Open Question Post
Sep. 21st, 2012 10:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI don't have any specific things to say about recent Talmud study, but I want to keep my posting up, so I'm declaring this an open question post.
If you have any questions about the Talmud, Daf Yomi, or Judaism, feel free to ask and I will answer as unauthoritatively as possible. Because I am not an authority, and please, please don't ever be the person who says "My Jewish friend told me that they do X," but I'm happy to try to answer anything anyway.
If you have any questions about the Talmud, Daf Yomi, or Judaism, feel free to ask and I will answer as unauthoritatively as possible. Because I am not an authority, and please, please don't ever be the person who says "My Jewish friend told me that they do X," but I'm happy to try to answer anything anyway.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-21 05:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-23 03:19 pm (UTC)Simple answer is that the Torah is quite clear that a convert is to be considered the same as a Jew. It repeats this several times. End of story.
Complicated answer might begin with a pre-Talmudic debate about conversions of members of the Seven Nations- the nations that lived in Canaan before Israel conquered the land. The Torah says that these people are tainted by the barbaric idol-worship of their nations and can't convert to Judaism. The book of Ruth plays out this argument: most scholars believe that Ruth is pro-conversion of Moabite propaganda. The rules of conversion that the Talmud adopts are almost all derived from the book of Ruth, and parallel to this the Rabbis come up with a variety of theories to explain the dropping of the rule about the Seven Nations. (AND THIS IS ALL VERY COMPLICATED, AND I AM SIMPLIFYING LIKE WHOA, BECAUSE I AM NOT AN EXPERT AT EITHER THE HISTORY OR THE LAWS INVOLVED)
So even 2500 years ago, conversion was a contentious issue for Jews, with one side seeking easier conversions of non-Jews and the other side seeking to make it harder. The same is true today. At that moment in history, the pro-conversion side won all the victories. At other times for a variety of historical, cultural, and economic reasons one side or the other has taken the lead.
In general, Orthodox conversion today follows a pretty demanding procedure. By tradition the first three times a prospective convert approaches a Rabbi seeking conversion, the difficulty of the procedure is explained and they are sent away to reconsider whether they want to do it. Converting to Judaism is seen as entering into a covenant, which isn't a magical sparkly aura that sends us to heaven, it's a binding legal contract with God that commits us to following an onerous set of laws. We want to make sure that people entering the covenant are serious about it. After that, if they persist, an education process that typically lasts more than a year ensues. After this, the conversion itself is relatively simple: the convert is interrogated by a Jewish court as to the practice they have adopted, their reasons for wanting to convert, etc... And upon passing, they are circumcised if male and for both males and females immersed in a ritual bath called a mikva, and then they are Jewish. (Baptism and Mikva are related, though in some senses divergent, phenomena. But that's a topic for another day)
And once they are Jewish, they are as Jewish as anyone else. I've known converts to tell me they felt more Jewish in some senses, since Jews by birth had no obligation at all to learn Torah in order to be Jewish, and many converts are far more educated in Jewish law than the average Jew.
But it's not that simple. Jewish communities are tight knit and family-oriented. A convert has crammed for a few years on Jewish culture and law and lore, but that's not the same as growing up in it. They don't know the songs we sang as kids. They don't know the weird traditions from summer camp. They may dress differently, or they may try so hard to dress 'correctly' that it's obvious that they're trying. They don't laugh at the right jokes. It is often not very hard to spot the person who doesn't belong in an observant Jewish community, whether that be a convert or a baal teshuvah.
I know a lot of converts very closely, and all of them have struggled at times after the conversion to fit into the Jewish community on a social level. It can be very hard. Even if the Jews in the community are making an effort to reach out and welcome in the converts, which they don't always, it's not exactly easy for them to have to socialize with people they don't connect with. Several of my convert friends have fallen into social circles mostly consisting of other converts. Sometimes they'll speak derisively about FFBs (Frum from Birth, a slang term for people who were born into Orthodox families). And with respect to you reading Hasidic female blogs, it has been my observation that some of the most generous and welcoming people toward converts have been Hasids, who in general have proselytization and bringing new people into the fold more ingrained in their Jewish education than most Jews, but on the other hand Hasidic culture is one of the Jewish cultures that is most divergent from mainstream American culture and most insular, so converts may have the hardest time fitting in.
And the other issue for converts that unfortunately can dog them is people questioning the legitimacy of their conversions. Israel's Orthodox authorities are at war with American Jewish religious authority in general at the moment, over a variety of issues, but one of the main ones is the legitimacy of American conversions with respect to the Law of Return. In recent years the Israeli Rabbinate has required greater and greater proofs of the validity of an American conversion before accepting someone as Jewish. If a person got a Reform or Conservative conversion, which may or may not be less rigorous than an Orthodox conversion, they will almost certainly need to re-convert under an Orthodox Rabbi before invoking the Right of Return and moving to Israel. That has been true for some time. What is new in the past few years is that now even American Orthodox conversions are receiving scrutiny, and not all Orthodox conversions are being accepted by the Israeli Rabbinate.
But beyond the legal implications, converts can see people questioning the legitimacy of their conversions in social circumstances. A person who is scrupulous about keeping kosher might not eat at a convert's house if they believed the convert was not yet expert at keeping the laws of kashrut. That's one of the more obvious examples I can think of, but this can also have much subtler manifestations, backhanded and maybe even unintentional comments that belittle a convert's knowledge or Jewishness. A born Jew might not even realize that the terms they're using create an us and a them with the convert on the outside, but it can still be hurtful and exclusionary to the convert.
But none of this is really what you asked me. You asked me how I feel personally about converts. Well, I have a number of extremely close friends who have converted. One of my old roommates completed her conversion process shortly after moving out, and she also married a convert. For years I kept a text message from her on my phone to look at when I needed a smile. It read: "I'm Jewish!" Halachically, I believe they are as Jewish as I am. Socially, I know many who have made important contributions to the community, who have been committed to the idea of being part of K'lal Yisrael. It frustrates me to no end that we don't do enough to welcome converts into our community once they have made the leap, because I believe it is the responsibility of the Jewish community to make every member feel welcome.
On the other hand, I find conversion baffling. I grew up Jewish and have doubted my Judaism many times, but I have never contemplated converting to another religion as my answer. I do not understand what draws particular non-Jews to Judaism. I don't understand what they're looking for and I don't understand what they've found, and I say that having had a lot of drunken (and therefore frank, friendly, and open) conversations with converts and people in the process of conversion on this question. I love them, they're my friends and in some case my family and they're part of Klal Yisrael, but all that stuff I wrote above about how it can be difficult to find common ground and welcome them into a community you were born in is still sometimes true of me. So what I do is try my hardest to make them feel welcome, and sometimes I fail, but I like to think I mostly do a good job.
Does that answer your questions? I feel like it probably opens the door to more questions more than it answers questions, but that's okay, too.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-23 03:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-25 04:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-25 07:05 pm (UTC)I'd love for you to tell me your thoughts about community in (I guess Orthodox?) Judaism -- also the role of women in this community? I'm not asking so much about feminist-ish things in particular, though of course thoughts on that would be interesting as well, but more on your thoughts on the glue that holds the community together and how gender plays into that. If that makes any sense. And hey, if it doesn't make sense, would still love to hear your thoughts on whatever you think I'm saying ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-25 08:05 pm (UTC)I have many many thoughts on the subject of community and gender roles in Judaism, but I'm entirely unsure how coherent they will be. I hope you find them interesting. See my Adventures in Artscroll Feminism tag for some thoughts on Judaism, female roles, and modernity. (There are good discussions in the comments, too)
I'll try to give you a longer response after Yom Kippur.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-28 04:59 pm (UTC)Wow, I really liked the Artscroll posts. Thanks for linking me to them! (Not having known what Artscroll was before you linked me, I would never have found them on my own :) )
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-28 06:24 pm (UTC)Artscroll is a pretty unavoidable part of the Orthodox landscape at the moment. Theirs is the only complete English translation of the Talmud Bavli available- though a rival, Koren, is starting to publish its own edition. Theirs is the dominant prayerbook, and mostly with good reason. It's the best typeset, most followable, clearest prayerbook on the market.
Theirs is the dominant Chumash (Pentateuch), and that I find a lot more problematic. I much prefer an older Chumash edited by Rabbi Hertz. Some of the differences are easy to explain. Rabbi Hertz's commentaries are better. They are less didactic, clearer, avail themselves of a much broader and richer set of sources, and push a much less problematic agenda. Other differences are harder to explain. The Artscroll translation is typically more 'literal', in a word-by-word sense. If you know Hebrew and you're reading the English text in Artscroll, you can usually guess what words the Hebrew text uses. But there are exceptions, when Artscroll makes noticeable edits in its English translation for doctrinal reasons. Hertz's translation is less literal, more fluid, and yet it is also more honest and features less of the strange doctrinal distortions of Artscroll. This noodling around about comparative translations is hard to explain without examples, though.
So Artscroll's Chumash, and their books in general, are great study tools for people who know their way around the text already and know how to read around the bias, and really dangerous ways to learn a carefully manipulated version of Jewish studies if you're a beginner just getting started.
Part 1
Date: 2012-10-03 01:35 am (UTC)This question of Judaism and community is so broad that I don't really know where to begin. So here, have a meditation on the reason why the idea of Jewish community has survived for longer than virtually any minority ethnic group's sense of community. The Talmud decided that physical slavery wasn't enough of a problem to make the Egyptian bondage a bad thing, so they added in another narrative about spiritual impoverishment. Away from the land of Israel, the land of their forefathers, the Ancient Israelites began to drift away from their God, say the Rabbis. When the two and a half million or so Israelites left Egypt amidst a powerful set of miracles, they left behind an equal number, the so-called 'mixed multitude', who weren't deemed worthy of being saved.
And yet Egypt is described triumphantly as the place where Israel became a nation, 'great, mighty, and numerous'. What does the Talmud say is the reason why those two and a half million were able to stay in their state of spiritual elevation even in exile? The answer, the Talmud says, is threefold: First, they maintained a distinct set of clothing, different than the Egyptians. Second, they maintained a distinct type of name, different than the Egyptians. Third, they continued to speak Hebrew. In other words, creating a community by holding themselves apart from the Egyptians was the Talmud's key to saving the Jewish nation from spiritual downfall, a salvation that ultimately led to the physical redemption of the nation. On the other hand, the physical redemption of Israel was led by a man who violated all three of those things. He bore an Egyptian name given to him by an Egyptian princess, dressed like an Egyptian accustomed to being part of Egyptian royalty, and spoke Egyptian. (Some commentators teach that Moses's 'speech impediment' was that he did not speak the same language as his nation)
Draw what conclusions you want from the Talmud's lesson vs. the Torah's lesson. I just like opening any essay on Judaism by broaching a contradiction, because the central theme of Jewish thought is the opposition: 'Two Jews, Three Opinions' is the joke so old and hoary it might be as venerable as the Book of Proverbs. God taught us through the name Israel (Which literally means "struggles with God") that we were obligated to struggle with our faith and were praiseworthy for that very struggle. It makes for a very dynamic sense of community. And I think this is an interesting contradiction to think about in relation to the idea of Jewish community, because it illustrates the fight between the isolationist impulse and the integrationist impulse when it comes to building Jewish community in the midst of other communities.
My first impulse on seeing your post was to immediately reject the idea of answering your question about Orthodox Jewish community separately from the overall question about Jewish community. In theory, Reform and Orthodox Judaism may seem very far apart. In practice, the communities are tightly interlinked by family and social interconnections. In answering a question for
So that's an important point. Jewish community does not map to denomination, but denomination is a major point of common ground and/or tension within the community. A maxim I grew up with was Kol Yisrael arevim zeh lazeh, which either means "All of Israel is responsible for one another" or "All of Israel is responsible to one another." Probably it means both. It's certainly understood both ways. It's one of those maxims to which way more than lip service is paid, in many different ways. No matter where they are, no matter what their beliefs, Jews believe in being there as a safety net when other Jews need help. It's sometimes amazed me when I've visited a new city and instantly found a community eager to offer me a place to pray, sometimes even meals and a place to sleep, as someone who they'd never met and simply because they knew that I was Jewish. And that is mostly true regardless of denomination. It's happened for me when I bounced into an Orthodox community in large cities like Chicago and Boston. It's happened for me when I've hit small Southern towns where the Conservative synagogue was the only synagogue for five towns in any direction. And Kol Yisrael arevim zeh lazeh gets applied beautifully on a global level, with Jews from across the world providing support to get Russian Jews to Israel, providing support to the victims of the Bombay attack, providing support for ambulances in Israel and anti-poverty efforts in Brazil. When a Jew is in need, our deeply instilled communal values tell us that their need trumps everything.
That notwithstanding, speaking of the Orthodox community as a thing unto itself is not entirely unreasonable. In most Jewish communities, cultural life revolves around the synagogue, so while there is overlap between different kinds of Jews, many kinds of social interaction are primarily within a particular synagogue community. And in addition, Orthodox communities have shared values, shared cultural touchstones, shared vocabulary, shared interests. Furthermore, there's one other factor that might be less obvious to someone outside the community: Because Orthodox communities are Shabbat-observant, they tend to clump together in close walking distance of their synagogue, much more so than non-Orthodox Jews who are okay with driving on Shabbat. My town, which is perhaps thirty or forty percent Jewish, has a tight cluster of Orthodox Jews living in three adjacent developments that are contiguous to the town's Orthodox synagogue. (My family, having moved into town back when my parents were less observant, lives about two miles from the synagogue, which is a lovely walk especially in the winter.) It's therefore far more common for there to be Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods than generically Jewish neighborhoods. And once towns accumulate enough Orthodox Jews to reach some nebulous critical mass, they grow increasingly because most Orthodox Jews like to live in places with lots of other Orthodox Jews, and there are a limited number of such places, and as more and more of them move in they raise housing prices and make it harder for more Jews to move there in a vicious cycle that continues until brave and daring explorer Jews colonize a new town and start the process again.
I don't have anything specific to say about these broad observations and how they relate to women. No, I guess I do. Traditionally Orthodox Judaism assigns women a role that is primarily oriented around running the household. The merits of this are debatable (and worth debating, in my opinion), and it's also important to note how much that traditional assignment has evolved in the 20th and 21st centuries- there are huge numbers of Orthodox Jewish women who hold full-time jobs outside the home these days. My freshman class in college had 6 Orthodox guys and 8 Orthodox girls in it, all would-be engineers, so not only were they defying the traditional logic of Orthodox Jewish tradition, they were defying the traditional logic of the technology field in the western world. So disregard everything I said about women running the household... no, I'm just kidding. Orthodox Judaism is moving toward greater gender equality in certain venues, unevenly and unpredictably, the same as the rest of the Western world. There are communities within the Orthodox world where girls get married at 19 after an education that was barely an education and are expected to immediately have children and run a household, but I usually don't intersect with those communities. Most girls in my Orthodox community are expected to go to college, expected to find their own husband (with perhaps pressure and/or assistance from the community), and expected to define their own professional aspirations. For most of them, these traditional communal expectations are something they run up against only in the expectations of older members of the community and in the halachot (laws) that were designed based on the traditional assumptions.
Because of the assumption that women were going to be running the household, the Rabbis of the Talmud exempted them from a class of commandments called in English "Time bound positive commandments." The boundaries of this class of mtizvot is a little hard to understand if you don't have a grounding in Talmudic thought, and there are counter-exemptions as well, time-bound positive commandments that women are obligated in. For example, women are required to listen to the reading of the Book of Esther on Purim even though it is a time-bound positive commandment. In general, though, this applies to any ritual-oriented commandment that is to be performed at a specific time of day. For example, the daily prayer services are required to be said at certain times of day. The morning prayer is said approximately between sun-up and noon (The actual timing is rather complicated and was the first thing I studied in my Talmud study). Because women might have an unpredictable schedule of childrearing, cooking, cleaning, etc... in a world where those tasks hadn't been made easier by 20th century technology, they were exempted. It is still meritorious if they pray, but they are not obligated in these specific time-bound prayers.
Which would be well-and-good. Sure, they're not obligated to pray, but there would be nothing wrong with them universally taking on the custom of saying the prayers anyway. Unfortunately, there are lot of things in Jewish ritual where one person does it and it counts for the obligation of everyone else present. And in order for this to satisfy for everyone else, the person doing it needs to be obligated in the commandment. In effect, this means that women are excluded from a lot of important parts of rituals in Orthodox rite because if they were to perform them on behalf of the men present, it wouldn't satisfy the mens' obligations. I go into some more gory detail about this in a recent post about the Gemara on the Grace After Meals.
Re: Part 1
Date: 2012-10-04 03:23 pm (UTC)So I don't know if you care at all, but my background/life-long church-culture affiliation is Christian-ish-sect, in particular Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints (LDS/Mormon). (We'll leave aside for my vexed relations with theology and so on, and focus simply on the community and gender aspects, since after all this is what the discussion is about :) For now let me say that the community always draws me back in, even when I fight my hardest against the theology.) And one of the reasons I asked the question is that the LDS church has a community aspect to it that is much more broad and deep than what I've seen in other Christian churches I've been to, and I was interested in how that compared to Jewish community.
I think that the non-helpful but still true general answer is: they are similar in many ways, and different in many ways. Ha, but really. (I'll have more to say on specifics in a second.) And that the Jewish community is deeper and more complex: deeper because of the argumentation you talk about and because of the thousands of years of tradition (Mormonism is a really young whippersnapper at 200 years), and more complex (and perhaps deeper as well) because decentralized (Mormonism is extremely centralized -- which leads to a lot of differences, both good and bad).
That idea that a need of someone else in the community, whether one knows them or not, whether there's a geographical colocation or not, trumps everything -- that is the same! I was totally nodding my head when reading that part of your response.
With my own religion, I've wondered if some of that is basically Bayesian inference, right? Mormonism is very different than Judaism, obviously, but similar in that there are a large number of commitments (not as many :) ) in terms of time and behavior that one makes to be Mormon. Because of that, when I know someone is Mormon, I immediately know to a high probability a lot about that person's worldview/philosophy, how they are rearing their children, how they conduct themselves in their personal life, what they do in their spare time. (In contrast, when I know someone is Christian, that's such a broad range that it gives me almost no new knowledge about that person.) And that both helps to foster that sense of community (this person's like me!) and gives me the impetus to trust that person even if I've never seen him/her before in my life (That's not all of it, of course, but I do wonder if that's a large part of it.)
(Oh, and here's a minor but important way that the LDS church differs from other Christian churches and is a little more like Orthodox Judaism, re your post: I was flabbergasted to find, when I started dating my Lutheran now-husband and occasionally attended church with him, that most Christians choose which congregation they attend. LDS members have their specific "ward" mandated, though not by decentralized religious law, rather by centralized fiat (there are specific geographical boundaries). This means that the normal socioeconomic boundaries for ordinary life don't necessarily apply, and that one has to figure out how to get along with people one may not have all that much in common with; one doesn't just leave and go elsewhere. I think that, when this works, it makes the community a lot more vibrant and interesting, but hey, YMMV.)
I only asked about Orthodox as opposed to Reform because you'd made that distinction in the response above; it is really interesting to me that the different communities in Judaism are so linked. I suppose this is true of some Christian denominations, but it is certainly not so of the LDS church (and of the various offshoots thereof).
I have more to say about women and comparison/contrast LDS/Orthodox religious/secular, but I'll finish that up later... :)
Re: Part 1
Date: 2012-10-04 04:27 pm (UTC)Judaism these days has so little central authority. A few months ago Rabbi Elyashiv died, a Rabbi who many Orthdox Jews had considered the Posek HaDor- the greatest Jewish legal opinion-maker of the generation. His funeral was attended by hundreds of thousands of Jews in Israel. And yet this was a man invested with no official title other than Rabbi and whose only power came from the fact that when he issued rulings, a lot of people decided to listen. Israel has two chief Rabbis, an Ashkenazi and a Sephardi, but they are in charge of making political decisions that relate to religion, not in charge of the Jews of Israel. Britain has a chief Rabbi, and he is deeply respected around the world, but they have a chief Rabbi because the Crown required the Jews to have a central figure to take responsibility for Jewish behavior, not because the Jews of Britain needed someone to look to for leadership particularly.
In America there is no compelling figure that even all of the Jews of one denomination defer to. Even the two biggest Hasidic sects, which traditionally have followed the rules set by their Rebbe, are faced with decentralized authority in the wake of power struggles after the death of the last Rebbes of Satmar and Lubavitch.
There are reasons for Orthodox Jews to stick together in a community even if they don't necessarily like each other, but nothing keeps them from moving to another community except economics and cultural issues.
How far does the centralized fiat extend?
Also, please tell me about your vexed theological concerns- in my experience those are inextricable from community.
Re: Part 1
Date: 2012-10-05 05:35 am (UTC)Not sure what you mean by how far does it extend? There is one prophet for the entire church; the church is divided into (I think?) regions; regions are divided into stakes; stakes are divided into the local wards I've already mentioned. (I might be missing a level here; Church bureaucracy is not my forte, and the stake-level is the highest level I usually interact with.) Each level has its own central authority (wards have "bishops," stakes have "presidents," and so on) which reports to the level above. So: it extends all the way up and all the way down. If you meant the geographical boundaries specifically, I believe the ward boundaries are set at the stake level, the stake boundaries at the next level up, and so on. Very hierarchical!)
Hm. Okay, so in lieu of gender remarks (may still get back to that eventually), here's my first attempt to plunge into the thicket of theology/faith (I was sort of using them interchangeably and recklessly in my last comment, which probably added to the confusion, and will continue to do so here) and community. This is... going to be really incoherent and full of parenthetical remarks, because I keep wanting to go off in all kinds of different directions. ...And I'm not sure I'm going to answer your question at all, partially because as I've already said, for me/my religion, faith and theology are inextricably linked, so much that I have trouble disassociating the definitions, as you will see. And I think maybe this is not so much the case for Judaism?
But anyway. I don't know how much you know about the Mormon/LDS religion, so let me start here: there are a lot of theological differences between it and mainstream Christianity, both major and minor, though in practice a mainstream Christian would have to dig a bit to find these (e.g., I can (and do, when I attend other Christian churches) recite the Christian creeds with only a couple of lines I have to leave out. It is true that if I had a really deep understanding of the creeds I might have to leave out more, but I don't). However, the obvious difference is that Mormons believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet (and that a prophet succession has existed since then up to the present day, with Thomas S. Monson the current one) and that he translated the Book of Mormon, which is an ancient text that tells about Jews that sailed to America around the reign of Zedekiah and built a culture here; the book includes the (somewhat simplistic) Christ-centric (looking to the future, obviously) theology of their society.
...you still here? :)
Anyway. The BoM is often referred to as "the cornerstone of our religion," not least because of all the theology set forth in it, and faith in the BoM is often cited as the key on which faith in the LDS church rises or falls. It is also the main text of the religion; although the Bible is also considered a main text (and the average faithful Mormon is going to know a heck of a lot more about the Bible than the average Christian, because there's much more of a culture of scriptural study, though not as much as in Judaism, and argumentation is not encouraged), the BoM is even more quoted and studied.
...And this is where I have issues. There's a whole branch of Mormon apologetics devoted to the BoM and resolving seeming inconsistencies and anachronisms -- but I don't care so much about that, because I'm not a historian, have no predilection towards that sort of analysis. What I do care about is that I trust my sense of text, especially old texts, and I cannot read the BoM as a 2000-year-old text. It just does not read that way at all for me. (This is not strictly relevant, but I'd actually be very interested to see what a Jew, used to doing Talmudic study, thought of the BoM. It's an odd duck of a book.) There is a sense of strangeness I get from reading, say, the Bible, or Beowulf, a sense of these people thought differently than I do that comes across very clearly to me even in translation, and the lack of that sense just jumps off the page to me when I read the BoM. (The apolgetics reason boils down to, "Well, they were writing for our current day" -- this is indeed BoM-supported -- but I do not accept that as a sufficient reason.)
The actual theology of the LDS Church is actually fairly simplistic, partially because it is a very young religion, and partially because in some sense there's much less of an imperative to look for theological answers when you have a prophet you can just ask to pronounce on a given subject, and partially because Mormons as a whole tend to be focused on the pragmatic. And partially because Joseph Smith himself was very pragmatic. Ask a mainstream Christian theologian about the Trinity and you'll get some mumbling about three persons/hypostases but one essence, but Jesus has two natures as both true God and true human, reciprocally containing one another co-indwelling, etc. possibly ad infinitum. You ask a Mormon theologian about the Godhead? Three entities, united in will/goals, like a family (well, if a family were perfect). Period. None of this one-essence-co-indwelling stuff. (To be fair, I don't think this is all that far from the average Christian's view of the matter, based on the educated but not particularly theological Christians I know.) Mormon theology is sort of focused on getting rid of anything that seems ridiculous to first order and ignoring higher-order ridiculousness that may result (if the Godhead is three distinct entities, what does that mean about the nature of Godhood? Well, funny you should ask. In fact... well, actually, let's not get into that, but let's just say that the theology gets more and more crazy to accomodate what seemed to first order like it was going to make things easier. It doesn't).
So now I can finally get into how all of this relates to how I relate to the community. The simplicity of Mormon theology in general means that in everyday life I am not particularly bothered by theological concerns when participating in the community. Obviously it comes up a lot, and obviously others in the community assume that I have a level of belief that I don't have. But the practice of being Mormon, and the culture of being Mormon, is in a lot of ways on a day-to-day basis more important than the theology. For example, for women there is a mandated program called Visiting Teaching (there is a very similar program for men called Home Teaching, which I know less about, not being male and not having an LDS husband) in which every woman is paired up with one or more other women that she visits every month with a spiritual thought. (In some wards you have a partner with whom you visit; in my current ward they don't have enough women for this to be feasible.) Sometimes when I talk to my non-LDS friends about this, I describe this program as "instant friend" -- you move into a Mormon ward, and you're instantly paired with at least one other woman whose job it is to be your friend, who is supposed to look out for you and if anything goes wrong tell the ward hierarchy, which will then swing into action.
I've thought a bit about how this is tied to theological concerns. I think the VT/HT program is an amazing one. I do not think God told the prophet that we should do this (though I'm not ruling out divine inspiration). I do think, however, that without a strong belief for a core group of people that it is mandated by God, there's no way you could get something like this to work. But (although I am not the best VT in the world) I am able to participate and try to do the best I can in it with my secondary understanding of the temporal benefits, simply because that core group is there and is faithful about doing it and running it.
In general, I am able to come up with justifications for doing most of the practice/cultural Mormonism things (aided, I'm sure, by lifelong inculcation of these values). I don't mind the (mild) dietary restrictions because I think of them as giving myself a cultural identity (and it's true, when people find out I don't drink coffee or alcohol, it is a very strong cultural signal that I belong to this group). I teach the four-year-olds at church because I think it's important to serve the community. And so on.
So... I don't know, perhaps it works for me because I have some sort of meta-agreement with the theology? I mean, I want to believe. And maybe wanting is enough? (Actually, there is some Mormon-theological justification there; one of the scriptures in the BoM reads, "Faith is a hope in that which is not seen, which is true." Of course, one can think what one likes on the "true" part, but the idea of faith as hope is one that sustains me, because hope, at least, I think I can do.) And I do believe there is something there, something I can't entirely explain or describe.
Re: Part 1
Date: 2012-10-10 04:07 pm (UTC)I find that theological approach of finding some first-order approximation of logic interesting. My Christian friends mock me sometimes for the way I answer any question they ask me about Judaism. Because it always begins with "Well, it's complicated and there is a difference of opinion between Rabbis," no matter what the question, no matter how simple and obvious and sure to have a short answer they think it will be. A few weeks ago, someone asked me if humans were kosher as a joke, and I began my answer, "Well, it's complicated and there is a difference of opinion between Rabbis." I always think it's worth going past the first-order approximation and trying to delve into the reasons why people disagreed, what they were disagreeing over, and where that leaves us. On the other hand, the net-effect is often not too different from the Mormon approach as you describe it because at the end of the day Orthodox Judaism is fully comfortable with saying "This is the law because God says it's the law. We don't understand its reasoning. We think it's silly or causes problems for us or is even backwards, but we do it anyway." The kosher laws are a great example of this. People can argue all they want about the health benefits of kashrut, about how it symbolizes a distinction between Jews and the rest of the world, about parasites in pigs or ancient superstitions about cloven hooves and the devil, but at the end of the day the reason Jews eat kosher is because the Bible tells me so. So is that different from reasoning based on some specious and apparently obvious logic and then cutting off the more sophisticated discussion? Maybe, maybe not. I like to think that our theological approach trains better minds. It's entirely possible, given the history of the 20th century and Judaism, that what the Jewish theological approach actually breeds is atheists. I attended a seminar back in college which was a group of distinguished scientists essentially gameplanning the next round of debates against Creationists. And at one point I raised my hand and asked them to characterize their religious backgrounds, these four distinguished scientists who were so dedicated to disproving the Creationists. Three were of Jewish extraction and the fourth was from a self-described 'militant Quaker' upbringing. I think that Jewish intellectual training is very good at breeding a particular sort of scientific atheism, because it encourages you in many cases to take your questioning to the very limits and see what happens. Personally speaking, I have taken my scientific questioning at times to the very limits of my capacity for faith, but have not yet crossed the line. I do not understand how God could create an entropic universe, I am not sure it is compatible with the Bible and with my beliefs, but I struggle every day and at the end of the day I continue to believe.
I mean, I want to believe. And maybe wanting is enough?
Huh... Mormonism is a religion developed after Pascal's Wager was developed. That is an interesting thought. Now whereas Judaism is perhaps a religion shaped in an era before belief was part of the equation, in a way. Religious thought in the time didn't really brook skepticism- we're taught that before Abraham there wasn't the capacity to question the idea that idols were deities. I don't know how anthropologically valid that observation is, but it underpins a lot of 19th century philosophy anyway, so... I'm rambling.
What does the 'spiritual thought' from the VT/HT program look like? I'm interested in the way other religions continue their religious study, since negotiating how to continue my religious studies now that I'm out of school has been a concern of mine for only a few years. I've sat down with Evangelical friends and done Bible study, and we do not study Bible the same way at all. They just read. straight. through! Without consulting any commentaries! Without really asking questions! Without wondering about translations! Without comparing the text to other texts, without questioning the Bible's internal consistency. It boggles my mind.
In Judaism a sort of buddy system called chavrusa is central to traditional learning, but it's generally voluntary, not assigned. You find someone whose learning style is compatible with yours and you make a commitment together to study. My friend
Re: Part 1
Date: 2012-10-20 01:26 am (UTC)That being said, stakes do vary (and because LDS clergy at that level is all lay clergy and changes every several years, it also varies over time), and it is possible to get exceptions. There are a number of exceptions in my stake, in fact, where people moved outside a ward boundaries and asked (successfully) to stay in their current ward, but when I moved, they'd just gotten in new stake leadership that was trying to crack down on the exceptions.
Hm, Pascal's wager, interesting. I had never thought of it that way. The key thing from my point of view is a simplification of Hebrews 11:1, "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for," that became in Book of Mormon theology "Faith is a hope in that which is not seen, which is true" (Alma 32:21). (This is another good example as to simplifying things to first order which just leads to more questions -- what does that mean? Does that even make sense? It seems to me that it doesn't make sense to define faith as hope, but I guess I'll take it...) Though perhaps it has to do with living in a post-Pascal world as well, I don't know.
The "spiritual thought" in VT/HT can be one that is made up yourself, although there is some pressure to use the central one handed down by the central authorities every month. Though it usually incorporates some amount of drawing from scripture, it isn't a scripture study of any sort. But Mormons do believe very strongly in scriptural study, and so now I'm going to blather on about that.
I haven't really participated in mainstream Christian scriptural studies (though the current Lutheran church my husband and I attend -- yes, this means I attend two different churches, actually three sometimes because I have a gig singing at a Catholic church; yes I am quite insane -- I lobbied hard for specifically because when we walked into their Sunday School scripture class, there was Greek up on the board and they were talking about the translation) so I'm not sure how it compares exactly -- I think Lutherans tend to be on the more scholarly end in general -- but Mormon scriptural study... there are a couple of things going on here. First, there is often an Approved Interpretation of a particular story or verse -- and when I say that, I mean one interpretation, not like the Talmudic thing where (if I understand this correctly from your DW and from Chaim Potok :) ) you can have several people weighing in saying different things. Translation is included in this -- LDS have enough scriptural interpretations that are weird compared to mainstream interpretation (Eve taking the fruit, for example, is supposed to have been a good thing) that we have a strong tradition of always saying, "well, we believe the Bible to be the Word of God, as far as it is translated correctly" (in fact, that is one of our codified Articles of Faith), but in practice there is an accepted translation that is usually considered: either KJV or Joseph Smith's emendations to the KJV where he thought things didn't make sense or to make it more consistent with LDS theology.
(This is not to say that there aren't Mormons who do in-depth scriptural study complete with Hebrew texts and so on. There are, and I know a couple of them. But it's not the norm.)
Second, Mormon scripture study -- and I think that this is something that is like mainstream Christian scripture study in general -- tends to be focused on the internal response to the text rather than the text itself. So it is much more likely that the sorts of questions that you'd be asking when reading a chapter of scripture in a Mormon scripture study are along the lines of, "What are ways we've struggled with the same thing that [Biblical character] struggles with?" and "How can we benefit from the lessons that [Biblical character] learned in our own lives?" rather than "If the verse is implying A, how can we reconcile this verse with Scripture Y which appears to say the opposite, and how does the translation given in Z either elucidate or contradict A?"
There is something of a tradition of cross-referencing other scripture in LDS scripture study, I should be careful to say. There is not a tradition of argument, as you may have gathered from the One Approved Interpretation thing, like there is in Judaism. It's actually considered not desirable, at least culturally, to argue against a particular interpretation. (Back when my calling was to teach Gospel Doctrine, the Sunday scripture-study class, I would often point out contradictions in the text and ask people to try to resolve them, but this isn't the norm.)
Re: Part 1
Date: 2012-10-21 03:03 am (UTC)So we do spend plenty of time thinking about and arguing over what particular Biblical characters did and why they did it and what we can learn for our own lives from what they did. It's just that the formalistic tools are a major part of how we do that... I think the best way to explain it might be to point to an example I actually use in one of my fics, 18 Chalakim of Life. There's a section where I rewrite Elisha's meeting with Elijah, and I dissect two words from the book of Kings, "Lech shuv" in rather a lot of detail. It's a classic bit of pilpul, but I put it there because understanding the conflicting meanings tells you a lot about both characters and why they made the choices they made.
Or, like, this week we read the story of Noah in synagogue, and afterward we argued about the ethical choices Noah made, about how he (and/or God) chose who would go on the ark and who wouldn't. And the context of that was a famous Midrash on a single word in the first sentence of the Torah portion, which says that Noah was a righteous man in his generation. The Midrash says that b'dorotav, in his generation, means that had Noah lived at the time of Abraham, he would have been an ordinary person, not a particularly righteous man. And in some ways, the story of the flood seems to bear this out. When Abraham learned that the city of Sodom was going to be destroyed, he negotiated with God to try to save even the sinners. It's not reported that Noah even tried this.
But another complementary Midrash argues that what b'dorotav means is that IF Noah had been in Abraham's generation, he would have been far more righteous than Abraham, because he wouldn't have been surrounded with quite as many temptations to sin. So maybe for Noah's time, not trying to save them and just starting over was the right thing to do.
So we take this one word and we dissect it and try to understand what it means, because by doing so it unfolds into an incredibly challenging moral debate about how to try to bring the world to a place of greater kindness and respect and understanding.
One of the interesting things to me about that "Faith is a hope" line is that if it had been a piece of Jewish canon which I was seeing in English, I would assume that both 'faith' and 'hope' were Hebrew words which were being inadequately translated, and go back to the Hebrew text to find the meaning behind the statement. But that is the primary text? I think I'm starting to see what you mean by first-order approximations. It sort of feels like the creators of Mormonism were trying to become a real religion by copying the argot of the real religions around them. I hope that's not too insulting a thing to say. (You can say nasty things about Judaism too, if you want)
Emunah, the Hebrew word that most closely maps to the English concept of faith, has a different set of connotations, as does tikva, which most closely maps to hope. If the original epistle writer were thinking in Hebrew, his words would not have quite the same vagueness they do in English. (For one thing, emunah is clearly a two-way street between God and Man in a way I don't think is true in most Christian doctrine I've come across)
Re: Part 1
Date: 2012-10-26 07:29 pm (UTC)Hm. Yes, I see that my comment made it sound like I don't think Jewish studies have a focus on doctrine, which I'm very sorry about, since I don't actually think that :) How about this: I do think that anyone who's going to engage with scripture is interested in the underlying truth of that scripture and how to apply that truth. I think (?) that in general (and again, pleeeeease correct me if I get this wrong!) Jewish people studying scripture may tend to emphasize more the difficulty and fascination of getting at that underlying truth from the texts we have, and Mormons (say) tend to de-emphasize that aspect because of a perception that that underlying truth is already known. But of course for Jews and Christians both there's no point in studying scripture unless it ties back to how we live our lives, so yes :) It does seem to me -- and this is sort of what I was trying to get at, if saying it very clumsily -- that asking both questions ("What is the text saying?" and at the same time "How do we apply what we learn from the text") seems like a fundamentally different approach in style from just asking the one ("How do we apply what we learn from the known interpretation of the text?").
Take your Noah example. I just went to look up the LDS Old Testament manual (this would be the manual used by teachers in our scripture study class the last time they did Old Testament (once every four years for each of our books of scripture: Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, and Doctrine and Covenants (revelations to early LDS prophets, mostly Joseph Smith)) (man, that's a lot of parentheses)). The questions we ask are -- these are direct quotes from the manual -- on the level of "What 'arks' do we have today that can help save us from the evil around us?" "What can we do to be temporally prepared in case of calamity or other need?" "What qualities did Noah demonstrate in building the ark? How can we strengthen these qualities in ourselves?"
And, hm. The KJV Hebrews quote ("Faith is the substance of things hoped for") is translated from Greek, and quick google research indicates that "substance" is the word that's interesting from a translation viewpoint (seems to mean "what stands under something" (a building, a contract, a promise), so as to be "that which supports what is evident" (in this instance, "things hoped for" being the "evident" part). The Book of Mormon quote ("Faith is a hope...") is, yes, a primary text (it is said to be translated from a variant of Hebrew, but in practice the primary text is English and it's assumed that the translation is entirely correct and that the words mean what they mean), but it's pretty clear to me that it's following a misreading of the KJV compared to the Greek (which I think is quite lovely, actually -- the idea of faith being the substructure, the foundation under, the things we hope for).
(And, um, if you don't mind, I would love for you to explain emunah to me. What does it mean for it to be a two-way street? The closest I can think of in my religion is that faith is a gift that God gives us, and to some of us more than others.)
Heh. What you say about "becoming a real religion" -- well, you have a point. When I told my husband (who as I think I have mentioned is not Mormon) about this whole discussion we've been having, he pointed out that one of the reasons Christian theology is so complicated is that they've had two thousand years to work out the higher-order terms. (In fact, although I'm too lazy to go look it up right now, I'm pretty sure Mormonism falls squarely into one or two of the heresies delineated in the first five hundred years or so of the Christian church.)
Re: Part 1
Date: 2012-10-26 09:27 pm (UTC)Those questions that the LDS Manual asks are really not that far from the questions we ask. It's just that I think we ask them in different ways, which I think may pick more deeply at the themes involved. For example, we wouldn't begin with "What 'arks' do we have today that can help save us from the evil around us?" , because that already makes an assumption that the ark is symbolic of the thing which saves us from evil, and we would first need to ask "What does the ark symbolize? What does the Hebrew word 'teva' mean, why was it used here specifically to refer to Noah's boat as opposed to all the other words for boats in Hebrew, and what homiletic lessons can we draw from the word?" And only after working through that exercise and quite possibly coming to the same conclusion as Joseph Smith, that the ark represents a barrier between man and the evils of the world, could we move on to your question.
So one of the first places I would go to when I think about emunah is the blessing immediately following the Evening Shema. The Shema, which is from Deuteronomy 6, is "Hear, Israel, the Lord is your God, the Lord is One," the basic declaration of Jewish identity. It's recited every morning and evening because the following verses include a commandment to, well, say it every morning and evening (sort of. It's complicated, and there's a difference of opinion among Rabbis). And it's preceded by two blessings and followed by the recitation of several relevant Torah passages and then by the recitation of two blessings. And the first blessing after begins Emet v'emunah kol zot. Which means "True and Faithful is all of this," which is to say, All of God's creation is identified by two properties, its emet, its truthfulness, and its emunah, its faithfulness.
Now, emet is also quite a loaded word. According to medieval legend, it's the word that the Maharal of Prague inscribed on the forehead of the Golem to bestow it with life. [And when he erased the initial Alef he turned it into met, the Hebrew word for dead, and destroyed it., because the Sages love puns and wordplay as much as I do] But clearly that suggests that truth is not just the opposite of lies, but some bedrock principle of how the universe is put together. Emet means true as in the truth of the laws of gravity.
And emunah, it follows works in approximately the same way. If emet is the truth that the world operates according to discoverable principles, emunah is the commitment that God will be faithful to those principles, that the universe will continue to endure.
And human faith as Jews understand it is in imitation of God's faithfulness, as we are created in God's image we are expected to be faithful to our commitments to God.
Re: Part 1
Date: 2012-11-06 05:29 pm (UTC)Heh, that.. never occurred to me with Pushing Daisies. (I have to say that it's refreshing to be talking to someone who has a more restrictive religion than I do, because that so rarely happens! Um, I guess that never happens to you :) )
Yes, exactly -- it's not that the questions are different, and neither is the overall goal -- it's just that stylistically it's a very different way of thinking about a source text. (And, I have to say, I suspect I'm more inclined towards the way you describe it, but anyway.)
Emet/emunah: Hmm. Still thinking about this. So would it be correct to say, in Jewish thought, that God and humans are both emunah/faithful (sorry, I'm sure I'm getting the language slightly mangled), or should be? Presumably God is the ultimate in faithfulness, and humans are striving to emulate that? Or humans, as God's creation, innately have a sense of that divine faithfulness that must be nourished? (Or both?) ...Or am I totally off base here?
What about emet? You said that all of God's creation is identified by its emet/truthfulness. How does that manifest in people?
(Um. It is totally not your job to educate me in Judaism, of course! But I do find it fascinating.)
Re: Part 1
Date: 2012-11-12 04:01 pm (UTC)As far as emet/emunah, yes, you're pretty much on track. The key concept is that man is created in the image of God, which is not interpreted physically. We don't believe God has two hands and ten fingers. We believe that the attributes of God (Mercy, Kindness, Justice, Truth, Faithfulness, etc..) were endowed in us and it is up to us to make use of them.
Hmm... as far as emet goes, well, I once belonged to a synagogue called Anshe Emet, which I think means something like Nation of Truth. I think generally speaking we understand human truth as developing and protecting and promoting the understanding that God created the world. That is the truth that is meant, certainly, in Anshe Emet. I can probably give you a long and complicated and esoteric lecture on why that is important to me as a scientist and a Jew, but maybe not now.
Part 2
Date: 2012-10-03 01:35 am (UTC)And moreover many Orthodox women are comfortable within the community's limitations. The scheduled rituals of Jewish life can be a demanding master. Praying three times a day, synchronized to the movement of the sun, is a lot. I've known some Orthodox women to express relief that they are able to pray on their own schedules, when they are so moved, rather than having to follow the obligations that are put on men. This thesis sometimes takes a form I am rather uncomfortable with, though it is popular with some sorts of Orthodox women: Some Rabbis trying to put a 20th century spin on Jewish gender roles have claimed that the reason women are exempted from time-bound positive commandments is because they are naturally more spiritual than men, so they don't require all of the opportunities for spiritual elevation that men do. This argument, though obviously born of the 20th century West, is not entirely novel to Jewish thought. The medieval kabbalists placed emphasis on the feminine divine in many of their meditations. However, in my opinion it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. It does not follow that because women are spiritually elevated, they should be restricted in the synagogue to a clearly secondary and inferior role. That notwithstanding, let me return to the point at the beginning of this paragraph. Many Orthodox women are comfortable within the Orthodox Jewish community's limitations. They like that the modesty rules pull them out of the constant beauty-wars those subject to the whims of Cosmopolitan magazine are part of. They like that being defined as the head of the household gives them power in a clearly defined and comprehensible world sphere. They like that they are part of a religion and a religious community that offers guidance for every part of their life. For that matter, I like those things. I love that Judaism is such an all-encompassing system that it tells me how to tie my shoes and in what order to eat my meals. At its core, this is what being part of the Orthodox Jewish community means and it is both a burden and an honor to be able to share these commitments with the rest of the Jewish world.
But one of my great frustrations with the discourse about Orthodox Judaism and women is that it suggests that Orthodox women are somehow worse off than Western secular women, which I do not believe is true. There are glaring examples of misogyny in the Orthodox world, and I deplore them and fight against them, but there are also glaring examples of misogyny in the secular world. (And I deplore them and fight against them. Sophomore year in college, my whole grade rallied together to get a professor fired for misogynistic remarks directed at a classmate. I remain incredibly proud of our fight and incredibly frustrated that we had to have it, and that it took so much effort and emotional cost, particular on the part of that classmate.). Look, humanity has issues with women and equality, and the Orthodox community is no different. As I told
I don't know how much to go into this, because this comment is already 2500 words long and meandering and confusing and probably entirely pointless, but one big problem the Orthodox community struggles with in terms of women in the community is called the agunah. Basically at its core, the story is: Our community doesn't have enough power to prevent ex-husbands from harassing their ex-wives. So it goes like this: By Torah law, only a husband can divorce his wife, not the other way around. This is a big problem that arises because Jewish marriage laws were designed in the ancient middle east, where they were actually comparatively progressive in many, many ways. When you consider that under Catholic law even today divorce is not allowed under any circumstance, Jewish law is comparatively good because it recognizes at least that marriages are contracts entered into between two people and that the contract needs an out and a way to reconsider the terms as circumstances change. But Jewish marriage laws are still not perfect, because if an asshole husband wants to spite his wife, he can refuse to grant her a divorce and leave her in this legal position called the agunah, the abandoned woman. The agunah is cast aside by her husband, but she is not able to remarry because she is still considered to be legally married. This is an especially big problem in some of the more insular Orthodox communities that place less emphasis on female education. A woman may have married, as I mentioned above, at 19, having barely had any useful education except in how to be a wife, which she is now forbidden to do. She likely has several children and no skills that can get her a job.
As a community, we have taken two basic approaches to trying to combat the problem. One is to put increasing pressure on the husbands to grant the divorce. This can include ostracization, restrictions on participation in synagogue, harassment, and even according to urban legend, physical threats and violence. I don't know if husbands who refuse to give divorces are actually beaten, but I do know that stories circulate as part of the effort to make them think twice about being that asshole. The other approach is an even more important one- there are several organizations founded in recent years devoted to providing resources for agunot to survive. They provide money, advice, job training, and other support to help them negotiate this life that was never part of their plans. These are both really good examples of the Jewish community working together in an organized way to solve a problem unique to the community, and it's also a great illustration of the problems that can confront a community when it is beholden to rules it can't change.
So yeah, that tangent was kind of a downer. Let's talk of happier things. One thing the Jewish community has always been good at, and I think it's come through already in these super-many words, is preserving and transmitting tradition. And I think that's really important. The Jewish people has such a powerful collective memory. As John Goodman's character puts it in The Big Lebowski, "Three thousand years of history from Moses to Sandy Koufax." Which is itself a funhouse mirror parody of a beautiful statement of Jewish continuity "Mimoshe ad moshe lo kam k'moshe." From Moses to Moses, there was none like Moses." There the allusion is to Moses the Prince of Egypt and, two thousand years later, Moses Maimonides. Six hundred years after that, the statement was reapplied from Moses Maimonides to Moses Mendelssohn. That tracing of intellectual heritages, that constant comparison to the past, is completely typical of Jewish thought. The Talmud's companion to the Bible's genealogical book of Chronicles is a Mishnaic book called Pirkei Avot, Chapters of the Fathers, which obsessively traces an intellectual genealogy. According to Pirkei Avot, a direct line of teacher-student relationships can be traced from Moses teaching Joshua how to interpret the Law down to the days of the Mishna. Present day Jewish scholars have continued the trace all the way to the present.
We live in a world that is so focused on the next trend. Culture evolves at a ferocious pace. The music of 2012 sounds nothing like the music of 1960, which sounds nothing like the music of 1900. And that is totally awesome, and I love tracking it as it changes, because it's exciting and new and constantly thought-provooking. But Judaism, though it has definitely changed along with the secular cultures of the world, also does many things in exactly the same way it has always done them, or the same way it has done them for a century or millennium. We read the exact same Torah that was read two and a half thousand years ago. We know that because when we found the Dead Sea Scrolls we compared their texts to ours and stunned scholars with the tiny number of differences. And even as the list of most popular names in America changes on a yearly basis, I carry a name straight out of that Bible, but moreover I carry my great-grandfather's name, and my youngest cousin carries my grandfather's name, and my sister carries my great-grandmother's name. And this week I eat my meals outside in a temporary hut because we believe that three thousand years ago Moses and his people did the same thing, and because we are so good at transmitting tradition, I believe it. Oh, and by the way, the reason we're so good at transmitting tradition? Is what I mentioned up at the beginning of the essay. We challenge everything, argue with each other about everything, and disagree about everything. And you'd think that'd lead us to constantly change our mind about things, which is true, but it also means that we understand our tradition at a very deep level because we have questioned every facet of it and probed its depths for meaning. And when you understand something at that level, it's a lot easier to accurately pass it on. We always laugh when atheists throw Biblical literalism gotchas at Christians on the Internet, because neither the Christians nor the atheists, in general, have spent as much time with these texts as we have. None of the gotchas that cause a Christian to stumble are surprises to us. We know how bloody, capricious, and apparently contradictory our holy writs are, and we've been struggling with the reasons for thousands of years.
So yes, that's what Jewish community is all about. Living together, sharing values and culture and beliefs, sticking up for each other when we're in need, crying when another of us is crying, laughing when another of us is laughing, and coming together in the joy of instilling a millennia old and still living and breathing tradition into another generation.
Re: Part 2
Date: 2013-07-01 03:24 pm (UTC)I guess I never responded to this! Anyway, this very argument is one that shows up from time to time in LDS thought, and one which a Sunday School teacher of mine told us when I was a teenager (that is to say, men need to be taught to serve, and women don't) -- and it made a huge impact on me, and is one of the big reasons why I don't particularly want the priesthood. I must say that in my life experience, it has mostly turned out to be true :) although one can certainly argue that it is as a result of culture rather than of fundamental gender differences.
The closest thing Mormons have to gender marriage inequality is that I believe (ETA: that is to say, I think this is true in Mormon theology; whether I believe it myself is a much more complicated question) men can remarry (after a spouse's death) in the temple (the sealing rites in a "temple marriage," done in an LDS temple, are binding for time and all eternity, whereas a non-temple marriage, whether done by LDS clergy or otherwise, is binding only until death), whereas women cannot do so (they can only be sealed to one man). Which is a little disturbing.
(Temple divorce is a thing too, but as far as I am aware there is no theological/ritual inequality there between men and women. It's very possible there is practically -- you have to get special permission to get a temple divorce -- but I wouldn't know about that.)
Hmmm. I'm still pondering your comments about misogyny in the religious world vs. secular world. My first reaction was to say that there was more in (my) religious world, but I'm not actually sure that is true. I think there is more condescension, and there is definitely more role separation than I am comfortable with (though that is changing -- it is still mandated that women are responsible for the home and men are responsible for providing, but there is much more awareness of non-traditional families (e.g., single mothers) as well as more understanding that "responsibility" can also mean "delegation")). And I do believe that there exists the potential for pretty bad abuse-like things to happen. (Relevant to this discussion may be my discussion of The Disposessed.)
But my current ward is really lovely. And it was way more demeaning to me when my lab professor in college would address all his questions to my (male) lab partner even when it was clear I had the answers and he didn't, than when people at church assume my degree was in music and not in physics.
Re: Part 2
Date: 2013-07-01 06:39 pm (UTC)Hah, yeah... this is actually a problem Reform Judaism struggles with in some communities: They have discovered that when men don't have a greater obligation to participate in services than women, female participation tends to not merely equal but far exceed male participation. Since Reform communities count women in their prayer quorums, their prayer quorums almost invariably have far more women than men, and it has become a question in such circles to ask how to get greater male participation.
Of course, there are other explanations for this phenomenon besides that women are more naturally drawn to spiritual practice. There may be a sampling bias inasmuch as women who want to participate in services may be drawn to Reform communities disproportionately.
Re: Part 2
Date: 2013-07-09 07:54 pm (UTC)In terms of the LDS phenomenon specifically, I would explain it as a cultural thing, both US and LDS. In LDS culture, and less so but still prevalently so in the US, women are expected to be more nurturing, more involved in social networks, more involved in family and children. And these are all things, I believe, that lend themselves to a greater affinity for spiritual practice and participation in worship, which are tied to the relationships with God and with the religious community.
Of course, some of this could be gender difference as well (I do believe that there is probably some intrinsic difference between the median man and woman, if not a particular sampling), but I believe that much of it is cultural.
Re: Part 2
Date: 2013-07-01 07:32 pm (UTC)I mean, this is at minimum a complicated and difficult question and likely a bad question. (See my post on which religion is bloodier: http://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/5145.html) Different cultures have different lenses with which to view women, and things that one culture would find misogynistic are seen as valorizing women in another. I didn't make the argument to argue that one was more misogynistic than another, really. I posed it to show that misogyny in all flavors is unfortunately a universal human experience that every culture should fight against.