Lewis Black on Creationism

Lewis Black explains why Christians get the “Old Testament” wrong. I explain how Black gets George W. Bush wrong—to some degree.

Here is another comedy clip, from Red, White, and Screwed, a video of Lewis Black in performance in Washington, D.C., in 2006. Once again, I have provided a transcript, so that those who like to remind themselves of the best bits, as I do, can have the words in print before them. And as in my previous posting of a clip of a comic in performance, of course, I advise all readers to watch the video before reading the transcript.

This performance took place during that dark age of recent American history known as the presidency of George W. Bush. The clip begins at a somewhat awkward point, in mid-sentence, omitting context that would allow the viewer to understand immediately what Black is talking about. I have therefore supplied, in the transcript that follows, the sentence and a half preceding the words with which the clip begins. (The complete version can be heard at 3:50 in this clip.)

I should have known earlier about President Bush, but I gave him some rope—a lot of rope, and then—he hung all of us with it. I should have known it when I heard him say, “When it comes to evolution, the jury is still out.” What jury, where? The Scopes trial is over.

I never thought that during the course of my life, a president would be elected who didn’t believe in evolution, or at least kind of in the ball park of it, or thought m-m-m-maybe it’s got some MERIT! But NO! He believes that the earth was created in seven days. Whew! Takes my breath away. And why does he believe that? Because he read it in the Old Testament, which is the book of my people—the Jewish people. And that book wasn’t good enough for you Christians, was it? You went, “No, we’ve got a better book, with a better character, you’re going to LOVE him!” And you called your book NEW, and said our book was OLD!

And yet every Sunday I turn on the television set, and there’s a priest or a pastor reading from my book, and interpreting it, and their interpretations, I have to tell you, are usually wrong. It’s not their fault, because it’s not their book. You never see a rabbi on the TV interpreting the New Testament, do you? If you want to truly understand the Old Testament, if there is something you don’t quite get, there are Jews who walk among you, and THEY—I promise you this—will take TIME out of their VERY JEWY, JEWY DAY, and interpret for you anything that you’re having trouble understanding. And we will do that, if, of course, the price is right.

Was the earth created in seven days? No. For those of you who believe it was, for you Christians, let me tell you that you do not understand the Jewish people. We Jews understand that it did not take place in seven days, and that’s because we know what we’re good at; and what we’re really good at is bullshit. This is a wonderful story that was told to the people in the desert in order to distract them from the fact that they did not have air conditioning. I would LOVE to have the FAITH to believe that it took place in seven days, but—I have thoughts. And that can really fuck up the faith thing. Just ask any Catholic priest.

And then, there are fossils. Whenever anybody tries to tell me that they believe it took place in seven days, I reach for a fossil and go, “Fossil!” And if they keep talking I throw it just over their head.

There are people who believe that dinosaurs and men lived together, that they roamed the earth at the same time. There are museums that children go to in which they build dioramas to show them this. And what this is, purely and simply, is a clinical psychotic reaction. They are crazy. They are stone cold fuck nuts. I can’t be kind about this, because these people are watching The Flintstones as if it were a documentary.

For me, the last paragraph, especially its last sentence, makes the whole speech worthwhile. But if the words preceding that line contain a serious error, does the worth of the speech as humor excuse it? I think not. Lewis Black is one of those comics whose performances largely owe their power to their truth. Of course, he often employs overstatement and fantasy, as around the middle of this excerpt; but he never, so far as I know, tries to pass them off as fact. So, as much as I relish making fun of the follies of Christian Biblical literalists and of former President Bush, I feel bound to correct Black’s lumping of the latter with the former.

Let us be clear that Black’s mention of the then-president at the beginning of the excerpt is mainly a transitional device, reflecting what he was saying just beforehand. He was talking about politics; now he wants to talk about the interpretation of Jewish scriptures by Christians, especially by those Christians who are Biblical literalists. Nonetheless, the excerpt begins with a misrepresentation of what President Bush, or rather, as he was at the time of uttering the words, presidential candidate Bush, said and meant. The utterance that Lewis Black approximately quotes was reported as follows in an article in The New York Times in October of 2000:

“From Scripture you can gain a lot of strength and solace and learn life’s lessons. That’s what I believe, and I don’t necessarily believe every single word is literally true. I think that, for example, on the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the earth. . . . I don’t use the Bible as necessarily a way to predict the findings of science.” ¹

Black’s version incorporates a correction, probably made unwittingly, of the future president’s characteristic confusion of idiom. Bush seems to have conflated the idiomatic phrases “the jury is still out” and “a verdict has not yet been reached” into the mixed-up phrase “the verdict is still out.” This detail does not, however, affect the substance of the words quoted.

What does affect the substance is the remainder of the quotation, which makes Bush out to be less clearly on the side of Biblical literalism than Black would put him. In fact, it puts him on the other side entirely. Then-candidate Bush says explicitly that he does not take the Bible to be literally true in every particular, especially as an anticipation of “the findings of science.” He praises the Bible as a source of “strength and solace” and instruction in “life’s lessons,” and contrasts this with regarding it as a source of scientific knowledge.

One might go further in trying to separate Bush from Biblical literalists and creationists. For Bush does not exactly say that the jury (or the “verdict”) is still out on evolution itself but on “how God created the earth.” One might suggest that the “verdict” that he means is a theological conclusion on how God makes things happen from behind the scenes rather than a scientific one on how the earth and the living things on it came into being.

This, however, is exceedingly unlikely. Creationists have a notorious tendency to conflate questions of the origin of species with questions of the origin of the life, of the earth, and of the universe as a whole: “theory of evolution,” in their usage, often stands for all of these things. The construction of the quoted sentence shows the same confusion, or at least indicates that Bush is only concerned with the theory of evolution so far as it conflicts with the Biblical account of how the earth and what lives on it came into being. It is plainly on this conflict that he takes the jury to be “still out.” Finally, his words to a group of reporters five years later leave no room for doubt as to where he thought that there was room for doubt:

During a press conference with a group of Texas reporters on August 1, 2005, President George W. Bush responded to a question about teaching “intelligent design” in the public schools. The reporter referred to “what seems to be a growing debate over evolution versus ‘intelligent design’” and asked, “What are your personal views on that, and do you think both should be taught in public schools?” In response, Bush referred to his days as governor of Texas, when “I said that, first of all, that decision should be made to local school districts, but I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught . . . so people can understand what the debate is about.” . . . Pressing the issue, the reporter asked, “So the answer accepts the validity of ‘intelligent design’ as an alternative to evolution?” Bush avoided a direct answer, construing the question instead as a fairness issue: “You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes.”²

President Bush makes clear on this occasion that in his view the supposed “debate” concerning the theory of evolution and the so-called theory of intelligent design belongs within the curricula of public schools. It has to be presumed that he means that it belongs within the curricula of science classes, and therefore that he considers it to be a debate within science rather than a debate about science.

In sum, what George W. Bush said publicly does not indicate that he believes, following the Bible, that the earth was created in six days. In fact, it indicates clearly that he is not a Biblical literalist at all, and that he does not think that the Bible should be used as a basis for drawing conclusions in matters of science. However, his utterances also make clear that he considers the theory of evolution—meaning, in this instance, the whole enterprise of explaining speciation by reference to natural causes—to be a matter on which no scientific verdict has been reached.

REFERENCES

¹ Laurie Goodman, “The 2000 Campaign: Matters of Faith; Bush Uses Religion as Personal and Political Guide,” New York Times, October 22, 2000. Bold type added. A scan of the pertinent passage as it appeared in print can be seen here.

² Glenn Branch, “President Bush Addresses ‘Intelligent Design,’” Reports of the National Center for Science Education, 25 (2005): 13–14. For equivalent reportage see Peter Baker and Peter Slevin, “Bush Remarks On ‘Intelligent Design’ Theory Fuel Debate,” Washington Post, August 3, 2005, or Elisabeth Bumiller, “Bush Remarks Roil Debate on Teaching of Evolution,” New York Times, August 3, 2005.

Trivializing the Diaspora

A new social-networking Web site adopts a tasteless and sophomoric name.

I have just learned that some enterprising morons have produced a new social-networking Web site on which they have conferred the name “Diaspora.” Do these boobs or their audience have any idea what the word means and what it refers to? Here is the entry for the word from the Oxford English Dictionary:

diaspora, n.

Pronunciation: /daɪˈæspərə/

Etymology:  < Greek διασπορά dispersion, < διασπείρ-ειν to disperse, < διά through + σπείρειν to sow, scatter

The Dispersion; i.e. (among the Hellenistic Jews) the whole body of Jews living dispersed among the Gentiles after the Captivity (John vii. 35); (among the early Jewish Christians) the body of Jewish Christians outside of Palestine (Jas. i. 1, 1 Pet. i. 1). Hence transf.: see quots.

(Originating in Deut. xxviii. 25 (Septuagint), ἔση διασπορὰ ἐν πάσαις βασιλείαις τῆς γῆς, thou shalt be a diaspora (or dispersion) in all kingdoms of the earth.)

To call your social-networking business “Diaspora” is as grotesque a trivialization of history as coming up with a new brand of lighter fluid and calling it “Holocaust.”

Judaism, Jewry, and Jews

The statement “Judaism is a people, not (just) a religion” seems like an important truth, but it is not even logically coherent. “Jewry is a people” is true and coherent, but banal. Here is how to capture both the truth and the importance without losing coherence.

GS on his blog OrthoModerndox posted an entry today with a title well calcluated to attract my interest: “Judaism as a nation, not [just] a religion” (the square brackets are part of the title). In this piece, GS offers some thoughts provoked by his reading The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel by Michael Wyschogrod. “One of his main themes,” he says of Wyschogrod, “is that Judaism is a people / nation rather than [just] a religion” (the square brackets are, again, in the original text). This is a topic on which I have written on this blog before (in “Three Ways of Looking at Being Jewish” and “Reply to Comment on Jewish Identity”), and I’m not sure that there is anything new in what I have to say about it here. But that one sentence raised some thoughts in my mind of which I make an occasion for reviving my own blog. The new year (5771) seems like as good a time as any for doing such a thing.

Now, I don’t doubt that GS, like most bloggers, and in sharp contrast to me, writes quickly, without spending a lot of time recomposing his sentences, as I invariably do. The typing error in his first sentence (“intersting” for “interesting”) is sufficient evidence of that. Nonetheless, I am going to pick on the statement that I quoted from him, for the following reasons.

First, it is a very difficult matter to state the relation among the concepts of Judaism, religion, and peoplehood. One can’t just make an incoherent statement on that point and then say, “Well, you know what I mean.” If you can’t say what you mean, then you can’t assume that your audience knows what you mean, because you have not shown that you know what you mean.

Second, the statement “Judaism is a people,” given the now current meaning of the word “Judaism” (more on that qualification in a moment), is not a coherent one. The predicate term “people” and the subject term “Judaism” do not belong to the same logical category. Of course Judaism is a religion: that is what we have the word “Judaism” for, as contrasted with terms like “Jew,” “Jewry,” and “Jewish people” (as a singular or plural noun). To say “Judaism is a people” is as senseless as saying “Five is a color.”

Now I have to admit one qualification here. I recently learned from the Oxford English Dictionary that the term “Judaism” was at one time used in a sense corresponding to that of judaismus in medieval Latin, namely to mean “Jewry.” Thus, a source from 1884 (the latest example of this usage provided) says: “The revenue of the Judaism, as it was termed, was managed by a separate branch of the exchequer, termed the exchequer of the Jews.”

If GS meant the term in this sense, then his statement is not logically incoherent at all. It was much as if he had written: “Jewry is a people,” “The Jewish people is a people.” But, for one thing, I find it unlikely that he had in mind any such rare and antiquated sense of the word “Judaism.” For another, if he did mean this, then his statement is banal and uninteresting. I prefer to assume that he was trying to say something both true and interesting.

I think that what GS was trying to say can be most exactly expressed thus: “The status of being a Jew is essentially a matter of belonging to the Jewish people rather than one of professing or practicing the Jewish religion.” This, I think, is an interesting statement, and a true one as well (subject, of course, to questions about the meaning of the crucial adverb “essentially”: more on that in a moment).

But the statement contains at least the suggestion of a falsehood. For it suggests that the connection of being a Jew with the Jewish religion is accidental: as if “Judaism” were the name of a religion that just happened to be practiced by a large portion of the Jewish population—as, e.g., Armenian Orthodox Christianity is practiced by a large portion of the world’s Armenians, but is not what defines them as Armenians.

As a matter of history, such a suggestion (concerning the Jewish people) is obviously false. The Jewish people have, through most of their history, defined themselves as the people of the Torah. In some sense, we still are so defined: that is, we are definable as the descendants of the people of the Torah, even if we are not all practitioners or believers of the Torah. Such a definition, whatever exactly it means, clearly depends religious terms.

The slippage between “Jew” and “adherent (by profession or observance) of Judaism” comes about because, according to the Torah that defines the Jewish people collectively, the individual Jew is defined as such by his or her birth. In terms of the category of “religion,” this means that it is a religious practice that defines that status, though it defines it in terms of birth rather than in terms of belief or observance.

So those who consider themselves Jews in something more than a purely ethnic sense but who cannot accept Jewish (or any) religious beliefs have the problem that their self-identification as Jews presupposes a religious practice whose fundamental beliefs they cannot accept. They are—that is, we are—in an inherently uncomfortable position.

This discomfort does not arise merely for those who are, like GS, “Orthoprax,” that is, observant of the ritual practices of Orthodox Judaism while rejecting most of the beliefs that support that practice (such as “TMS,” the doctrine that the whole Torah, oral and written, was given to the Israelites through Moses at Mount Sinai). It arises even for the “three-day-a-year” Jew, whose observances do not extend beyond partaking of a seder at Passover and going to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (something that I have bound myself to do every year by accepting a paid gig in the choir of a Reform temple), as long as he or she does so under some sense, however vague and unformulated, of an obligation other than an immediate social one. It applies to the unbelieving Jew who refrains from eating pork and shellfish for reasons that cannot be attributed to personal distaste or matters of health (false rationalizations notwithstanding). The unbelieving Jew who considers himself or herself under so much as one obligation—one mitzvah—merely because he or she is a Jew has this problem.

Jewish Education in America: A Historical Note

Given the conditions of Jewish education in the United States, it is not surprising that so many children behave badly and learn little in Hebrew school. What is surprising is that this situation has existed for at least 140 years.

In a piece published on the Web in January of this year under the title “Stop Blaming Hebrew School,” Rabbi Benjamin Weiner responds to comments reportedly made by a prominent Jewish philanthropist in an interview on cable television. These comments included a characterization of the American institution of Hebrew school as “a shandah—an abysmal failure. . . . Can there be a worse term in the American Jewish lexicon than ‘Hebrew School’? There were six kids in the 20th century who liked it!”

Weiner contests the claim that Hebrew school has been a failure: “Anyone who has jockeyed disaffection with the Jewish establishment into a successful career of personal expression on the American mass-media stage . . . should reflect on the debt of gratitude he or she owes to this half-assed system of religio-ethno-cultural indoctrination,” he writes. But his main point is that “such talk, to paraphrase Tevye, blames the cart for the inherent lameness of the horse.” Weiner likens “the oft repeated claim that synagogue Hebrew schools are responsible for the decline of the Jewish people” to “stripping your parents’ house of all viable woodwork, plumbing, and appliances and then wondering why they live in such a dump.” He writes further:

What created the supposition that two to six hours a week of after-school guttarality could foment a firm commitment to the Jewish people? I don’t think this paradigm was determined deliberately from the outset, by committee. At the turn of the last century, there were viable models of Jewish education, and there was a critical mass of Jewish community prepared to embody them. And then there was mass immigration, and genocide, and breakneck assimilation—from a flummoxed traditional culture into a post-War America that was primed with petroleum to give Jewish people the greatest thrill ride they had ever experienced in a Gentile world. And, at the end of the day, Hebrew School emerged because it was the best we were allowed to do. Speaking, gloves off, as a working rabbi and education director, trying hard to find ways to reflect the “verbiage” of the Jewish religion “realistically upon our lives,” it is frustrating that, by consensus of the parents of my community, I can only educate their children for two hours a week with no homework, and that those hours come well after regular school hours, and that the expectations for behavior and attendance sometimes fall somewhere between a railway station and a monkey house—despite the fact that they are all, without exception, great kids. But this is roughly the extent of the concession that many American Jewish families are willing to make these days to their Jewish identities, and there should be a category of Nobel prize for whoever figures out how to put these parameters to the best use.

The point is that historical circumstances have made the institution of Hebrew school, with all its limitations, the primary arrangement by which Jewish parents seek to transmit Jewish knowledge to their children. The results are dismal because the hours in the classroom are meager and no homework can be assigned—not that having longer hours or assigning homework is a serious option, given that the sessions are supplemental to the children’s weekday schooling.

My attention was arrested by Weiner’s felicitous observation that “the expectations for behavior and attendance sometimes fall somewhere between a railway station and a monkey house.” The phrase seemed to me exactly to describe my own experience of Jewish religious education, and moved me to post a comment under the heading “I have long wondered why we all hated Hebrew school so much,” in which I wrote:

I am ashamed to recall the way that I and my fellows behaved in religious school. I had Sunday school at one Reform synagogue and evening classes once a week at another, with a different crowd at each, and we were all completely ineducable. As far as I recall, the only teacher who got any respect from us was a tough, sarcastic rabbi from Brooklyn (in Seattle, such a creature was rather exotic) who had a great knack for humorous abuse à la Don Rickles, and who would throw erasers at students whose answers he didn’t like. I can't speak for the other boys (I don’t recall the girls being as troublesome as we boys were, though they may have been just as inattentive), but I was certainly interested in the subjects that I studied in my secular day school, and it would never have occurred to me to misbehave in class there.

The puzzle is that youngsters who, in their daily secular schools, showed at least a reasonable degree of interest in their subjects of study and a reasonable standard of behavior became inattentive and intractable during the measly two hours or so that they were expected to spend in learning about Judaism. Weiner, though he notes this disparity, does not attempt to explain it.

Reader Becca Lish, however, does so in a comment in which she writes that the Jewish philanthropist mentioned earlier “might wish to look to the vast majority of parents who expect our children to embrace beliefs and practices which we ourselves eschew. . . . The degree to which we integrate ‘Jewishness’ into actual family life will always be the prevailing factor in determining both sentiment and practice in the next generation.” I am inclined to agree. In fact, just a few days before her comment appeared, I had written something in a similar vein in a comment on my own blog:

Though I was industrious and well-behaved in my weekday secular school, I and my classmates in religious school were rebellious, inattentive, and virtually unteachable. I think that the underlying cause was simply that Jewish observance played so little role in our everyday lives that any study of it or of the thinking on which it was based literally bored us silly.

As I ruefully concluded my comment on Weiner’s piece: “In my adulthood, I wish that I could have learned much more [about Judaism when I was a child], but I don’t know how anyone could ever have taught it to us.” The ineffectuality of Jewish education outside of day schools and yeshivot reflects the thinness of most American Jewish practice.

But why is so much American Jewish practice—at least, so much American Reform Jewish practice—so thin? I think it is thin because the underlying beliefs are thin; and I think that the beliefs are thin because modern scientific and historical knowledge has made them so. But I know too little about the subject for my historical speculations to be worth publishing here.

Recently, I have been making my way slowly through Michael A. Meyer’s compendious Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). The following passage—and this is really what this whole post has been leading up to—caught my attention:

Limited to a few hours a week, the religious school was unable to undertake the intensive curriculum which had been taught in the day schools. Most met as few as two hours per week. Hebrew especially suffered, students but rarely achieving any real competence in the language. While in the majority of schools some Hebrew was taught, it was often optional and in quite a few not taught at all. Children who behaved well in public school resented the additional burden of weekend classes. As one observer noted, comparing the two: “There attention and quiet, here indifference, often wild noise; there decent respectful behavior toward the teacher, here only the opposite.” (286)

I quote this passage here because, although it almost exactly describes my own experience of Hebrew school, it refers to the situation approximately 140 years ago: the quotation within the quoted passage is taken from a piece published in 1871! Rabbi Weiner, in a passage quoted earlier, claims that “at the turn of the last century”—that is, circa 1901, in contrast to developments in subsequent decades—“there were viable models of Jewish education, and there was a critical mass of Jewish community prepared to embody them.” I don’t know how to square this with Meyers’s historical account. If the passage from that account quoted above is at all reliable, then the ineffectuality of Hebrew school and the refractory behavior of its recipients are not only not recent developments: one could fairly say that they belong to a Reform Jewish tradition.

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What Beliefs Are Jewish Beliefs?

Certainly some beliefs are Jewish beliefs; only it is difficult to say which ones. If the question is whether a belief is an Orthodox Jewish belief, the question can be easier to settle; but not always.

Rabbi Louis Jacobs (1920–2006)

Shilton HaSechel posted a comment on my previous entry, “Three Kinds of Religious Beliefs,” which has given me occasion to rethink some of what I wrote and to add a few further thoughts. Shilton writes:

After all the denial of Mosaic authorship although dear to many actually is not necessary to Judaism.

I concede the point. I probably ought to have specified “Orthodox Judaism” at certain points in my article, though even then I am not sure if that would have been an adequate qualification, as there may be a diversity of views on the pertinent points even among Orthodox rabbis, let alone Orthodox Jews (not a term capable of sharp definition) in general.

While I continue to hold that there is such a thing as “Jewish beliefs,” or beliefs characteristic of Judaism, it is no easy matter to say what those beliefs are and in exactly what sense they are “Jewish” or “characteristic of Judaism,” without making arbitrary or parochial assumptions. So, for instance, the belief that the Torah was given litteratim to Moses at Mount Sinai is certainly a Jewish belief in some sense: it is propounded in the Talmud; it has been maintained by rabbis for hundreds of years; it is still maintained by (most? many? some?) Orthodox rabbis. But, also obviously, that belief is not held by all, or even by most, Jews, and probably not even by most rabbis.

Continuing with Shilton’s comment:

Even Orthodox Judaism could do away with belief in Biblical history and still continue functioning pretty much the same. All you really need to believe is someway somehow God inspired/directed the holy writings of Judaism so therefore these writing are then themselves holy and contain God’s message.

In theory, perhaps; in practice, I very much doubt it. The “could” that Shilton suggests here is presumably what Rabbi Louis Jacobs assumed when he first published We Have Reason to Believe: Some Aspects of Jewish Theology Examined in the Light of Modern Thought in 1957. In that bracing book, he argued that imputing divine origins to the written and oral Torah is entirely compatible with a scientifically informed understanding of the historical process by which the pertinent texts were formed. And he did this without any fudging of the science à la J. H. Hertz.

The Orthodox establishment of Great Britain had quite different ideas, as Jacobs learned to his discomfiture a few years later when his promised appointment to the principality of Jews’ College (the London Orthodox rabbinical seminary) was thwarted by the intervention of the Chief Rabbi of the UK, Israel Brodie; and again a few years after that, when Brodie vetoed the appointment of Jacobs to a pulpit position at the New West End Synagogue of London. The vindictiveness of the Orthodox establishment toward Jacobs only worsened after he left the Orthodox rabbinate to found the Masorti movement, the British equivalent of Conservative Judaism in the US. In 1995, the present Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, published an article in the Jewish Tribune accusing Jacobs of “intellectual thievery” and, according to an article by Matt Plen, “alleging that Masorti’s claim to represent authentic Judaism was a subterfuge aimed at the destruction of the tradition.” In 2003, Jacobs was denied an aliyah at his granddaughter’s wedding because, as Rabbi Sacks and the head of the London Beth Din, Dayan Chanoch Ehrentreu, wrote together in a publication, “had Jacobs uttered the words ‘Our God [. . .] who gave us the Torah of truth [. . .]’, he would have made a false statement” (source).

Of course, one could argue that this disgraceful history says more about the parochial rigidity (not to say meanness, mulishness, and sheer stupidity) of the British Orthodox establishment than it says about Orthodox Judaism per se. But when certain positions are maintained by such a prominent Orthodox authority, it is difficult to regard them as deviant or unrepresentative.

Finally, to answer Shilton’s closing question:

Are there any other natural beliefs you have in mind besides Mosaic authorship?

Well, pretty much all of the history in the Bible. I have been reading The Bible Unearthed (bibliographical information in note 2 of my previous entry), and I am continually impressed, first, by how much knowledge has been accumulated by scholars concerning the actual history of the ancient Near East, and second, how little truth it leaves in the accounts of events in the Bible. As Finkelstein and Silberman say at some point, even the histories of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, which have a far closer relation to historical fact than anything in the Pentateuch, simply are not attempts at history as we understand it, but exercises in ideology in historical form.

Of course, those parts of the Bible have a less intimate relation to Jewish religious practice than have the contents of the Pentateuch. But they do support the important theme of how the Israelites earn divine retribution by repeatedly straying from the worship of the one true God. That is, they attribute the misfortunes of the Israelites to their collective failure to keep their part of their covenant with God. Finkelstein and Silberman’s findings show that even where the “natural” part of this history is concerned—the mere recounting of events, regardless of the theological interpretation that is put upon them—the Bible is untruthful.

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Funny Word, Funnier Concept

The word “Jew” is odd enough considered merely as a phonetic phenomenon; it gets even funnier when you try to figure out exactly what it means.

Jerry Seinfeld

Is not the word “Jew” somewhat—well, funny? That a religious identity with three thousand years of often tragic history behind it, the source of some of the founding texts of Western and Near Eastern civilization, should be signified in our language by a paltry monosyllable is, to say the least, incongruous. More than that, the word has at least a potentially humorous ring to it. Thus an elective class at the religious school that I attended as a boy was whimsically titled “Jews in the News.” (That is the kind of measure to which a Reform Jewish Sunday school—and yes, it was held on Sundays, not Saturdays—resorted in its efforts to avoid boring us: elevating the hallowed pastime of Jew-spotting to an academic subject.) My classmates and I were inspired by this title to add “Jews in Trees” to the list of classes on a bulletin board. But the impulse to play around with the word started with the grown-ups, not with us.

Of course, it may well be that I can say such things only because I had the good fortune to grow up without hearing the word “Jew” used in hatred and contempt, something that I imagine most Jews of earlier generations in English-speaking countries cannot say (to say nothing of Jews in countries of other languages). Even today, many people, especially non-Jews, shy away from using the word and substitute the dainty phrase “Jewish person” for fear of giving offense. I suspect that I am not the only one who finds something jarring in the designation of a rabbinical college in London as “Jews’ College.” (I suspect that that is one reason why in 1999 it changed its name to “London School of Jewish Studies.”)

As far as its origins are concerned, the curtness of the word “Jew” says more about the eliding tendencies of the French language than about the sentiments of those who have used it. It was in French that the word for one belonging to the tribe or the kingdom of Judah, transmitted in trisyllabic form from Hebrew (y’hūdī) by way of Aramaic (y'hūdāi), Greek (ioudaios), and Latin (iūdæus), was reduced to a monosyllable, variously written giu, gyu, or giue, before ending up in English as “Jew.” (Source: Oxford English Dictionary.)

And yet, the very word that is innocent in one language can become a slur in another. In English, “Yid” is an ethnic slur; in Yiddish, it is just the word for “Jew.” “Zhid” (жид) in Russian is an offensive term, while a word of identical sound and origin in Czech (žid), Slovak (the same), and Polish (Żyd) carries no derisive connotation. 

Whatever the oddities of the word “Jew” and its monosyllabic equivalents in some other languages, they are superficial compared to the oddities of the concept expressed by the word. In my first entry in this blog (“Three Ways of Looking at Being Jewish,” December 27, 2009), I considered three possible ways of understanding what a Jew is: (1) one who belongs to the Jewish people, (2) one who practices Judaism, and (3) one who adheres to the Jewish faith. That last phrase, “the Jewish faith,” makes me cringe somewhat, as it so strongly suggests attempts to assimilate Judaism to a Christian, and more specifically a Protestant, model of religion as “faith.” Of course, Judaism is a religion and does involve faith, both in the sense of a body of theistic and eschatological beliefs and in the sense of trust in a divinity (at least in most of its varieties). But it would be an error to presume that the beliefs define the religion or that they are more fundamental than the observances.

The relation between belief and observance in Judaism is subject to endless disputation. Yet it is merely one “funny” element of the concept of being a Jew. Let us simplify the matter by distinguishing between only two rather than three aspects of Jewishness: belonging to the Jewish people on the one hand, and accepting—whether that means practicing, professing, or both—Judaism on the other. Now it seems plain that the first of these has priority; for one who is born into the Jewish people is a Jew, regardless of whether he or she accepts Judaism, while someone not born into the Jewish people and not converted by a rabbi is not a Jew no matter what practices or professions he or she may make.

Is the term then an ethnic designation, or a term of descent? Not at all. In the first place, one can become a Jew by conversion. There is no such thing as converting to an ethnic membership, and while one may be adopted into a family, one does not thereby acquire a new descent. In the second place, it is religious practice that determines membership in the Jewish people (a.k.a. Israel), not in the sense that you have to practice Judaism to count as a Jew, but in the sense that it is Jewish practice that determines the criteria for so counting. Traditionally, the primary criterion is that one is born of a Jewish woman. Reform Judaism also accepts patrilineal descent under certain conditions as sufficient for membership. Whatever the specifics, the important point is that the criteria of belonging are themselves a matter of religious practice. The Jewish religion determines both a religious condition (conversion) and a non-religious condition (descent) for belonging to the Jewish people; and the non-religious condition is the normal or default condition. A Jew is, by and large, such by dint of being the child of Jewish parents.

So the term “Jew” compresses into one syllable at least two pairs of divergent but mutually inseparable aspects of Jewish identity: religious belief and religious observance on the one hand, religious practice and descent on the other. Anyone who tries to impose an either–or on these matters and make the term unidimensionally a matter of, say, religious profession or observance or descent—just one and not any other—does not even understand what the word means.

Is this logically incoherent? Of course not. It merely refuses to conform to certain a priori expectations. Face it: it’s a funny word.

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Reply to Comment on Jewish Identity

There is more to belonging than just a sense of belonging: the entity to which you feel that you belong must really exist, and you must really be included in it. I belong to the Jewish people even though I do not accept Jewish beliefs, but only because of a practice that rests on those beliefs—which leaves me in an uneasy position.

Source

A few days ago, Rogueregime posted some comments on my first three blog entries to which I think any adequate reply would have to be somewhat lengthy. So here, as another entry rather than a mere comment, is my reply to one of them—his comment on my first entry, “Three Ways of Looking at Being Jewish.” (I expect to reply to his other comments in subsequent entries.)

Responding to my having written, “It may be, for all I know, that my sense of belonging is in fact illusory and superstitious,” Rogueregime asks me:

I’m curious to know more about what you actually experience when you say you feel a “sense of belonging.” Certainly it can’t be illusory if you feel something, right? How does your sense of belonging to the Jewish people differ from, say, your sense of being an American? Is there a difference, and if so, what is it?

I will answer the rhetorical question in the second sentence first, because I think that it will clarify the other matters. Perhaps my expression was not as clear as it could have been, but I take it that someone may have a sense of belonging to some larger entity when in fact he does not, either because the entity does not include him or because it does not exist. Such a possibility is what I meant by an illusory sense of belonging: it is a sense of belonging that does not rest on an actual fact of belonging.

The application to my own case is that I feel that I belong to the Jewish people, but the veracity of that feeling is problematic for me because of my religious doubts. If the grammatically singular term “Jewish people” merely signifies the totality of those who are Jewish by either matrilineal descent or conversion to Judaism, then my belonging to that totality is a natural fact of which I may be assured, but it is hardly a matter of life-shaping importance. Why should it matter that I belong to a group that is defined in such an oddly disjunct manner? Why should a group be so defined?

The only kind of belonging to the Jewish people that could have what I called life-shaping importance, as far as I can make out, is one that derives from religious tradition. For instance, if I accepted the doctrine that the Jewish people (or the nation of Israel, of which the Jews of today are the surviving remnant) is constituted by a covenant with God made at Mount Sinai, then I would have no difficulty attributing a real basis to my sense of belonging, and explaining why and how my belonging matters to the conduct of my life. But I don’t accept that doctrine, and it seems to me unlikely that I shall ever do so.

What actually obtains is the following rather complicated arrangement: I am counted, by a Jewish tradition founded on beliefs that I do not share, as belonging, by virtue of a natural fact of descent, to a people constituted by a hereditary supernatural bond. The fact of my descent provides me, so to speak, with my membership; experience provides me with my sense of belonging; but in what way I actually do belong, and to what exactly I belong, are questions that I have not been able to answer. If this convoluted reasoning gives you a headache, I am sorry, but I can tell you that it is no easier to be the source and object of it!

Rogueregime also asks me what experiences I have in mind when I speak of this “sense of belonging,” and how it differs from my sense of being American. Well, in both cases I regard certain chapters of history to be in some sense “my” history, because they concern an entity to which I belong; in both cases, though there are things in that history that appall me, I tend to prickle when outsiders find fault with my “people”; in both cases, I recognize that my membership conditions my ways of thinking, feeling, and acting; so there are a lot of similarities. But, for one thing, I can imagine circumstances in which I might trade the political part of my American identity, that is, my citizenship, for another national identity, while I cannot imagine circumstances in which I would trade the religious part of my Jewish identity—even though it remains largely, so to speak, unused—for some other religious identity. I don’t know that I can honestly say that I would sooner die, but the feeling seems to me to come pretty close to that. More of that on another occasion, perhaps. The main point is that the Jewish identity, by my subjective estimate, goes deeper.

Finally, Rogueregime posed this question about my proposed three ways of looking at what it is to be Jewish:

Is there not a sense in which one is Jewish not because of anything you think, say or do, but because others see you as a Jew? The fourth “way” would then be “One who other Jews says is a Jew."

Well, the definition (if it can be called that) has an obvious circularity, though an analogous circularity has not deterred some philosophers of recent times from using similar tactics in formulating so-called conventionalist definitions of art. In my estimate, though, this way of looking at Jewish identity, like those definitions, achieves a tidy outcome by trivializing the question that it purports to answer. You illustrate the application of the definition with the case of an Israeli-born friend who recognizes that she counts as Jewish because her mother is Jewish, but to whom the identification has no value or significance. The proposed definition is well suited to the outlook of such a person, but it evades the question of why “other Jews” call someone Jewish. To say that they do so because the person’s mother is Jewish takes us to the question: why do they do that? The answer then must be in terms of Jewish tradition and Jewish law. And then we have to ask what kind of authority such tradition and law have. So if we are seriously trying to explain what a Jew is or what makes someone Jewish, we can’t avoid those difficult questions.

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Why Are There So Few Non-Orthodox Jewish Blogs?

Why are there so few bloggers writing about Judaism and Jewishness from a perspective comparable to mine? Is it because too few non-Orthodox Jews care enough about Judaism to write about the topic, or is it because too few of them know enough about Judaism to do so?

(I couldn’t find a good photo of a guy in a kippa at a computer)

Rogueregime, a blogger on Jewish concerns from a Reform perspective, asks in a recent post, “Is anyone else like me out there?”

I have found lots of great frum (i.e., religious) and off-the derech (i.e., by former "observant" Jews) blogs out there, and I have even come across some right-wing sites that at the very least are giving me some food for thought. [. . .]

But I'm not finding other blogs written by people like me:  Liberal, Reform Jews searching for a meaningful, authentic connection with the nitty-gritty of our faith.

Now I do not know how specifically Rogueregime intended the words “Liberal” and “Reform.” (Did he mean “Liberal” with a capital L or a small one? If the latter, did he mean liberal in religion or in politics?) Speaking for myself, I would be satisfied to find some blogs in which Jews who are not presently or formerly Orthodox—understood to include the whole range from Modern Orthodox to Ultra-Orthodox—address Jewish concerns. I don’t care whether they are Reform or Conservative or Reconstructionist or Liberal or Renewal or “other” (which would include “unaffiliated”). I would just like to be able to read some thoughtful blog writing about what it means to be Jewish from perspectives that are like mine to the extent of being completely outside of Orthodoxy. I have found Rogueregime’s blog and now the two that he cites in his post (The Reform Shuckle and Mah Rabu). There may be others out there, but, given how hard they have been to find, they cannot exist in the same profusion as Orthodox blogs. Why is that?

The first explanation that came to my mind when I asked myself this question was that there are not many non-Orthodox Jews who find being Jewish to be a topic of sufficient interest for a blog. But I think that a more plausible answer—and it is in some ways an even sadder one—is that there is simply not enough knowledge of Judaism among the non-Orthodox for many of them to blog about Jewish concerns, at least in any very interesting way. I may be overgeneralizing from a narrow experience, but it seems to me that the great majority of non-Orthodox Jews—Jews like me—have at best a smattering of second- and third-hand knowledge of the historical sources of Jewish law and doctrine. Many have not even that. Since most of us do not know Hebrew, let alone Aramaic (which I only recently learned to be the primary language of the Talmud: how ignorant is that? I also ask my non-Orthodox Jewish reader: did you know that?), we don't even have a vocabulary in which to express the pertinent concepts. At least, that is the impression that I get from reading Orthodox blogs, in which Hebrew words and phrases that I never knew are scattered like slang in the conversation of teenagers. (I have recently learned that this mode of expression is called Yeshivish.)

Now it is, of course, a celebrated fact about Jewish tradition that if you want to know what “the Jewish view” on X is, where X is a non-trivial topic, you are asking an essentially unanswerable question. There is no single Jewish view on any topic of significance: what there is is two thousand years of rabbinical disputation. What you have to learn is not what “the Jewish view” is, but how the argument has gone. The trouble is that if you grow up outside of strict Jewish observance, then that tradition is not likely to seem of anything but academic interest to you.

In writing even this much, I have run the risk of talking beyond my knowledge; so I am reluctant to take the topic much further. (Whatever shame there is in knowing that one is ignorant, it is less than the shame of learning that one has talked ignorantly, i.e., made statements with a presumption of knowledge when in fact one did not know what one was talking about.) From this point, I will try only to relate it to my own particular predicament.

I am willing to grant that there may be a form of belief in God that is not superstition. What I cannot conceive to be other than superstition is the attribution of particular events in history to God’s will, particular texts to his authorship (or “inspiration”—a bit of verbal evasion that either means essentially the same thing as authorship or means essentially nothing), or particular laws and observances to his authority. (For two thousand years our rabbis have inveighed against superstition: but it seems to me that in practice what they mean is just superstitions other than their own.)

Now from this point of view, it is difficult to conceive of a rationale for observing halakhah or bringing up one’s children within it. And among Jews who grow up and live without such observance, few are likely to feel much incentive to study the tradition of rabbinical literature and thought. But without study of that tradition, Jews really do not know what Judaism is. In my view, that means that they do not really know what they are. If they do not care about their ignorance, and either abandon Judaism or fail to pass it on to the next generation, they may be throwing away something of immeasurable value. I cannot say that I know that there is something of immeasurable value in Judaism; but I also do not know that there is not. For this reason, I am not willing to throw Judaism away.

So the sum of the matter is this: On the one hand, I cannot understand Judaism otherwise than as being founded on certain beliefs that I find to be inherently superstitious. On the other hand, there may be something of immeasurable value in Judaism. I cannot be in favor of throwing out something that, for all I know, may be of immeasurable value. I also cannot be in favor of superstition. I don’t know where to stand. My only consoling thought is that the Jews of the world—secular or religious, liberal or strict, skeptical or superstitious (but I don’t mean these three pairs of terms as equivalents!)—will go their various ways regardless of what I think or say.

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Three Ways of Looking at Being Jewish

My first version of the title of this post was “Three Ways of Looking at a Jew.” The parody held some charm for me (if you don't get the allusion, look here), but I chose to replace it with a title that better reflects the actual content to follow. The three aspects are: belonging to the Jewish people, practicing Judaism, and adhering to Jewish beliefs. Relations among the three are complicated.

Kahal Shalom Synagogue, Rhodes

Here are three ways in which one might think of what a Jew is:

1. One who belongs to the Jewish people.
2. One who practices Judaism.
3. One who adheres to the Jewish faith.

It would be nice, wouldn’t it—I mean, as far as intellectual comfort is concerned—if these three descriptions invariably coincided. For if they did, then any question of what it means to be a Jew would be, in the end, academic: a potentially interesting matter to think about, but not an urgent or a necessary one, and above all not a troubling one. But I cannot imagine a world in which those three descriptions invariably coincide—other than, I suppose, a world without Jews.

I could not define any of those three items without entangling myself in controversies that would soon take me out of my depth. Nonetheless, I believe that I fit the first description—“one who belongs to the Jewish people”—and that this by itself makes me a Jew. Or perhaps I should say that my being a Jew makes me a member of the Jewish people rather than the other way around. In any case, the fact that I practice almost no Jewish observances and accept none of the theistic and eschatological beliefs of Judaism does not raise any doubt in my mind about my Jewish identity. (I suppose that in the eyes of Orthodox Jews I would be a kind of virtual goy; but, since I was born of a Jewish mother, they would still count me as Jewish under halakhah.)

It may seem, then, that for me the question of what it means to be a Jew should be academic after all. For if I am sure that I am Jewish, regardless of my being without Jewish observances and beliefs, then what need is there for me to perplex myself about these various aspects of being Jewish? Let the believing Jews worry about such things!

But the matter is not so simple. For one thing, although the primary criterion of belonging to the Jewish people, and thus of being a Jew, is that one is born of a Jewish mother, this criterion is itself a product of religious law. So one who takes himself to belong by birth to the Jewish people, as I do, is thereby appealing to religious law, and thus to religious practice and belief. To be sure, one can belong to the Jewish people without believing or practicing Judaism, as one can believe without belonging or practicing, or practice without belonging or believing: the three items can occur independently of one another. But they cannot be conceived independently of one another. So the non-believing, non-practicing Jew who considers himself to belong to the Jewish people is thereby entangled in a problem that is anything but academic: how can I belong to a people defined by a religious law that I do not myself accept? If I don't accept the law—if I neither observe it nor accept the beliefs on which its authority rests—do I in fact belong?

One possible response to this problem is simply to give up the idea that one belongs to the Jewish people. Indeed, to be consistent, one would have to deny that there is any such thing as the Jewish people. One would not deny, of course, that there are Jewish people, that is, persons of Jewish descent, most of whom happen to profess a certain religion called Judaism; but one would have to deny that they constitute a people in any serious sense—a sense weighty enough to generate an obligation to continue the traditions of that people, for instance.

I know that many Jews do take this route. For them, being “Jewish” is purely a matter of descent, like being “Irish” or “Italian” as Americans commonly use those terms, meaning that one has forebears of the nationality in question. Such a way of regarding Jewish identity seems coherent and rationally defensible, at least on its face. That is more than I can say for the option that I have taken, that of regarding myself as a member of the Jewish people without accepting the religious beliefs or, for the most part (more on this qualification later), the practices on which that identification seems to rest.

It may be, for all I know, that my sense of belonging is in fact illusory and superstitious. But it may also be that it is not, and that I have simply been unable to figure out what it does in fact rest on. It could rest on accidents of personal history and emotional association, or it could rest on something immeasurably precious that I have so far failed to comprehend. The best bet for me, in my estimation, is simply to press on with my inquiries. A skeptic, as I use the term, is not simply one who doubts, but one who requires sufficient reason for any proposed conclusion in a matter that admits of reasonable doubt. In the present instance, that includes requiring rational substantiation of my own doubts: they may be founded on insights, or on blind spots. Thus I remain a skeptical Jew.

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