Housekeeping and History

It's amazing how much more appealing mopping the kitchen floor becomes when I'm trying to avoid grading papers. (Grading. Ugh. You know, teaching undergraduates would feel less like a second-class job if I didn't know that my graduate-class-teaching colleagues have a lot fewer things to grade.) It's also amazing how much more diligent I can become with blog updates. One of the nicer aspects of the blogospheric debates on the academic life was my finding a lot of new and interesting blogs to read. I've added a few of those to the sidebar, plus Eclogues, which I'm pleased to see back. So, yes, housekeeping.

And as long as I'm reading Eclogues, I will take a deep breath (necessary before contemplating anything remotely to do with Current Events, and how is it that I sound like a Harry Potter character all of a sudden?) and refer everyone to Juliet's entry simply repeating an English translation of a 4,000-year-old dirge, the Lament for the Fall of Sumer and Urim. "The people, in their fear, breathed only with difficulty / .... / The dark time was roasted by hailstones and flames / The bright time was wiped out by a shadow." This lament is one of the principal sources recording the end of the Third Dynasty of Ur and of Sumerian civilization as a separate presence in world history; this end came via a combination of political betrayal, military dictatorship, various people claiming to be favored by various gods, famine, and invasion from outside (the Amorites). There is also much to learn in this Sumerian proverb collection from around the same date. "That which is given in submission becomes a medium of defiance." Well, yeah. I would prefer to believe that we can learn from history.

[Edited to add that there is more than one lesson to be learned from history. I am against this war, fought this way, under these circumstances, but (as usual) what I find absolutely incomprehensible is the attitude -- exhibited by people on both sides of the war debate -- that the Right Thing To Do is uncomplicatedly obvious and anyone who disagrees is a moron. This essay (via Ghost of a Flea) is a beautiful distillation of the pro-war historical perspective, and I recommend it.]

I do not belong to a history department, but -- as these things go -- I have always considered myself to be a historian. If I were into claiming a muse, which I generally am not, it'd be Clio.* Unfortunately, I'm well aware that do a lousy job of proclaiming these days. I just don't think I have anything eloquent left to say for the moment. So I'm going back to housekeeping, because I can't do a damn thing about the news, but the dishes are entirely under my control.

* -- Look, a nice quiz result I didn't even have to cheat to get!

Find out which is your Muse. - brought to you by Amanda.
Geek assistance by Locke.

Leah's Curse

(Note: this has nothing whatsoever to do with Princess Leia. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. The post placement is entirely coincidental.)

Even though I'm a teacher, I don't usually pay a great deal of attention to the proliferation of National Minority-Group Months. Back when I was in grade school, we had National Black History Month, during which we made a token gesture toward learning about Benjamin Banneker and Booker T. Washington, and that was it. Now we have National Hispanic Heritage Month, National Native American Heritage Month, National Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month, and National Women's History Month -- and I might be missing a few. (It's interesting that African-Americans and women are the only two groups with "history" rather than "heritage," but I think that's because they're the two oldest enactments.) This year, however, courtesy of one of the Boondoggle U. departments I'm an adjunct member of, I found myself attending several National Women's History Month events around campus, focusing on everything from domestic violence to Alias.

However, my departmental affiliations had nothing whatsoever to do with the one WHM event in which I actively participated. This event, a panel on "Women's Spirituality" hosted by some conglomeration of student groups I'm still not clear on, clearly called me up because I am (a) female and (b) Jewish. The other panelists included a staff member, a grad student, and an undergrad, so I'm fairly certain my academic expertise wasn't required, but the other panelists also happened to be Muslim, Buddhist, and several flavors of Christian. Apparently, I was supposed to talk about "Women's Spirituality" and opportunities for women's leadership from within my spiritual tradition. I could say that I agreed to do it because it would look good on my academic service record, but that's not really true; I agreed to do it because I'm a Jewish feminist and it sounded like fun. And then I realized I had to talk about "spirituality," one of those words that gives me methodological hives.

What I actually did was to explain why I would rather talk about tradition, a word that annoys me far less than "spirituality," and then I told a story. It's one of the stories I'd been saving for future blogging (would you believe I have a folder full of these things?), so I might as well repeat it here, with some of my comments. In Bava Basra 153a, midway through an extremely dull explanation of the circumstances under which deathbed gifts can be retracted, there is a chunk of aggadic material, and it goes something like this:

Once upon a time, the Babylonian teacher Rava (bar Joseph bar Hama, founder of the academy at Mahoza, d. 352 C.E.) had to decide a case brought by a woman named Leah. Leah had been on her deathbed and had drawn up a contract giving away her property "from life and in death," but she had recovered and wanted her property back. Now, this is close to one of the classic borderline cases for deathbed gifts: the recovery of gifts "in life and in death" had been debated by Rav and Shmuel three generations earlier, with Rav's opinion (that such gifts are not binding if the person recovers) winning out. Leah's gift, "from life and in death," should probably have followed the same rule, but Rava (alone) insisted that the "from life" form was a different category, so that he denied her claim.

Here's where it gets interesting: Leah protested that Rava's ruling was incorrect, and (in light of the above legal issues) she was essentially right. Rava, however, had ruled as he taught, and did not wish to retract his teaching, so he tried to close the case another way. He had his scribe draw up a new decision which read "she may retract," but at the bottom, it quoted from another Mishnah about employers being allowed to deceive employees when the latter refuse to do their contracted work. This, Rava believed, would make it clear to any sage who read his new decision that he had not really intended to retract his earlier judgment but to get Leah off his back by deceiving her. Unfortunately for Rava, he had misjudged one small point: Leah knew exactly what he had done. She cursed him: "[if] you want to trick me, your boat will sink." Rava's students tried to get around the curse by soaking their master's clothes in water, but his boat sank at sea nonetheless.

Now, as Talmudic stories about women go, this is downright empowering, especially since Leah is not identified as any rabbi's wife or daughter. It's not especially gender-specific, though, if you bear in mind that there's a lot of cursing in the Talmud, plenty of it done by the rabbis themselves. Cursing was not especially associated with women, but it was one of the few effective alternatives to rabbinic justice which women could practice. (Rava himself stressed that a husband should never give his wife cause to curse him.) On the whole, the Talmud's teaching about curses contains nothing which is not standard among other post-Hellenistic cultures: curses should never be taken lightly, a righteous curse can have effects beyond what its swearer could have imagined, and even an unrighteous curse can take effect with even the most minimal justification. But this particular situation was obviously a poser for Talmudic commentators: for Leah's curse to have taken effect, Rava must have done something wrong.

Naturally, this being the Talmud, there are several suggestions. One is that Rava ruled against a previously established legal consensus, either intentionally or unintentionally; this would be grounds for his liability in his role as judge. However, there is another Talmudic case (Gittin 35a) of a woman cursing a judge, this time when the judge was fully in the right as regarded the law, and the curse taking effect. So the second suggestion is that because Rava instructed his scribe to write the Mishnaic "disclaimer" on the new decision in Leah's presence, he caused her pain, which is unacceptable in a judge. There is a curious premise behind this reasoning, namely, that Leah would not have been equally pained to discover Rava's deception in private (since it seems impossible that she would never discover the true wording of the contract, regardless of whether or not she herself could read it); I suspect that this is what provoked the third suggestion, my personal favorite. In this view, Rava's wrongdoing was not that he caused Leah pain -- which was inevitable, given that he was ruling against her -- but that he mocked her by drawing up a false decision in her very presence.

I find this conclusion comforting, in part because it's not the least bit sexist: in principle, a judge is not allowed to mock or deride the claimants in a case regardless of their gender, class, social standing, or relationship to himself. (Of course, the principle was frequently observed in the breach, and it is not saying much for a legal principle when it requires extralegal curses to enforce it, but there you go.) And I am fond of the idea that other people -- no matter how marginal and/or annoying those people are -- should not be mocked when you hold power over them. It's a useful principle for judges, teachers, administrators, and politicians, just to start. Now, you must understand that the commentary on this passage is not especially kind to Leah. It might almost be construed as "mocking." Quite probably "Leah" was a placeholder name -- there are random Leahs, along with Simeons and Reuvens and Plonis, illustrating cases all over the Talmud -- but the commentators tend to excise this name altogether ("Leah," for those of you with even basic knowledge of the plot of Genesis, is not a well-omened name*) and refer to her as "the woman." Some commentators refer to her repeated suit as "harassment" even while admitting that her legal case was sound. On the whole, they seem to sympathize with Rava (who is, of course, named throughout), implying that this "woman" must have been especially exasperating. Bizarrely, none that I have found suggest that Rava was wrong simply in deceiving her. But they still have to admit that Leah had a case, both legally and ethically, and that she outwitted not only Rava but all his students.

I did a few Google searches while I was putting together my talk, and it turns out that this story is not a favorite among the sorts of people who put their sermons and Torah studies online. I can imagine why not, but it is a favorite of mine, because it's a nasty, annoying, technical, quasi-supernatural text and yet it stayed put in the final redactions of the Bavli. It attests not to the Jewish tradition's impartial treatment of women in court (yeah, right) or an early adoption of feminist principles (not hardly) or even the ease of isolating a strand of tradition that says positive things about women (possible, but requiring a very selective reading, especially in the Talmud). It's not a story I'd teach to children, but it's a story I like to teach to adults, because they're old enough to recognize that no worthwhile religious tradition is 100% comfortable for our twenty-first-century sensibilities. And yet... Leah knew the system, outwitted the men behind the system, and exacted justice for the system's failure. Her curse worked.

On behalf of the entire Jewish spiritual tradition, something which I pretty much never speak for, I'd like to wish you all a happy Women's History Month. ;)

* -- Now that I think about it, if they were really trying to be clever, the rabbis should've called her Dinah. It's not as if they didn't enjoy a good pun. So I'd like to think that "Leah" might be for real.

On Ivory Towers

The comments keep piling up on my recent excursion into meta-academic critique, and I keep promising to tackle another post on the topic. I try to keep my promises, but it's difficult just now -- world events are weighing me down, another pile of grading has landed on my desk, I haven't quite finished the article I wanted to get done over Spring Break, it's a holy season for my people (I'm thinking of March Madness, not Purim), the house-buying is proceeding apace, and I'm more than half tempted to simply thank everyone for giving me a lot to think about and suggest that they go look at what I consider a much more widely interesting discussion about community. The topics are not at all unrelated.

Let me just add one last thought, though. I sometimes entertain myself by looking back to turn-of-the-fifteenth-century Paris (a time and place characterized by more than its share of military, political, and religious incoherence) and reading six-hundred-year-old complaints about the venerable University there which have a familiar ring:

I see another problem in the studies of the University, and indeed a very great one. For there is a great defect and error in terms of the discipline of its youths in morals, even in their basic learning in the most basic matters. This is caused by the very great numbers of teachers in whose multitude there are some who are harmful to their pupils, saving the praise of the good and those of whom I speak without reproach. But others show blind ignorance or lazy negligence, or they wrongly pursue adulation. Sometimes they act out of an inappropriate fickleness, or, something intolerable in its pestilence, by the contagious example of the most base way of life. Such teachers do not pull up the evil roots of such proclivities but nourish and increase them. Either they are afraid to correct their pupils, who might leave them, or religion and piety are uncouth for them.*

I trust it will not surprise my readers to learn that these words were written by an ex-academic: Jean Gerson, scholarship boy made good at the College of Navarre, doctor of theology, and erstwhile Chancellor of the University. Gerson had been rushed into administration very early in his career thanks to some powerful patrons; as of 1400, when he wrote the words I quoted above, he had recently quit academia in a state of disgust and profound depression, sick of academic politics and vowing to go preach to the common people instead. Then as now, however, there was a shortage of qualified higher-education administrators, and Gerson managed only a year-plus sabbatical in Bruges (exchanging letters back and forth about University matters the whole time) before his friends convinced him to give the Chancellorship another go. He stuck with the job on his second try despite even better offers, remaining titular Chancellor** until his death nearly thirty years later.

One can find textual evidence of academic disillusionment a good deal earlier than that -- the first several chapters of Abelard's twelfth-century Historia calamitatum prove that complaints about the jealousy and venality of one's erstwhile teachers and colleagues actually predate the concept of the university itself. (If anything, academic politics was a lot more vicious when professors were paid directly by each student who attended their lectures.) But I am fonder of Gerson, not simply because Abelard's self-presentation frequently makes one sympathize with his colleagues, but because Gerson decided to return to Paris and take his best shot at reforming the University to make it conform to his vision of what it should be: providing guidance and instruction to the people of Paris, turning out teachers and counselors for schools and churches across Europe, taking an active role in both political and ecclesiastical controversies.

It's easy to take an unhappy lesson away from this: well-meaning people have been trying to reform the university for more than six centuries, and they still haven't gotten it running smoothly. I try to remind myself of this sometimes so that I don't delude myself into thinking that anyone (much less yours truly) can "fix" academia, as if I were fixing a faulty engine. But, after all, things have changed. The engine still doesn't work perfectly, but it's a sight better, and the academy has made great strides in more than simply discouraging teacher-student relations on the Abelard-Heloise model. It no longer funds graduate study by assigning students preaching stipends which they are not expected to actually earn, it tries (however inadequately) to support some sort of freedom of expression for our professors, and it features a blend of educational opportunities here in the U.S. which allows for wider and better-directed formal learning with every passing decade. An academic context has also produced a hell of a lot of important, useful, and fundamental discoveries over the past six centuries. And some of the good things about the medieval university -- the opportunity for rapid social advancement it offered bright young people, for instance -- have remained constant.

Probably the most constant characteristic of academia, though, is the idealism which surrounds it. From the origins of the medieval university in Christian Europe, people writing about academia tended to borrow language originally applied to the Church (in the sense of "ideal" or "heavenly" Church, not the fallible human institution) and apply it to the University.*** Even in an age of less exalted rhetoric, we still expect "the University" do to more, to do everything, to get it right the first time through, to serve as an "ivory tower" (a circumstantial, but not coincidental, description) without fault or stain stretching up from the earth into whatever heights we imagine. I suspect that the virulence with which many of us criticize academia is a measure not of its objective failure, but of our subjective disappointment.

I am frequently disappointed. But I'm also sticking with it. And I would say more, only so much of it has been better expressed elsewhere, and... I have a class to go teach.

* -- Letter from Gerson to his colleagues at the College of Navarre in 1400; translated in B.P. McGuire, Jean Gerson: Early Works, pp. 185-6. (Gerson wrote many indictments of the university, some of which are even more painfully familiar, but this one is available in very good translation, so there you go. ;)
** -- "Titular" because when the English and their Burgundian allies took Paris after Agincourt, Gerson was at the Council of Constance arguing against the Burgundians' use of assassination as an expedient political tool. Not surprisingly, it was unsafe for Gerson to return to Paris afterwards. He eventually turned down a cushy offer from the University of Vienna and instead settled in Lyons near one of his younger brothers, teaching younger students and continuing to send letters and treatises across Europe.
*** -- So, to pick a fairly obvious example, the 1231 papal bull confirming autonomy and establishing statutes for the University of Paris was entitled Parens scientiarum, "mother of knowledge."

Disciples of Aaron

[Looking for the ongoing discussion about academia? Scroll down to the next title. I'll be posting a follow-up this weekend or thereabouts.]

For various reasons, I am one of very few Jews (and even fewer non-secular Jews) at Boondoggle University. I am generally fine with this -- after all, I was also one of very few Jews growing up in My Hometown. Back then, I brought doughnut holes and dreidels into class and explained about Hanukkah; now, I smile (although sometimes it looks a little more like a grimace) and do my best to answer when one of my colleagues asks me about "the Jewish position" on a given topic. In fairness to my colleagues, most of them recognize how ridiculous this is, but I'm the only articulate, religious Jewish person around most of the time, and I'd rather they ask me than go uninformed or randomly surf the Web for answers. At least I issue disclaimers before I answer such questions, and they go something like this: There is probably not a single, unified Jewish position on the vast majority of topics. This is the case for any major religious tradition, but it goes double for anything descended from rabbinic Judaism, where we keep the minority opinions in the Talmud and then disagree about why we have kept them in. I, of course, do not speak for the whole of the Jewish tradition (hence the name of this blog!), but I do my best to explain where I am situated within it on any given point -- attribution is also a Talmudic tradition, one which aligns neatly with modern academic standards.* Perhaps repeated utterance of these disclaimers is why I get slightly cranky when other people claim to explain "the Jewish position" on anything.

So, for something like the tenth time in the past several weeks -- because my colleagues are very well-read, and we are all very interested in the topic for obvious reasons -- Meir Soloveichik's article in First Things is not the last word as regards "the Jewish position" on forgiveness. It is called "The Virtue of Hate," which should give you a fairly accurate notion of its contents. Now, Soloveichik's citations are all, to the best of my limited knowledge, accurate,** and he has done a bang-up job of sketching out a certain strand of the Jewish tradition which does indeed clearly indicate that we are to hate, not forgive, our enemies. (The fact that this strand also plays into the worst kind of Christian theological prejudices about Judaism is... OK, not totally irrelevant.) But it is easy enough to find texts from within the mainstream Jewish tradition which contradict these ideas. If Soloveichik can read selectively, so can I. So here's another Jewish position on forgiveness, running parallel to Soloveichik's.

Soloveichik begins by comparing Jesus ("Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do") with Samson ("Strengthen me only this once, O God, so that with this one act of revenge I may pay back the Philistines"). Now, leaving aside the context of Samson's story within Dysfunction Junction the Book of Judges and the obvious fact that even the Gospels' Jesus is not strictly comparable with human beings of any stripe, there are plenty of other Hebrew Bible figures who might be more profitably compared with Jesus. The most obvious example is Moses, who forgives the Israelites for murmuring against him time and time again, to the point that he is willing to plead on their behalf to God and even sets his own life against God's forgiveness of them: "Now, if you will forgive their sin, well and good; but if not, erase me from the record which You have written!" (Ex. 32:32) Elsewhere in the Tanakh, Abraham forgives Abimelech, Joseph forgives his brothers, Esau forgives Jacob, and David forgives assorted people who rebel against him -- just off the top of my head and sticking as closely as possible to the text of the Hebrew Bible.

An even more interesting comparison point for Jesus would involve the Book of Jonah. I know I've mentioned Jonah before, but some things bear repeating. Jonah, for those of you thinking about the fish, is also a story about a guy whom God sends to save the capital city of his country's worst enemy. He tries to get out of it, fails, and finally sucks it up and goes to preach his message. To his profound disgust, the Ninevites repent and avoid destruction; Jonah then stomps off into the desert, where God provides an object lesson in the form of a plant which shelters Jonah from the sun one day and withers the next. Jonah mourns, and God shows up to rub it in: "You cared about the plant, which you did not work for and which you did not grow, which appeared overnight and perished overnight. And should not I care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not yet know their right hand from their left, and many beasts as well?"

There is, I think, a simple human truth in the way Jonah's story plays out: like Jonah -- not like Jesus, or Moses, both of whom are defined in their own narratives as highly exceptional -- we are naturally inclined to hate our enemies. We do not want to forgive them, and we do not want God to forgive them, either. Yet our enemies have the capacity to surprise us (the Ninevites listened to Jonah and repented at a time when the Israelites seemingly could not!), and so does God, Who wants us to help them against our natural inclinations. The Jesus-comparison in the Book of Jonah is not Jonah himself, but Jonah's God. For anyone who thinks Jonah's God must be a fluke, I suggest a quick jaunt through the Tanakh: it is just as possible to sketch an outline of a compassionate God as a vengeful one. As early as Exodus, God is described as "extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin" (Ex. 34:7). In the following verse, God threatens to extend iniquity a mere three or four generations,*** but cancels this out in Deuteronomy 24:16: "Parents shall not be put to death for children, nor children be put to death for parents; a person shall be put to death only for his own crime." But even this is not the last word, since God repeatedly forgives the Israelites for their "own crimes." As Moses puts it in Numbers 14:19, after reminding God of those previously stated attributes: "Pardon, I pray, the iniquity of this people according to Your great kindness, as You have forgiven this people ever since Egypt." Psalm 85:2 is even more generous, as it can be read in either future or perfect tense: "You will forgive/have forgiven your people's iniquity, you will pardon/have pardoned all their sins."

Of course, the God of Abraham does not forgive without a few preliminaries -- the Israelites Moses is leading around the desert are selectively pruned by sword-wielding Levites, plague, earthquake, and old age. God is not even an effective criminal justice system -- some of the guilty survive some of the time, so that Aaron is not only forgiven for his apparent leadership role in the Golden Calf incident but also made High Priest -- but God is perfectly capable of making distinctions. Aaron is an interesting example, because from the Tannaitic period forward, there exists a tradition that Aaron was a peacemaker, and that he only went along with the Golden Calf to prevent further bloodshed. He was, in effect, the Good Cop to Moses' Bad Cop. In fact, Aaron's peacemaking role is seized upon as the justification for God's choosing to make Aaron (rather than his higher-profile brother) the first High Priest, and Aaron himself becomes a model for ethical behavior. "Be disciples of Aaron," Hillel advises in Pirke Avot 1:12, "loving peace and pursuing it; love your fellow creatures, and bring them close to the Torah." Whether you focus on Aaron as an example of God's forgiveness, or as someone singularly talented at forgiving his fellow human beings (and remember the High Priest's special role in communal atonement?), I can't see this as anything but a strongly pro-forgiveness message.

That said, there are indeed restrictions on forgiveness in both the Jewish and Christian traditions. That famous Second-Temple-era ethical compilation known as the Sermon on the Mount -- oddly, Soloveichik only wants to consider it from a Christian standpoint -- is quite explicit about delineating these limits. Jesus certainly advises exceeding the Torah's commandments when he recommends to loving one's enemy and praying for one's persecutors -- by the way, the word "forgive" is entirely absent from that statement -- but he also ratchets up the stakes on punishments, teaching that "every one who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother shall be liable to the council, and whoever says, `You fool!' shall be liable to the hell of fire." (Mt 5:22) In other words, Jesus argues that both the positive and negative commandments of the Law are to be exceeded, so that forgiveness is at once easier and more difficult to attain. Then, just after the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6, with its famous plea to "forgive us our trespasses as we have forgiven those who have trespassed against us," Jesus explains the logic behind those lines: "If you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." (Mt 6:14-15) It is perhaps worth emphasizing at this point the fact that Jesus was indeed Jewish, and that even if he were the Big Fluffy Bunny of Sweetness and Light Soloveichik depicts him as (going, I think, on unexamined assumptions derived from Christian theologians who should know better), Jesus himself would still be part of "the Jewish tradition" unless you stick the modifier "rabbinic" in there (and even then, it's arguable). I'm not going to push that, though, and I'm not going to utter a peep about Desmond Tutu's theology -- I'll leave further discussion of the mainstream Christian tradition to those with more of a stake in it.

Many of my readers know that the Sermon on the Mount has numerous parallels with Pirke Avot, but I'm going to point to a different parallel, in the Babylonian Talmud version of tractate Yoma 85. The Mishnah text is very close to my last SotM quote, but a little more precise about the mechanisms of forgiveness: "The transgressions of man toward God are forgiven him by the Day of Atonement; the transgressions against other people are not forgiven him by the Day of Atonement if he has not first appeased the other person." I am tempted to simply refer you to the really wonderful treatment of this passage by the twentieth-century French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas; the article in question is called "Toward The Other," it's extremely readable in translation, and it's collected in the Nine Talmudic Readings volume from Indiana University Press. It derives from a speech Levinas gave at a conference on "Forgiveness" in October 1963. However, I realize that most of my readers have busy lives outside libraries, and so I will summarize the Gemara (commentary) on the Mishnah passage and mention a few key passages from Levinas's commentary on the commentary.

The Gemara features two stories about the Babylonian scholar Rav. In the first, he goes to visit a slaughterer with whom he has had an altercation because Rav believes that the slaughterer needs to ask his forgiveness. The slaughterer tells Rav to go away, and is immediately killed in a freak accident; the story seems to indicate that it is also wrong to try and force another person to ask your forgiveness, even if you are convinced that they have wronged you. The second story has to do with a case in which Rav's teacher refuses to forgive Rav for a fairly minor insult, despite Rav's annually repeated requests for forgiveness, until Rav finally leaves town; the rabbis explain this behavior in terms of a dream which allowed Rav's teacher to recognize his student's ultimate destiny as head of an academy far away.

Levinas -- after warning his audience that "this is only one of countless texts the Talmud devotes to forgiveness" -- says some very interesting things. The story of Rav and the slaughterer Levinas explains as being about "the purity which can kill, in a mankind as yet unequally evolved, and of the enormity of the responsibility which Rab took upon himself in his premature confidence in the humanity of the Other." In other words, while forgiveness is a Good Thing, attempts to force it are inappropriate, even at the outer limits of ethical awareness of one's fellow human beings.**** Levinas spends even more time on the story of Rav and his teacher, pointing out that "it is better not to sin than to be granted forgiveness" (there is definitely a difference between Jewish and Christian emphases on this point) but that "it is very difficult to forgive" Rav, who was intelligent, self-aware, and (however unconsciously) seeking to take the place of his own teacher. There are categories of forgiveness, Levinas suggests, and some people are easier to forgive than others: "One can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger."

My own take on this passage, which stems from Levinas's, begins with the obvious: Rav, the wrong-ee in the first story, is the wrong-er in the second. Moreover, Rav is (was?) a big gun among his contemporaries, so this tale is being told not about Joe Smith but about (say) Thomas Jefferson. Anyone is capable of screwing up, then, and anyone is capable of doing something unforgivable (at least to man; we never learn what God thought of Rav's teacher's decision). Forgiveness is not always the right thing to seek, or to try to elicit from another -- and this holds even when exceptional people are involved on both sides of the possible equation. The other item in this passage which I find fascinating is what the slaughterer says to Rav when the latter confronts him: "Go away, Abba. I have nothing in common with you." This, says Levinas, "underlines one of the essential aspects of the situation.... men do not yet form one humanity." Let me amplify: the easiest reading of this story is that what the slaughterer says must almost certainly have been untrue or offensive to God -- because, after all, he is killed by a freak accident immediately afterwards, as a result of removing his attention from his work to answer Rav. Within the story, however, the slaughterer's death is not blamed on God's justice; as Rav hurries to confront the slaughterer, one of his rabbinic colleagues warns him: "Abba is going to commit murder." That is, Rav is held at least partially responsible for the slaughterer's death, for providing the conditions under which the slaughterer is not only driven to deny any connection between himself and Rav but is also forced to remove his attention from his work for an instant.

I could keep going -- on this passage, on any of a dozen others, on a number of medieval, early modern, or modern representations of "the Jewish tradition" which enunciate a much different philosophy of forgiveness than the one Soloveichik describes. But I think I've made my point. I don't know who the "many Jews" are who would, as Soloveichik asserts, respond to Elie Wiesel's inability to forgive his dying Nazi tormentor with cheers of "Right on!" It reminds me uncomfortably of Levinas's words about "the purity which can kill," and the fate of the slaughterer. But I am one Jew -- a rather traditional one, in this area -- and I prefer to focus on the fact that I routinely find myself in need of forgiveness from humans and God alike, a fact conveniently recorded ad nauseam in my people's sacred histories. Soloveichik is accurate about "the importance and the necessity of Jewish hate," but I'll be concentrating on the Disciple of Aaron plan instead. As important figures in several religious traditions have pointed out, loving one's fellow creatures is considerably more of a challenge than hating them.

* -- And you wondered why so many of my entries have footnotes?
** -- One minor quibble: Jesus' idea of inheriting the kingdom of heaven is not, as Soloveichik asserts, absent from "the rabbinical ethical writings" (unless the latter phrase is defined so narrowly as to be meaningless). Mishnah Berakhot 2:2 and 2:5, which deal with the ethics as well as the practicalities of reciting the Shema, are among the most obvious examples; like Jesus, the rabbis usually seem to consider the "kingdom of heaven" a reward for going above and beyond their obligations to God, although... this would be another post altogether if I kept going.
*** -- Jonah, interestingly, throws the description from Exodus 34 back into God's face after Nineveh is saved, but he leaves out the line after "forgiving iniquity," reflecting the reality: God no longer punishes even the guilty as long as they repent.
**** -- Those of my readers (and I know there are several of you) familiar with Levinas's more involved discussions of the Other can probably fill in some blanks here. I draw the line at advising people to read Totality and Infinity.

From The Distaff Side

Just because I studiously avoid anything resembling TV news (Sunday night is for ACC basketball in any case) doesn't mean I'm not aware of certain types of current events. I've known about the Lysistrata Project for over a month. Now there are news stories and multiple websites up; I suspect that many of my readers will already have heard about the plan to conduct public readings of what might be Aristophanes's least PC work (and believe me, there's heavy competition) on 03/03/03.

Why bother? Well, my inner teacher is convinced that reading classic works of Greek drama for their contemporary relevance is intrinsically nifty. On the other hand, "relevance" is a tricky concept. I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that Lysistrata is a viable proposal for Peace In Our Time; it's not only pure comedy, but pure fantasy. Quite apart from everything else, the laws of the Athenian city-state in 411 B.C.E. (when the play was first performed) would've made a large gathering of women from various city-states impossible, rendering the play's premise equally impossible. But it's still pretty impressive that Aristophanes had the nerve to write this in Athens, during the Peloponnesian Wars, and at a point when things had started to go badly for Athens. Viewed from that perspective, Lysistrata might almost be another contribution to the Poets Against The War effort.*

Of course, it's also fun to think about reclaiming the text for such radical, fearsome, revolutionary feminist purposes as demonstrating that men and women should have equal opportunity to shape public policy. Lysistrata tends to be remembered as The Comedy Where The Women Get Peace By Denying Their Husbands Sex, but it's got a surprising amount of substance to it, and Lysistrata herself turns out to have a sound grasp of military strategy, public policy, and diplomacy. In one speech, she compares governing a country to that traditional women's task, weaving: you wash the fleece (or country) to remove dung and dirt, comb it free of sticks and bugs, combine it with other fleeces to spin a strong thread, then weave it into a garment which is at once serviceable and appealing. Of course, Lysistrata's male audience is entirely baffled by this simile.

As I said, most of Lysistrata isn't particularly practical, but it is relevant. I wish my government knew a little more about weaving.

* -- Some of you may also be interested in discovering less immediately contemporary antiwar poetry; Caterina has started a Poems About War blog for this purpose.

Hosanna in Excelsis

It's not that I haven't been blogging these last few days; it's that I've been trying to put together a rather lengthy blog responding to an article in last month's First Things. (If you immediately know what I'm talking about, go, you. If not, relax, because I'm going to tell you all about it someday soon. ;) Yesterday I took off from work -- quite apart from the commandments involved, if God rested after six days I should probably consider doing so as well -- and spent most of the day in harmless pursuits such as Torah study, chatting with new friends in coffee shops, and reading mildly trashy novels in bookstores. Then, for the first time since I moved here last summer, I went to a Boondoggle Symphony concert. I had thought about going to more of the Symphony's season -- I'm almost always pro-Vivaldi and Bartok, and Bach goes without saying, and I do occasionally catch some music from the Classical period proper as well -- but I got busy, and I'm going to be traveling a lot this spring, so this may be it for 2002-03. This was the one concert I absolutely couldn't miss, because I am a sucker for Latin Mass cycles. Since I don't want to make it too easy for people to Google and figure out my location, I won't offer a specific review of the performance, but will just share some highly idiosyncratic opinions about Mass cycles -- mostly Ordinary settings.

• Machaut's Messe de Notre Dame should be performed more often, and not simply for historical reasons or because hocketting is way cool. And I'm taking recommendations on recordings of it, since I seem to lack one at the moment.


• After Machaut, my ideal concert would have a second half consisting of Benjamin Britten's Missa Brevis in D. Nobody will ever sing this program, but a girl can dream.


• An Ordinary setting will probably succeed musically if and only if it can pull off all the mood shifts in the Gloria. However, any setting gets extra credit for doing something non-obvious yet non-gimmicky musically on "Tu solus altissimus," "descendit de coelis," "et ascendit in coelum," and any other part with directionally suggestive lyrics.


• An Ordinary setting succeeds spiritually if it can take me through the middle of the Credo in a temporary state of acquiescence. Bear in mind that as a matter of personal belief, I buy into the first sentence ("Credo in unum Deum....") and about three phrases in the Holy Spirit section, with an option for the resurrection of the dead. Also, I know rather more about the composition of the so-called Nicene Creed than is strictly necessary. Thus, any Mass setting that gets me through the Jesus stuff in the middle without my brain stopping to think about the linguistic problems of "consubstantialem patri" and the massive theological problems with "cum Patre et Filio simul adoratur et conglorificatur" is really damn good.


• The only Ordinary setting that can get me to the end of the Credo still believing is, as far as I know, Bach's Mass in B Minor, because otherwise "Confiteor unum baptisma" is definitely going to snap me out of it. Why the B Minor Mass succeeds in that respect has a lot to do with its Credo's structure and its simultaneous appeals to my love for history and polyphony -- it might not work for everyone, but it sure does for me.


• The best Agnus Dei ever is Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, mostly because of the second half: drums and trumpets weaving decidedly martial themes in and around "Dona nobis pacem." This is even sadder if you remember that it was being written shortly after the Napoleonic Wars. (I could swear I've blogged about the Napoleonic Wars' being the beginning of modern warfare in certain key respects, but I can't find the post just now. Maybe it was one of the ones that only happen in my head.)


• The major problem with symphonic-style Mass settings is an overuse of the solo. Also, all other things being equal, I like alto solos better than soprano ones and polyphony better than just about anything.


• On a related note, Bruckner's E Minor Mass is a lot more interesting than the D or F Minor Masses. It, too, should be performed more often.


• Dufay's Missa Se la face ay pale should not only be performed more often, but should be performed in churches more often. It's not like you need an orchestra, and people who listen to Christian rock should really learn that using profane musical techniques for sacred purposes is Not At All New. (L'homme armé is nice, too, but something about the tenor line in Se la face just sounds more, uh, chanson-y to me. Yes, I realize that "chanson-y" isn't a word.)


• In my head, the Kyrie always goes to the tune of my first participatory encounter with the Latin Mass, Beethoven's in C Major. There is probably no way to fix this, even if I wanted to.

Finally, on a non-Mass-specific note, the people who use standing ovations as an excuse to head for the doors while everyone else is clapping are pathetic. But it was a lovely concert otherwise. And I finally graded one set of tests on Thursday, just in time to receive a second set (from a different class -- I didn't take that long!), so today is pretty well spoken for. More later. ;)