (And not in the was-Homer-a-composite-or-was-it-oral-tradition? sense, either.) I feel that I deserve the Teacher of the Year award for neither breaking down in tears nor launching into an impromptu jeremiad on the American educational system.
** -- Did you know there's a Cardinal Ratzinger fan club (link via Holy Weblog)? The definition of "fan" could really, really use some expansion....
*** -- And if you're thinking this also pertains to my ongoing "postmodernity isn't half as innovative as it thinks it is" argument, you are also to be warmly congratulated. Go read Stephen Toulmin's Cosmopolis if you haven't already. I don't entirely agree with it, but it's good to think.
I've blogged about names, divine and otherwise, before. I realize that multiple/assumed names, or even multiple/assumed names attached to literary works, have been around for millennia. I'm instinctively and immediately skeptical of any claims that "New Technology" Has Revolutionized Our Culture.* And yet... it seems to me that "our culture" (Western? First World? People on the happy side of the digital divide? All y'all reading this?) is in fact gearing up for some relatively interesting debates about names and signifiers courtesy of assorted bits of modernity. Plenty of bloggers have recently pointed out that which name one chooses -- and which name one is then called by -- has very obvious implications for cases such as "John Williams" versus "John Muhammad." Some of my students genuinely do not grasp why anyone would want to be known by more than one name, unless to make test questions more difficult; they are, I think, forgetting that most of them have at least three legal names, plus a handful of nicknames, plus a couple of email and chat aliases. They are also forgetting that most of the texts we read do not come from a monolingual culture, and I am afraid that this is one of the things which the Internet is hastening. And they are downright baffled by the concern some of these multiply-named characters in their texts exhibit when it comes to blasphemy.
So... may I ask a survey-type question of my readers? When (and in what context) was the last time you thought about blasphemy? I mean, it started out as a perfectly good Greek term involving injuring reputations of people (and gods) important enough to have them, and then it got associated with blurting out the wrong thing at sacrifices and mixed up with Hebrew strictures about names of and proper reverence for God, and then Jesus came along, and everyone got even touchier about the subject. But now I'm wondering whether "blasphemy" is a concept which has relevance for mainstream twenty-first-century Western thought, except as something which creepy fundamentalist groups blather on about. The term certainly reminds my of my occasional efforts not to take the Lord's name in vain, although I'm reasonably certain that (a) that verse refers to taking an oath or vow, not just yelling "Jesus!" when one stubs a toe, (b) in any case, stubbing one's toe is painful, and not an inappropriate moment at which to call upon one's deity of choice, and (c) yelling "Jesus!" is definitely preferable to yelling "fuck!", which is uncouth and makes no sense whatsoever unless the toe-stubbing took place in a very specific and somewhat unusual context. (Since I'm Jewish, of course, yelling "Jesus!" isn't technically taking my Lord's name in vain. It is, however, exceedingly tacky. Tackiness and blasphemy are not the same thing, except possibly in Howard Stern's case.)
I haven't stubbed a toe lately, so the most recent context in which I've thought about blasphemy was when my Talmud study hit a section about it in tractate Sanhedrin (56-60). It features debates over whether blasphemy required two repetitions of God's name or only one (one), whether or not "blasphemy" was the same as "making a hole in God's name" (probably), precisely which versions of God's name counted as such (it depends), whether these counted in all possible languages or only in Hebrew (it also depends), whether Jews and non-Jews could be judged by the same standards (usually not), etc., etc. Naturally, I'm intrigued by references to how these laws changed over time: Jews who heard another Jew blaspheming (including judges who had to listen to witnesses testifying in a blasphemy trial) were initially expected to tear their garments (a sign of mourning) and refrain from sewing them back up, but after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. (i.e., the loss of the one place where it was OK to pronounce God's proper name once a year), Rab Hiyya taught that garment-rending was no longer necessary. Blasphemy, he pointed out, had become so common in his day that all pious Jews would walk around with their clothes in tatters if they tried to observe that custom! Moreover, once Jewish courts lost the authority to prosecute blasphemy as a capital crime, the distinction between blaspheming against God's proper name (a capital crime) and blaspheming against another common name for God (a less serious crime) rapidly collapsed.
These collapsed distinctions reminded me of a related issue visible in contemporary Jewish practice: Wheel of Fortune theonymy, i.e., "Rabbi, I'd like to buy a vowel." It has become customary for pious traditional English-speaking Jews to write the word "God" as "G-d" -- presumably by analogy with the usual substitution of adonai, "Lord," or even ha-Shem, "the Name," for the proper name of God in prayers or Scripture readings. "G-d" is actually a conflation of two commandments, one against blasphemy and the other against destroying or damaging Jewish holy books or holy names -- that is, one writes "G-d" so that one can toss or rip the paper with no qualms later on. Otherwise, one might have to treat the paper as one treats a used Torah scroll or even notes from studying Torah, putting it into a central storage facility and eventually having it buried. (And, yes, by extension one types "G-d," although I think the accepted opinion is that it's OK to delete a file with God's name in it in English as long as you don't tear up a printout. Maybe. It's still under discussion.) If I sound a bit bemused about all of this, it's for good reason: my Jewish upbringing was spectacularly unOrthodox, and I didn't encounter this orthographic peculiarity until I went off to college. I didn't think much of it then, either. It was, I decided, silly. Over the years, my views have evolved slightly: I no longer find "G-d" silly (well, maybe sort of goofy-looking); in fact, I'd really like to keep the commandment in question. Nevertheless, I think this particular custom has some implications which its proponents haven't really considered.
I mean, c'mon. We can probably agree (and by "we" I mean me, Pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides, and anyone else who'd like to join us) that all the available names of God are singularly inadequate when it comes to representing God. But I also happen to believe -- and I can argue this historically, methodologically, or theologically -- that names have power, and that God has more names than any of us. Hence my appreciation of the principle underlying "G-d." However, the Jewish tradition is fairly explicit about God's having one Really Important Proper Name and a bunch of secondary names or attributes (see above). And "God" is not the proper name of God, any more than "dieu" or "Gott" or even el in Hebrew would be; all of these are category terms, referring to other deities as well as the One God with whom I tend to be concerned. (Although el, being in Hebrew, is probably a special case, for some of the same reasons "Allah" would be in Arabic. Sacred languages complicate things.) For that matter, odds are good that none of the available pronunciations of the Tetragrammaton** are the proper name of God, either, especially once they've been transliterated into English. However, someone who wanted to be consistent about omitting letters from any translated name or attribute of God should be typing things like "m-rciful," "c-mpassionate," "h-gh," and "pl-ce."*** In all available languages. Including, presumably, ones without the same kind of vowel/consonant distinction that English has... and I'm having trouble believing that a bunch of people who speak Hebrew think a word doesn't count without a vowel, but I suppose "Go-" or "-od" would be a little too goofy-looking even for them. Clothes in tatters, indeed! Me, I'm sticking with one sacred language and one proper name for God. So, yeah, I type "God." And I'm not especially worried about it. If you ask me, "G-d" is way more a hole in God's name than "God." Think about it.
Of course, the logical corollary to this line of argument didn't dawn on me until pretty recently. If I object to writing "G-d" out of the conviction that nothing except a certain four Hebrew letters in sequence is even close to a proper name for God in my tradition -- thus falling in line with the Mishnah's, if not the Gemara's, view of what constitutes blasphemy -- what do I do with the four Hebrew letters in sequence? Usually, this isn't a problem; I don't doodle them on my notepads, my prayerbooks and commentaries substitute other Hebrew phrases for them, and English-language scholarship tends to circumvent the issue by avoiding the Hebrew and talking about "the Tetragrammaton" wherever possible. But I hit a snag last month when I found myself printing out unpointed (that is, vowel-less) passages from the Torah for the entirely legitimate purpose of preparing to read a passage from an actual Torah scroll (equally vowel-less) during Saturday morning services next week. The CD I was printing from was, in fact, of Orthodox origin, and when I used its "print" command, it popped up a window warning me that I might be printing material containing the name of God. As it happened, I was. And now I'm not entirely sure what I should do with this piece of paper once I'm through with it. I mean, sure, I can stick it in a folder, but what then? Is dropping it off at an Orthodox synagogue in the middle of the night too extreme? Somewhere, God-with-an-o whose proper name is properly inexpressible is probably laughing Her (entirely figurative) head off.
Anyway, let me know what you think about blasphemy.
* -- Or, in my line of work, that "New Technology" Has Revolutionized Our Way Of Teaching, and can I just say that one should never attend teaching workshops at which the presenter does not appear to realize that "syllabi" is a plural form?
** -- I sympathize with Bible scholars trying to sort out possible pronunciations, but I tend to feel that religious uses of "Jehovah" and "Yahweh" are tacky in precisely the same way that my yelling "Jesus" is tacky. Fortunately, I can't seriously believe that God will respond to any old formula which hits some of the right consonants.
*** -- Yes, "place" is a name for God. More on that next week, I think.
I'm sure I've mentioned that I consider it tacky not to explain my post titles, unless (a) they are so obvious as to require no explanation, or (b) it is a special occasion. Since neither (a) nor (b) is the case tonight, and since not all my readers are likely to be familiar with Ovid's epigrams or with the very helpful article by J.Z. Smith with the same title, I should tell you that the full quotation is "adde parvum parvo magnus acervus erit," which means something like "add a little to a little and there will be a big pile." The relevance of the title, once translated, is easier to explain, though: I am trying to organize my books.
I almost said "my book collection," but that's the wrong way of phrasing it, Walter Benjamin notwithstanding.* When I was a kid, I collected coins, stamps, dolls, seashells, and half a dozen other things until I finally took to informing inquisitive strangers that I collected collections. (I was an annoying kid.) But each collection was finite, mostly decorative, and easily ignored or discarded once I was through with it, although I still retain all sorts of useless trivia about gastropods. What I have here might be called a series of book collections, divided by topic or author or even size, but I have my doubts; one does not speak of having a "food collection" or a "clothing collection" or even a "shoe collection," because those things -- however aesthetically pleasing they may be -- are constantly being used. There are people who do not use their books, but I do not speak to those people.**
This fit of bibliophilic introspection is being brought to you courtesy of a low-grade manifestation of the mysterium tremendum: I have free bookshelf space. The last time I remember having bookshelf space was when I was twelve, shortly before I gave up most of my collections. I don't remember how I came to have free time -- probably a school vacation of some sort -- but I was seized by some sort of maniacal need to organize my bookshelves. (My mother, who is a librarian, never feels this way.) I got all the books down off the floor-to-ceiling bookcases covering one wall of my childhood bedroom (thanks to which I possess excellent bookshelf-climbing skills for an otherwise unathletic person) and got all the other detritus which accumulates on bookshelves off as well. The books went on my full-sized bed, piled a few feet high; the detritus went goodness knows where, and I think some dusting took place. I then sorted the books, banishing what I had decided were "children's books" to the Upstairs Wasteland (trust me, this is an accurate description of my parents' unfinished attic) and alphabetizing every single one of the others. Once I got them back on the shelves, none were stacked atop one another, and there was space... well, about half a shelf's worth. Unfortunately, I hadn't really left enough extra space at the end of each shelf, so that some shelves outgrew their boundaries very quickly, and the whole system went to merry hell in about six months.
I have learned a great deal about organization and spontaneity since then; I have decided that alphabetization is greatly overrated. I have also acquired a great many more books, and multitudes of them are still living in the Upstairs Wasteland or my childhood bedroom, where a few boxes of books always seem to be waiting for me to ship or donate them. Given that I have only lived in the same place two years running on one occasion over the past ten years, it is probably sensible of me not to have every blessed book I own in one place. Unfortunately, as even mildly observant readers of this journal will have noticed, I do not react well to being unable to put hands on a book I want to read at once. Moreover, I keep acquiring new books, which pretty much puts paid to any illusion that I am carting around only the essentials. "Tax deduction," I tell myself, as I pack extra luggage to take to Major Professional Conferences and fill at the exhibit hall. "Investment," I murmur, as I celebrate my visit to a new city by hunting out its best used bookstores. Neither of these justifications are entirely untrue, and I will confess to feeling extremely proud when I reflect on how many of my senior colleagues have stopped by my office and observed -- in tones sufficiently forceful as to escape the suggestion of mere pleasantry -- that I have quite an impressive book collection (that word again!).
At any rate, despite my best pruning efforts, I had gotten up to forty-ish-odd boxes of (strictly essential) books at my move to Boondoggle, but I realized something wonderful upon my arrival: one of the benefits of the professorial life is an office with shelf space. There is a wall of bookshelves in my office -- although they are the bracketed sort on which it is dangerous to climb -- and I have it about three-quarters full. I estimate that it will take me, at most, two years to finish filling it up, after which I will be able to fit one more small bookcase into the room (what do my visitors need with chairs, anyway?) and will then have to start taking back issues of journals home again. For the time being, however, I have only about two bookshelves' worth of books at home, and three bookshelves (not all of my grad-school furniture made the move with me) to put them in. That will only take a year to fix, but for the time being... ah, shelf space! An opportunity to arrange books by something other than size and where they can possibly be stacked! Sing, O Muse, the glee of Naomi Sara's daughter, whence to her downstairs neighbors unnumbered ills arose... but, then again, they like to blast their TV past 11 at night on weekdays, so I doubt that my puttering away in the back bedroom (where the bookshelves are living) will disturb them much.
I hope you will not think me entirely insane when I tell you that organizing books is more fun than a litter of kittens. I didn't go into detail about my office organizational schemes because if you haven't figured out my primary academic specialties by now, you certainly would have by the time I'd finished. My home books, on the other hand, simply confirm most of the tendencies I allow to run riot in this journal. We have the Random Judaica section, the Epic And/Or Fantasy section, the Lyric Poetry section, the Mystery section (tentatively divided into "procedural" and "not procedural, but what do you call the type with only amateur detectives?" subcategories), the Romance section, the Inexplicable Fondness For The Generation of 1898 section (actually, it is explicable, but that's another post), the Children's Books section (these are books directed at children below age five; I had to rescue them from my aunt, who was efficiently planning to toss them now that her children had in turn outgrown them), the Gardening section (the cookbooks have their own shelves in the kitchen), the Dictionaries I Didn't Take To The Office section, the Random Literary Criticism I Also Didn't Take To The Office section, and so on and so forth. There will probably be a Buffy and Angel Videotapes section once I get the books all worked out.
In my office, I had to make all my book categories more or less suitable for public viewing, so that the jokes I made by juxtaposing certain books had to be pretty subtle (and, in fact, nobody has so far noticed where I put The Silmarillion); at home, however, I can snicker quietly to myself as I put Don Quixote next to Alice in Wonderland next to Lud-in-the-Mist, A.S Byatt's Babel Tower next to William Morris's The Wood Beyond The World, and Sarah Caudwell next to P.G. Wodehouse. Of course, some of those books got moved a little further apart on second thought; I tend to order books chronologically (broadly speaking) and then thematically within a given section. On the other hand, there's nothing to be gained by putting all my twentieth-century poetry in strict chronological order instead of classing it by influence. My belief that Edna St. Vincent Millay belongs between W.H. Auden and Dylan Thomas (in, I hasten to note, a purely literary sense) is not something I need to support in public. It makes perfect sense to me. (Yeats goes on the other side of Thomas, and Eliot on the other side of Auden, and then I try to figure out where to put Verlaine, and things get really confusing.)
Unfortunately, organizing one's books makes one aware of certain absences. I appear to have skipped the eighteenth century, for instance -- although I can't say that I'm feeling especially agonized about that, and I do have William Blake at the office.*** Two-thirds of my Amanda Cross novels are at my parents', and all my Agatha Christies must be there as well. I should really keep the huge Grimms' and the huge Arabian Nights in the same place, either home or office. Most of the books I read between the ages of five and twelve are still at my parents' as well, and I have the oddest need to go reread the collected works of Laura Ingalls Wilder right now. Also, I want David Grene's translation of Herodotus for both home and office, which poses something of a problem -- do I start investing in multiple copies? (Bear in mind that my book budget is not, technically, infinite.) Do I, for that matter, consider investing in hardcover copies of paperbacks which are beginning to fall apart? (In the case of Gaudy Night, the answer is going to be yes.) One also becomes aware of paths not taken and, on occasions, paths one is quite glad not to have taken. (Note to self: Kierkegaard is no less depressing than he was six years ago.) But getting rid of books is... well, difficult. I've managed to accumulate a "to discard" stack of, er, six, three from a class I once TAed. (Classic, schmassic: I do not like Native Son on a dizzying variety of levels.) Now I have to figure out a good home for them. It might be less complicated to simply leave them be -- as long as I have shelf space.
Looking back over this post, I will grant that I do have some things in common with "collectors." Talk of organization inevitably leads to talk of memory. As Benjamin put it,
What I am really concerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship of a book collector to his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection. If I do this by elaborating on the various ways of acquiring books, this is something entirely arbitrary. This or any other procedure is merely a dam against the spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions. Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.
Only... my memories aren't especially chaotic. They are organized with a logic apparent only to me, and every bit as satisfying as my bookcases. Which reminds me, I need to reread Borges's Ficciones.
* -- A lovely essay by Walter Benjamin entitled "Unpacking My Library" (trans. Harry Zohn in a volume entitled Illuminations) argues, among other things, that an adult's library is the culmination of a series of childhood collections. Benjamin agrees with my assertion that collections are non- (or not purely) utiliarian, and writes that "the most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them." This is, as I said, lovely, but I do not have final thrills when it comes to books. More of Benjamin later.
** -- Unless the people in question are related to me. I still remember going over a cousin's townhouse for a family birthday party several years back and discovering that the five seemingly decoratively bound books on her mantelpiece (the only books in the whole place) were (a) plastic and (b) trompe l'oeil videotape holders. I think I may have burst something trying not to break into howls of laughter for the remainder of the evening.
*** -- William Blake, by the way, is the result I get in my favorite recent meme: the Which Major Romantic Poet Would You Be (if You Were a Major Romantic Poet)? quiz. Gee, I wonder if it was my response that a vision of hell would make a great poem topic....
Huh. This week's Angel... well, notice how I'm actually online writing about it the day after? And notice how I actually watched it on the first broadcast, all the way through, instead of cutting it off and telling myself I'll look at the rest on tape? And notice how I don't want to kill Fred? Much? (Okay, that part you probably didn't notice, but take my word for it.) Mostly, though, I'm wondering what the heck the Buffyverse has against formal education. (Spoilers for "Supersymmetry" and a lot of musing about both Angel and Buffy below.)
"Supersymmetry" was a lot better than I'd expected, and a mostly fun episode to watch, but it left a nasty taste in my mouth. It's not just that I secretly wish Wes had kicked Fred out (although I like payback-time Fred); it's not just that I think Gunn gets more annoying by the day (although he looks gorgeous with his shirt off); it's not the utter hash the episode made of its central moral dilemma (sending the guy into his own hell dimension would've been fine by me); it's not just the looming Angel/Cordelia romance (yay, amnesia!). We won't even get into what will happen to poor Laurie, with her vanished advisor, or the alarming fact that physicists everywhere can apparently open portals to other dimensions with the right three syllables. What's bothering me is the Buffyverse take on education.
Credit where credit is due: "Supersymmetry" was, thankfully, looked over by someone with some familiarity with academia. Granted that there's no way Fred should've had time to pull together an academic article without a decent library and while hunting demons and, uh, trying not to get killed over the past season. Granted that there's no way Fred would get her article accepted anywhere after being MIA for nearly six years and having no institutional affiliation or connections whatsoever. Granted that it's equally improbable that they'd invite her to speak at even a little one-day conference on the strength of that one article. Granted, further, that no professor in my fairly extensive acquaintance has ever had an uncluttered office as large as the Evil Advisor's. Those were all more or less necessary plot contrivances. The conference deal was reasonably accurate, as was the sixth-year TA. And, really, who doesn't know a graduate advisor who engages in the less supernatural equivalent of sending his most promising students into hell dimensions?* Heck, it's even possible to praise "Supersymmetry" for its mordant yet insightful critique of graduate education. (I didn't say I'd do it; I said it was possible.)
However... let's consider the educational backgrounds of the cast of Angel, shall we? Angel: total autodidact. Wesley: presumably a degree or two somewhere, but alienated from the Council of Watchers (as is Giles) and, lately, from the rest of Angel Investigations; no academic affiliation, and no interests in research except, apparently, to impress Fred. Cordelia: couldn't attend college for financial reasons; has apparently never looked back. Gunn: did he even graduate from high school? And among all those complaints about not understanding Fred's physics article, did he ever consider, y'know, doing some background reading (and not comics)? Connor: grew up with Holtz in a hell dimension with no books; oddly, this does not seem to have stunted his intellectual growth one bit compared to the other characters. Finally, Fred, the phyics grad student turned Pylean slave turned demon hunter. I was a little puzzled, back in "Fredless," when the newly sane Fred's choices seemed to be limited to "go back home with the folks" and "stay working at Angel Investigations." Now, a season later, I'm realizing that the S2 episode "Happy Anniversary" wasn't a quirk: every time Angel and company get near a college campus, they discover that it's a loony bin, full of people who obviously shouldn't be let out into society and -- even worse -- whom society can do quite happily without. Kindly note that Fred's desire to re-enter academia was squashed like a bug ASAP; not only was her advisor an evil serial killer, but who'd want to do that when there are demonic detective cases to solve?
The problem isn't just endemic to Angel. As I've previously observed, Buffy S4 was all too clearly written by someone who didn't have the faintest clue about graduate education -- and S4 was a defining moment in Buffyverse attitudes toward education. Before S4, when the Scoobies were in high school, their avoidance of formal education was mostly funny -- look, we have to skip class so we can save the world! Oops, there goes another teacher! Did we mention that the high school is located directly over the Hellmouth? Buffy's offer to try "excessive not studying" in "The Harvest" only made sense; Willow's hacking abilities and magic, alongside Giles's encyclopedic knowledge and library, provided all the information anyone could want. And, really, under the circumstances, we understood that the Scoobies didn't especially care about the Peace of Westphalia. Once in a great while, there were even nods toward the value of formal education: in "Teacher's Pet," an otherwise forgettable S1 episode, Buffy defeated the monster of the week with information she learned in biology class. Late S3 even featured some angst over college selection and SAT scores. The problem in S4 was that college wasn't high school, and goofing off shaded into active contempt.
Buffy S4 featured a wide array of educational opportunities -- for psychos. College professors were total jerks and/or homicidally inclined members of secret government conspiracies. TAs were chip-controlled commandos; Riley was apparently the only sympathetic one of the lot.** Buffy, of course, fell asleep or missed class constantly. Willow attended classes in many thrilling scenes we did not get to see. Oz withdrew from his classes and left to tour Tibet. Xander worked a series of lousy jobs without the least thought of taking a night course here or there. Giles, who should logically have taken a position at UC-Sunnydale, instead got the challenging plot arc of Sitting At Home Being Pathetic. There were more S4 scenes set in frat houses than in classrooms. In fact, there were more S4 scenes set in Xander's basement than in classrooms. In S5, classrooms became even more irrelevant -- Willow and Tara were the only collegegoing characters by the end of the season, and everyone else found their niches in retail, construction, death, or babysitting.
This isn't a question of quantity, though; it's a question of quality. Unless we count Willow's definition of a Freudian slip***, nobody on Buffy has ever learned anything in a college class that would later prove helpful. (In fact, starting around Giles's exile in S6, nobody ever learned anything, period. Dawn randomly flipped through books and computers until she identified the right demon, Anya provided plot exposition thinly disguised as first-person anecdotes, and Willow sucked books up through her skin instead of, y'know, reading them.) Now, in S7, Dawn is enduring classes for a minute maybe once every other episode, Buffy has a nifty job as a counselor despite her utter lack of credentials, Xander has a nifty job as a construction foreman despite never taking anything resembling a shop class, and I suspect we only saw Willow talking to a (sympathetic, yet clueless) professor for a moment in "Selfless" in order to set up Willow's encounter with Anya outside the frat house. Heaven forbid we should find out Willow's major, at least until Buffy takes a leaf from Angel and has a bunch of crazy computer scientists... oh, wait, that was the S1 episode "I Robot You Jane," wasn't it?
Now, I can only assume that the writing staff at Mutant Enemy are too busy coping with the fans who wanted Tara and Willow's relationship to make up for every negative portrayal of lesbianism ever in Western culture, not to mention the fans who wanted Spike to become a monogamous Byronic hero and the fans who wanted Angel and Cordelia to marry and have lots of cute little impossible vampire babies. But I want to speak for my fannish interest group, the roughly four-fifths of my academic colleagues under age 50 who will admit to watching Buffy and/or Angel. We have disposable income (well, once we get past those nasty student loans), and we're getting kind of pissed off at the way we're treated on the show.
Also, the part where Buffy's a great role model for teenage girls? Might want to rethink that. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go dash off an academic article before I kick some demon ass work on our core-course descriptions later tonight....
* -- My advisor, thankfully, was nothing of the sort. But the system doesn't police itself very well. Scholars are allowed to serve as graduate advisor based on their research rather than any sort of interpersonal skill, teaching ability, or basic human decency. And if all of their students drop out or drop off the face of the planet, well, they simply don't register.
** -- Actually, it would've been hilarious if the Initiative had really been the Psychology department. Can you imagine how they'd cope with faculty meetings? Grant proposals? Job searches? Okay, maybe that's just me....
*** -- In S5 "Tough Love," and I quote: "I took Psych 101. I mean, I took it from an evil government scientist who was skewered by her Frankenstein-like creation before the final, but I know what a Freudian slip is." Doesn't that make you feel all confident and happy about the college experience? ;)
It will not be immediately obvious, but rest assured that this is indeed my Extended Hissyfit About The Concept Of Jewish Culture. The short version, for those of you who lack reading stamina: it's a really silly idea. But the long version is a lot more fun.
Probably the most famous -- and the only entirely extralegal -- tractate in the Mishnah is Pirke Avot, the Chapters (or sometimes Ethics) of the Fathers. I like stories, traditions, histories, and snappy one-liners; Pirke Avot has them all. "Jewish culture" in spades, you might say. But the part most people know best from Pirke Avot is its first chapter, a list of names and figures who passed down the Law from Moses at Sinai to the compilers of the Mishnah.* Each named figure gets one or two famous sayings attributed to him. In this list, there are two sayings which are parallel -- one from a man among "the remnants of the Great Assembly," presumably somewhere around about the second century B.C.E., and one from the generation which survived the Bar Kokhba rebellion in 132-135 C.E.** Both men were named Simeon, and their statements are, respectively, the first and last in the chapter.
"There are three things on which the world depends," both Simeons said. Simeon the Just, the Great Assembly leader, said that the three things were Torah, the worship service, and deeds of loving-kindness. Simeon ben Gamaliel, the leader of the Sanhedrin at Usha, said that the three things were justice, truth, and peace (quoting Zechariah 8:16). The words of Simeon the Just have made it into the traditional Torah service; the words of Simeon ben Gamaliel are less familiar. But if I had to explain to someone what Judaism Is All About -- this does happen from time to time -- I wouldn't bother with creeds or principles, I wouldn't just sit people down and make them read Deuteronomy, and I'd be a tad bit more precise than Hillel, who famously summed Judaism up by means of the Golden Rule (or #3 on the first list, and, yes, Jesus did the same). I'd try to explain some of the Jewish perspectives on these six things: revelation/law, worship, ethics, justice, truth, and peace.***
Now, each of these six things still means something today to anyone who considers himself or herself Jewish (and, no doubt, most of you who don't). Each of these things, from my liberal and historical corner of Judaism, has been and will continue to be affected by culturally induced changes (while retaining a central core of meaning, in my opinion -- but we can go into that some other time). But none of those things are the same as "culture," by pretty much any definition of "culture," and this is why I find the concept of "Jewish culture" so INCREDIBLY IRRITATING. (Yes, with capitals.) There are and have been specifically Jewish cultures in certain times and places, but there is not a single Jewish culture even in the Biblical period. (This is also another post, but please think "golden calf" and "asherah" for starters.) There most certainly isn't one today. I am not from Jerusalem, except in the most symbolic possible sense, and I am not from Israel, except in an incredibly attenuated genealogical sense. I am Jewish by birth, by custom, and by choice, but I have absolutely nothing in common with -- say -- a Yemeni Jew beyond our religion, and the Yemeni Jew and I would probably have very different ways of interpreting my six things, even though we could agree on the six things themselves. For instance, we would agree on the importance of the bond of marriage, but s/he would be legally fine with and practically accustomed to polygamy, while I am neither.
Let me put this more concretely: I have more in common culturally with Britney Spears or Bill Moyers than with Ariel Sharon or the late Menachem Mendel Schneerson. And "Jewish culture" doesn't make any more sense viewed from the "culture" rather than the "Jewish" angle. On my mother's (very Jewish) side of the family, we have all been raised to hate the New York Yankees. I am fairly certain that we do not derive this belief from either the oral or written Law (although certain passages -- no, never mind). Does this mean that hating the Yankees is part of "Jewish culture"? Of course not -- and my father's (very Not Jewish) side of the family hates the Yankees as well. (For the foreigners among my readers, hating the Yankees is actually a cherished part of non-Manhattanite American culture; it is especially strong on the East Coast.)
The idea of "Jewish culture" has its own specific history, ultimately dating from the Enlightenment (and especially its Jewish incarnation, the Haskalah), but mostly rooted in nineteenth-century Germany (or what would become Germany) and the academic discipline of Wissenschaft des Judentums. Nineteenth-century Europe as a whole (you know that this is going to be a sweeping generalization, right?) was preoccupied with concepts of "culture" (which shaded over into "race") and "nationality." Various "folk ways" were collected, revived, and occasionally made up from whole cloth. It is in this context that the idea of Wissenschaft des Judentums evolved. And it was in this context that pioneers of the discipline such as Heinrich Graetz, who wrote a ground-breaking eleven-volume History of the Jews, stressed that the Jews were ein lebendiger Volkstamm, " a living people," not merely a religion or a "church." Granted, the Jews were possessed of a mandate to share ethical monotheism with whomever happened along -- in fact, Graetz suggested at various points, they were just the sort of "living people" who constituted (and deserved) their own nation. Here's an excerpt from Graetz's 1891 preface to the English translation of his History:
English readers, to whom the forefathers of the Jews of today – the patriarchs, heroes, and men of God – are familiar characters, will the better understand the miracle which is exhibited in the history of the Jews during three thousand years. The continuance of the Jewish race until the present day is a marvel not to be overlooked even by those who deny the existence of miracles, and who only see in the most astounding events, both natural and preternatural, the logical results of cause and effect. Here we observe a phenomenon, which has developed and asserted itself in spite of all laws of nature, and we behold a culture which, notwithstanding unspeakable hostility against its exponents, has nevertheless profoundly modified the organism of nations.****
(The italics are mine.) Of course, Graetz and his contemporaries were struggling against Christian theological prejudices (which viewed Judaism as a static entity since the time of Jesus), not to mention German academic prejudices (which prohibited Jews from serving as full professors); it is no wonder that their positions might seem a bit overstated from the perspective of the twenty-first century. What is peculiar is that their positions are still largely accepted at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
The sources which make up "classical" or "traditional" Judaism have always maintained that Judaism is a religion from which many cultural variations have derived and on which they have depended. The sources which make up the more recent history of Judaism are equally clear on the impossibility of arguing for any sort of Jewish cultural unity. (In his History, Graetz ignored the Jewish communities in Poland, Russia, and Turkey, most of the mystical elements within Jewish thought, and anyone who spoke Yiddish.) For a variety of reasons, however, most of the world has yet to catch on to how peculiar this idea of "Jewish culture" should be. Some of these reasons include the continuing power of a discourse of Jewish nationalism, the convenience for all sorts of groups (most of them odd bedfellows, and many of them guessable by anyone who remembers the basics of twentieth-century European history) of defining Judaism as "culture" rather than "religion"; the equal convenience (for just as many different factions) of insisting that "Jewish culture" is somehow homogeneous, even when its members patently are not. There is a gradual shift away from this paradigm taking place in academia: "Jewish Studies" programs are beginning to share space with "History of Judaism" programs, people are talking about Jewish/Christian "coemergence," and I just read a review of a 2002 book called Cultures of the Jews: A New History. But it's going to take most of my lifetime for this shift to filter down to the average person, if indeed it makes it that far.
Still, they had it right in the second century. The world -- and, by extension, Judaism -- depends on six things. Truth is one; justice is one; divinely appointed law is one. Culture is not one of the six things, nor should it be.
* -- Anyone who immediately flashed to Irenaeus (aka Solomon) of Lyons's assertion of his own authority by transmission from Jesus and the apostles, and promptly realized that it's pretty well exactly contemporary with the compilation of the Mishnah, gets a shiny gold star. Please don't ask how many points it has. ;)
** -- There are actually two Simeon ben Gamaliels among the Tannaitic-era sages cited in the Mishnah, and they were grandfather and grandson; it's fairly clear that the guy speaking in 1:18 is the grandson, whose own son was Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi, the compiler of the Mishnah (and the beginning of Chapter Two). Incidentally, the parallel sets of "three things" obviously bothered some redactors; in certain manuscripts of Avot, the second Simeon says -- as did the first -- that "the world depends on three things," but others alter the second version to "the world is sustained by three things" (omed versus kayam). As distinctions go, this one doesn't bother me much -- the two passages are still very much parallel.
*** -- The condensed version of such an explanation runs as follows -- assume at least a lunch date to get through it all. Torah: law, revelation, oral versus written (mikra versus mishnah), what stayed in (the Song of Songs) and what stayed out (anything written in Greek), layers and layers of commentary, and which commentaries take precedence. Avodah: originally the Temple worship service, evolving throughout the period of the Great Assembly, evolving even further in the aftermath of the destruction of the Second Temple, prayer, liturgy, still a source of fascination and consternation for most Jews today. Gemilut Chasadim, deeds of lovingkindness -- or perhaps "piety" or "mercy," because chesed is notoriously difficult to translate, and not just for me: ethics, behavior, etiquette, custom, again shifting, but always coming back around to "love your neighbor as yourself," which is a lot more difficult than it sounds. Din, judgment or justice: established in the gate alongside hospitality but constantly jostling up against the strangers who visit or the strangers who rule, and not always too clear among ourselves, either. Emet, truth: human beings are creatures of limited perspective, and I will maintain that honesty is decidedly relative, but truth (the whole, nothing but) is not. It's also extremely dangerous. Fortunately, the rabbis allow us to transgress it for either good manners or family peace. Shalom, peace: the one we -- okay, I -- have the least trouble defining and the most trouble achieving. Judaism's long history of trying to cope with the ever-present reality of other religions, other peoples, from idol-worshippers to the four empires to Christianity and Islam. And, remember, these are the six things on which the world -- not just Judaism -- depends. Check, please?
**** -- Graetz was an infinitely more interesting and intelligent character than I have time to explain -- but someone remind me in six months or so, OK? Because I really like Heinrich Graetz, massive methodological and theological disagreements notwithstanding, and there are many spiffy things to be said about, for instance, his contributions to the history of Second Temple Judaism, or his association with S.R. Hirsch and the degree to which he managed to alienate virtually all the major Jewish movements simultaneously. But for now I will settle for simply pointing you to this not-terribly-complete effort to put the six-volume English version of Graetz's History online, from whence I derived my excerpt.