In direct contravention of my wife's explicit instructions, herewith I inaugurate my first blog. Long may it prosper.

For some reason, I think I have something to say to you. You think you have something to say to me? Email me at: gideonsblogger -at- yahoo -dot- com

 
Oh, I almost forgot: I've stayed relatively out of the whole Columbia University Mideast Studies fracas. I see the latest wrinkle is to offer a position in Israel Studies as a "balance" for the rest of the department, and that sharp-eyed critics (such as Martin Kramer) have already noted that the deck is being stacked to hire an anti-Israel academic for the position.

Now, I have little sympathy for Columbia in this whole business, and it's obvious to me that Mideast Studies is badly, even dangerously politicized. But it does strike me that this is not something unique to Mideast Studies; indeed, it is endemic in the academy, and particularly problematic in departments of "Studies." Women's studies, a "discipline" organized entirely around an ideology, is particularly egregious in this regard, but so is African-American Studies, Latin-American Studies - for that matter, American Studies and Judaic Studies. I took courses in both American Studies and Judaic Studies in college, and generally they were quite good. But it did not escape me at the time that these disciplines were - inevitably - tinged with ideology. American Studies as a discipline is premised on a certain understanding of America, one that comes from a left-wing perspective. Judaic Studies, meanwhile, was a frankly pro-Jewish department; or, more correctly, a Judeo-centric department. That is to say: many of the professors assumed that much of their class was Jewish and that the students brought Jewish concerns to the class. This was certainly not universal, but it was common.

Did I find this congenial? Basically. But I also find it problematic, because the university is not supposed to be sectarian in that manner. I was a history major, and I couldn't help but notice the difference between classes where the discipline of history was understood to be governing and classes where the governing principle was ideology or identity, with the discipline of history serving as a mere tool. And this is not about subject matter; I took a class on the Spanish Civil War - a hot-button item for lefties of a certain generation if there ever was one - that was excellent in every way. We studied a wide diversity of primary and secondary sources - everyone from Stanley Payne to George Orwell to Gabriel Jackson to Noam Chomsky to Jose Maria Gil Robles - and got fully versed in the historiographic debates and their significance to partisans on the various sides. By contrast, a course in American Labor History - cross-listed, I might add, with American Studies - was, well, I would call it an indoctrination except that it was assumed that everyone who came in to take the class was already politically correct, so indoctrination as such was unnecessary.

Anyhow, my point is that "Studies" departments, because they are frequently organized around questions of ideology or identity, and because they are consciously inter-disciplinary, will find it extremely difficult to avoid falling into this trap, even if they are chaired by well-meaning and open-eyed individuals. I wonder, then, whether the solution (not that anyone would actually put this into practice, mind you) doesn't begin with eliminating all of these departments, dispersing their professors into departments affiliated with the relevant discipline (history, comparative literature, art history, etc.). Let them be forced to affiliate with and be evaluated by their peers on the basis of a common discipline rather than a shared commitment to an identity or ideology. You could still always provide undergraduate or graduate programs of an inter-disciplinary nature if they made sense, but you would at least no longer have a formal structure supporting sectarian, non-objective programs of study.

I don't pretend this is a total solution, nor am I naive enough to think anyone would actually put even this much reform into practice. But I do wonder whether it isn't a necessary condition to fixing the university, if hardly a sufficient one.
posted by Noah at 4:15 PM

 
Passover, followed by a dreadful head cold. Soon, I go home and take a nap.

In the meantime, I'm going to recycle old stuff. I wrote something last year about counting the omer that, if I say so myself, I rather like. We're counting the omer again, so here's a link to it. Anyone have any ideas on where I might send (a reworked version of) it for publication? Tried First Things; no dice.

Oh, a couple of other matters.

I see that John Debyshire has belatedly joined Caesar's Bath Game. Philosophy he and I have discussed; I can resort only to Chopin's retort (on an entirely other matter): sir, you have never been Polish. As for his other choices: basketball is exciting mostly for the last 2 minutes of the game. But baseball is never exciting at all. And soccer (football to those on the other side of the pond) is mind-numbingly dull. Actually, I don't get the point of watching sports at all. Football and hockey are OK, I guess. Saul Bellow: I blogged some weeks ago my disappointment with Humboldt's Gift and my deeper disappointment with Ravelstein. But I did like Henderson the Rain King, so I'm going to reserve judgement on him generally until I've read at least one of Herzog, Sammler's Planet or Seize the Day. But I'm not all that optimistic. I'm not sure I like fiction that tells me how significant it is all the time. I'm not sure I like authors who are so present. Beaches: no argument from me. My ideal coastline is Maine. Or British Columbia. But I will make a stand for cinnamon! Not only was it part of the spice mix used before the Ark of the Covenant (see Exodus 30:22-25) but it's used to this day (along with whole cloves) in the spice box we sniff at the close of the sabbath, to recall the sabbath's sweetness that it should linger into the workweek. It's one of those rare flavors that works with sweet and savory dishes, and softens the tartness of dishes made with tomatoes or fruit. Long live cinnamon!

Next: I've been attempting to read two books simultaneously that do not go well together, and I'm not sure if each is making me like the other less or whether I've just been in the wrong mood for either. The first is a collection of essays by Eliezer Berkovitz, which comes to me courtesy of the Shalem Center. Now, I don't actually dislike the book, because Berkovitz's positioning is very congenial to me. He's what I'd have to call a progressive traditionalist. He's also a nationalist without being a chauvanist and a religious Zionist without being a messianist. These are all good things, from my perspective. And there are things in the book I like. But I keep wanting to hear a real knock-down argument for a position I already agree with, and finding myself at the end of the argument feeling a kind of vague dissatisfaction. I'm also troubled by the degree to which Berkovitz fails to recognize the larger Western tradition that he's drawing on, particularly the ethics of Aristotle (he tends to reduce all of Western philosophy to Plato and Rousseau, which is deeply unfair) and the 19th century nationalists (how can you talk about Jewish nationalism without talking at all about nationalism per se?) all of which make him seem frankly quite provincial. The most intriguing part of the book is the discussion of how Jewish law works, and how the law has been distorted by the loss of Jewish sovereignty and the commitment of the Mishna to writing. This is a path long-trod by Conservative Judaism, but I don't know that it's been trod well, and I would love to understand better how Berkovitz's approach differs from that of, say, Solomon Schechter. It's not 100% obvious to me how it is. This is all terribly important stuff to me, because I am convinced that (a) Ahad Ha'am was wrong, and the Jewish people exists because of the Covenant at Sinai, not the other way around (good essay - actually more of a reminiscence - on this topic by Hillel Halkin in the latest issue of Commentary, not on-line); (b) the foundation of the State of Israel cannot avoid theological significance if only because it raises the question of what a Jewish State *is* beyond the banal fact that many Jews live there; (c) the messianism of the Rav Kook school of Orthodoxy and the anti-Zionism of the ultra-Orthodox have each proven disastrous; and (d) my own "stream" of Judaism - Conservative Judaism - has mostly forfeited any reasonable claim to representing the "vital center" through a lack of seriousness about the responsibility inherent in claiming the right to re-open settled halachic issues. So I am very interested, as I say, in the positioning of someone who appears to be avoiding these traps. But I don't, ultimately, see *how* he avoids them, or how his thought would convince someone not already congenial to his point of view.

The other book: Paradise Lost. I'm afraid that, so far, theology is making for unconvincing narrative and flat characterization. I'd be tempted to say that the project is inherently hopeless, that trying to make a character out of the divine is a foolish project doomed to precisely Milton's failure. God comes off as vain and pompous tyrant, Christ as a fawning toady, Adam as a simpleton who deserves to fall, and Satan, according to Blake the unintentional hero of the poem, as a blustering, strutting loud-mouth. I'm unpersuaded by Stanley Fish's interpretation (no I haven't read his book yet - I wanted to read Milton first - but I've read enough about his book that I think I get the gist) that we as readers are supposed to be seduced by Satan, thereby reenacting Adam's Fall, because I find Satan seductive only against the background of an unpersuasive account of the divine. If God were really the way Milton depicts Him, then yes, I'd be tempted to buy Satan's arguments. But not because Satan himself is especially persuasive. So I count this a failure. In any event, I'd be tempted to say that this failure was inevitable . . . except that the Bible doesn't fail similarly. And, to skip over questions of authorship, I don't just mean the Torah; books like Jonah, Job, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, the Psalms, the Song of Songs: God figures as a *character* in each of these books to a greater or lesser degree, and He is convincing as such. Two things above all feel missing to me in Milton: any sense of God's love for His creation, and any sense of God's uncanniness, His deep strangeness and unknowability. Milton's God seems very easy to know and very hard to worship. That makes Satan's argument easier than it should be. I feel the poem would have been vastly stronger if we never heard God's voice, if everything was related by the angels on either side - either by Satan and his minions or by Michael and his cohorts. Anyhow, the edition I'm reading has lots of critical material included, so I'll read some of it when I'm done with the poem and see if it changes my mind at all.

(As an aside: I believe I'm reading Milton's poem in the spirit that it was intended, that is to say, as a religious text, albeit not a text of my own religion. So if it fails to be persuasive to me on those terms, I count it a failure.)

And finally: if Marilyn Quayle actually runs for Governor of Arizona, that would be just spectacularly tremendous. This is a gal who knows how to shout and shimmy. I've always liked her. She really could have gone places if it weren't for her doufus of a husband.
posted by Noah at 3:23 PM

 
Well, I'm still catching up from work from the avalanche of emails that came in while I was out (2 days for Passover prep and yesterday for Passover proper). So I can't really post anything substantial right now. But I know some of you will be bugging me for the Seder menu this year, so here it is:

Shaved fennel and apple salad (karpas course)
Sephardi charoset
Curried eggs
Butternut squash soup with red pepper puree and matzoh balls
Potato pancakes topped with smoked salmon and chives
Roast turkey
Artichoke bottoms and yellow zucchini stuffed with veal (meat choice) or mushrooms (vegetarian choice)
Quinoa pilaf with peppers, jicama and toasted pistachios
Parsnips cooked in a hot and sweet sauce
Roast asparagus
Cocolate nut cake (provided, as always, by my wonderful sister)
Passover cookies and fruit

Seder was very enjoyable, if I say so myself. Our son particularly enjoyed enacting Moses' confrontation with Pharaoh (conducted with hand puppets) and the amusements of the "plague bag." What families with small children did before the invention of this little item, I have no idea. The only problem is that now our son wants to turn all our water into blood.

Chag kasher v'sameakh everyone.
posted by Noah at 4:27 PM

 
And now I've been invited, retroactively. Facts on the ground . . .

Oh, and yes, I know the Shawshank Redemption is a Christ allegory, though I didn't realize that until after it was revealed Tim Robbins was innocent. So (a) it's a lousy Christ allegory, and (b) I thought it could have been something more interesting than a lousy Christ allegory, namely the story of how a *guilty* Tim Robbins character is redeemed by prison. Anyway, the movie stank.
posted by Noah at 4:11 PM

 
I don't care if I haven't been invited (if, in fact, I occupy far too lowly a rung on the Great Chain of Blogging to even conceivably be invited), I'm going to play anyway.

Play what? Play Caesar's bath meme.

So here 'goes: 5 things everyone seems to love that I can't stand (or, at a minimum, think are over-rated).

1. Soho. You're supposed to love Soho for ultra-hip emporia like Moss. Or you're supposed to hate Soho because it's been ruined by bankers who've driven the poor artists from the lofts. I don't have much use for hip, ultra- or not, but I hate Soho for the reason no one seems to, but everyone should: because it's ugly. Not just a little ugly: really, really breathtakingly ugly. We are supposed to treasure as architectural wonders buildings that are covered with the 19th-century equivalent of aluminum siding: cast iron facades cranked out to lend a thin, kitchy veneer of class to workaday warehouse space. All this says is that we who dwell in the deserts of modernism and the wilderness of postmodernism are so deprived that the slightest gesture in the direction of aesthetic experience is to be treasured. That just makes me sad. That people will pay such ludicrous sums to live in these ugly buildings just makes me disgusted.

2. The Shawshank Redemption. This may be the single most over-rated movie of all time (ranked by the visitors to the Internet Movie Database as the second-best movie *in history* after The Godfather.) The cinematography is only workmanlike. The acting is leaden and unconvincing. The music is treacly. But most important, it is so deeply, pervasively mendacious that I don't know where to begin. So I'll jump right to the most important thing wrong with it: the absolutely indefensible decision to make the protagonist innocent of the murder for which he has been convicted. This is, supposedly, a story of this man's redemption in prison, how, once inside, he redeems himself by doing good to others. If the movie had been any good in other ways, that could be an interesting story. But if he isn't guilty then why does he need to be redeemed?!? If he's not guilty, isn't this just a story about a guy so great that, even though his wife is murdered and he's sentenced to life in prison for that murder he didn't commit, he spends his time helping others, whether saintly prisoners (every prisoner in the movie is basically good) or thuggish guards (every authority figure in the movie is basically evil). Who cares? There is nothing good in this movie. And I can't count the number of otherwise sane men (they seem to all be men) who consider this their favorite work of cinema.

3. The iPod. I am certainly not going to climb aboard Ross Douthat's bandwagon and declare music itself overrated. I love music. I love music of many kinds: orchestral, chamber, opera; classical, modern, medieval; jazz, showtunes, rock 'n' roll, pop, country, folk, traditional and soul; Marshall Crenshaw and Ian Dury; Dusty Springfield and Toby Twining; Jimmy Dale Gilmore and Milt Jackson; Dave Van Ronk and David Krakauer; Dr. John and Blossom Dearie. My tastes are not entirely catholic; the hip-hop revolution has passed me by almost entirely. I'm not especially knowledgeable about music, nor do I go out to concerts very often (something I regularly resolve to change, but never do), but I love music. When I come home from work, one of the first things I do after kicking off my shoes, emptying my pockets and hugging my wife and son is put something on the stereo. But. The appeal of tuning out the world by sticking wires in my ears is really obscure to me. I've never owned a Walkman or Discman or other pre-iPod iterations of the tune-out machine, and I've never missed owning one. If I want to retreat from the world, I read (and I'm the kind of jerk who has been known to read while, say, climbing a flight of stairs; sorry). If I want to listen to music, I want it to surround me, not play inside my head. And, frankly, hearing music that no one else hears makes me feel like Caliban on the island, or like I'm going mad. Finally, I specifically don't understand what the great achievement of the iPod is, how it has nearly single-handedly revived Apple Computer's fortunes. I just don't get it.

4. The Simpsons. I graduated from college in 1992, and I don't own a television (we watch movies on the computer), so maybe I just missed the perfect moment that would have cemented my identification with the series. And I must admit, it's a good show. But it rarely makes me laugh out loud. In fact, I'm much more likely to laugh at renditions of Simpsons bits by friends or colleagues, or, more to the point, allusions to the Simpsons, than I am to laugh at the show itself. A show built on cultural references, high and low, somehow seems to me more successful as something referred to out of context than it is in its original context. I don't know what that means. But I do know that if I'm sitting in a hotel room flipping channels as I fall asleep, and a Cheers rerun is on one station and a Simpsons rerun is on another, I'm going to watch Cheers.

5. Sophocles. From the Simpsons to Sophocles: I think that's a required survey course at Yale, isn't it? Anyhow, Aristotle thought Sophocles' work epitomized what tragedy was supposed to be. But for some reason, he just bores me. Tragedy, per Aristotle, springs from character, but Sophocles' characters always strike me as very one-dimensional, as emblems of an idea or principle rather than people of flesh and blood. This is not a complaint I have about the other Greeks; I think Aeschylus and Euripides are marvelous. Aeschylus is like Wagner, a great archaist, only Aeschylus is by far the greater artist in creating characters with human depth. And Euripides is strikingly modern, anticipating everyone from Shakespeare to Brecht to Artaud. Sophocles, by contrast, putting his puppets through their psycho-philosophic paces, leaves me cold. Admittedly, I am reading all these dramatists in translation, so perhaps in Greek he soars. But as I read him, Sophocles is far inferior to his great contemporary rivals, and far inferior to history's estimation of him.

I would love to hear what Mickey Kaus, John Derbyshire and Michael Blowhard list. I would ask Steve Sailer but I feel sometimes like his entire blog is devoted to things/ideas/etc he hates that everyone else seems to love.
posted by Noah at 10:52 AM

 
By the way, as long as we're on the subject of Christianity, can someone explain to me how this isn't Manicheism?

What does it mean to say that pain and death have "no significance" unless it means that these things do not come from God? Well, I was taught that *all* things come from God, there being none other.

Satan is the adversary, yes. He's *our* adversary, not God's. He's God's *employee* - His prosecuting attorney, in fact, charged with proving humanity's guilt. Anyhow, that's what Satan is in the Jewish tradition, as I understand it. Am I wrong? Does Orthodox Christianity understand it differently?

God, for whatever reasons He alone knows, created a garden, and created us to dwell in it. That is where we *belong.* He also, again for reasons He alone knows, created a wilderness. We live in exile, in the wilderness, which we know as the universe, but we know we belong in a garden. It seems to me our job is to make as much of a garden out of this wilderness as we can.

As for God's reasons, I can't do better than the whirlwind's reply to Job, though I could take the time (another time, not now) to explain what I think the whirlwind's reply *means*. (3 hints: the whirlwind praises Job, not his comforters; the whirlwind extols the virtues of Leviathan and Behemoth as among God's greatest creations; and among the very few things we know about Job's post-whirlwind life are the names of his daughters. And remember, always, that Job does not accuse God of injustice, nor does he take his wife's advice and commit suicide - "curse God and die" - but simply asks to have His justice *explained* to him.)

Finally: how can I worship a God who is responsible for spina bifida? If God allowed the Holocaust to happen, how can I love Him?

Because He is my father. Hating Him will avail me nothing; I will still breathe His breath until I breathe my last.

And now I'm going to bed.
posted by Noah at 10:57 PM

 
I have been meaning to say something about the late Pope John Paul II, but I simply haven't had time, and besides, so much has been said so much better by so many others. (See, for example, here, here, here, and here.)

In general, I think The New Republic has done a fine job with this story, covering the Pope's own "record" as it were from a variety of angles and also covering the politics around the succession. So, having praised them in general, I would like to take the opportunity to dissent from the rather peevish spirit of this old piece by Leon Wieseltier republished for the occasion.

As I understand these things (and my understanding is limited) the official story is that the truth never changes, and, as the Church expounds that truth the Church doesn't change its mind. But with respect to Judaism, I don't think that's correct. What Catholicism teaches today is something rather different from the supercessionism that the Church held to for hundreds of years. And that change in Church doctrine is due at least as much to the just-departed Pope as to Pope John XXIII.

Again, as I understand thse things, the Church's understanding of Judaism is that it is a *valid* and *living* and *authentic* religion; that it is *salvific* for those who are parties to its Covenant; that God, who does not change His mind, did not "replace" historic Israel with a new Israel of the Church, but founded a new Israel of the Church while retaining His Covenant with historic Israel to the extent that historic Israel did not choose to embrace and subsume itself in the new. This is, I think, extraordinary and revolutionary. It is a radical change from the Church's historic approach to Judaism which was, as I say, supercessionist. It is, as well, the only possible foundation on which friendly coexistence between Judaism and Christianity can be founded and, as I have said before, such friendly coexistence *must* be founded because we are too intimate ever to be strangers, as, say, Jews and Buddhists might be; we must, perforce, be either friends or enemies.

This change is more John Paul II's doing than anyone's, and I don't think he was so determined to set our faiths' relationship on a proper footing simply because he knew Jews in Poland or was a witness to the Nazi Holocaust. Maybe it's just because I'm Jewish, but I think his efforts in this area more than in any are the clearest window into his understanding of God and His ways with mankind. God is not a man, that He should repent - that is a profound idea, and we have not yet seen the full effects of this idea as it ripples through the mind and body of the Church.

It is also a change of very profound significance, significance that, I think, Leon Wieseltier does not appreciate nearly enough. Isaiah promises that, at the end, all nations will worship at God's holy mountain. He does not say that all will accept the yoke of the commandments given at Sinai, but he does say that all will recognize God's sovereignty and, given that this worship will take place in Jerusalem, the validity of His covenant with Israel. If one is not a quietist, and Wieseltier is not a quietist, then things in history that point to this promised end are freighted with significance. The recognition by the Catholic Church of the validity and continuity of the covenant at Sinai with the Jewish people points to that end. It is as significant, I would argue, theologically and eschatologically as the various recognitions, beginning with the Balfour Declaration, by the temporal powers of a Jewish right to a homeland in the historic Land of Israel. It is vastly more important than any apology for past crimes committed by churchmen, in the Church's name, or incited by Church teaching.

The change is not set in stone, however. The next Pope, or later Popes, could recast the teachings of John Paul II's tenure in a different light, more consonant with traditional supercessionist thinking. I fear greatly that my own tradition, unused to the responsibility of dialogue as against defense, has already missed the opportunity to engage with Christianity on the new terms offered. And I hope that, in the lifetime of the next Pope, my people rise to that challenge, and that John Paul II's tenure will be remembered centuries hence as the "first flowering" of another aspect of our redemption, and of the redemption of the world.
posted by Noah at 10:07 PM