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Great Jewish Books: Second Time Around

August 24, 2015 by admin

Last year I taught an undergraduate class called “Great Jewish Books” and posted the syllabus here. The course, I thought, went very well. Nevertheless, since I am an inveterate tinkerer, I have tinkered with the syllabus for the upcoming semester. In terms of readings, I switched the excerpts for both classic rabbinic texts and medieval mystical texts and added more in Jewish thought (at the expense of I. B. Singer and Glueckel of Hameln). I am still uncomfortable with the lack of works authored by women, though. I have also changed the writing assignments slightly, making them more focused to better achieve the goals of the class.

A copy of the syllabus in Word format can be found here. I welcome suggestions. You should also feel free to use it with whatever modifications work for you.

Take That!

July 7, 2015 by admin

I direct an online project called Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine (IIP). The purpose of this project is to make accessible and searchable the many published inscriptions from this region that date from the sixth century BCE to the seventh century CE, in all languages and religions. We have just entered an exciting and intensive phase of the project, which over the next couple of years will expand and further develop the site.

I find these inscriptions endlessly fascinating and I will begin here, in a somewhat irregular fashion, to share some of these inscriptions (you are welcome, of course, to browse the database on your own and to share with me your own favorites!).

Today’s featured inscription is a lead sling bullet that comes from Dor, a coastal city located in northern Israel. It was originally published in 1982, but then reinterpreted by Dov Gera, “Tryphon’s Sling Bullet from Dor,” Israel Exploration Journal 35 (1985): 153-163 (the record in IIP can be seen here). It is inscribed in (mainly) Greek on two sides. One side reads:

For the victory of Tryphon.

The other side reads:

Dor. Year 5. Of the city of the Dorians. Have a taste of sumac.

The bullet was made by forces loyal to Tryphon, a Seleucid ruler who was locked in a civil war with his rival, Antiochus VII. Antiochus VII forces killed Tryphon, probably around the time the bullet was made, in 138/137 BCE. The city of Dor was apparently loyal to Tryphon right to the end.

The bullet has a return address. This is not uncommon in antiquity; often projectiles in particular had inscriptions on them. Know – the bullet seems to say – who just wounded you.

The kicker, though, is the phrase, “Have a taste of sumac.” The phrase is enigmatic, but since sumac can refer to a sweet, dried fruit, the bullet seems to gloat: “So how do you like that sweet pain? Would like more from where that came from?”

Hardly the utilitarian and antiseptic way in which we practice warfare today.

The photo comes from the Tel Dor project site. It is a sling bullet, but I’m unsure if it is the one I’ve discussed here.

Is the Bible True? Should It Matter?

June 29, 2015 by admin

This was just published at Aeon Ideas. I paste a copy below.

Not really. And not really.

The truth is that there isn’t much, if any, historical accuracy in the early accounts in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. There are many reasons to doubt these early stories. Internal to the Bible itself, the stories are peppered with supernatural interventions that strain belief and are full of contradictions. Externally, and more importantly, almost none of these stories can find more than a potential shred of supporting evidence, and evidence external to the Hebrew Bible more often than not contradicts the biblical account. There is no real evidence for an Exodus by the Israelites from Egypt, for example, or for even the very existence of the extraordinarily wise, wealthy, and well-traveled King Solomon. Archaeological evidence directly contradicts the biblical account of the conquest of Jericho specifically and, more generally, of the account of the Israelite conquest of Canaan. Instead of seeing the Hebrew Bible as containing an accurate historical record, we are better off seeing it as a collection of ancient Israelite myths. These myths, just like those of the Greeks, might have small kernels of historical truths buried somewhere within them, but even these are largely unrecoverable, insignificant, or both. The Hebrew Bible’s account of events after the purported reign of King Solomon toward the end of the tenth century BCE gets somewhat better. Despite its tendentiousness and continuing self-contradictions, it at least seems to accurately record the names of the kings of Israel and Judah.

The New Testament is hardly better. While it is likely that a man named Jesus existed, the events of his actual life are, despite the Gospels’ accounts, unrecoverable. The Gospel accounts routinely contradict each other. Mention of Jesus in sources outside of the Bible is so uncommon as to suggest that he did not make much of an impact for a good century. The book of Acts, which is patterned after a history, is more novel then history; nearly all of its claims must be taken with more than a grain of salt. Most of the other books of the New Testament do not even try to tell a history.

So the Bible isn’t historically true. We’ve known this since the time of Spinoza. Who cares?

Many people, it turns out. The claim that the Bible gets its history wrong has caused some with secular commitments to exalt triumphantly. See, they argue, its lack of veracity shows that it is all a load of malarkey, just another ancient document used to support modern (usually nefarious) special interests. On the other side are those whose faith is so threatened by this claim that they react to it strongly and often aggressively. In the middle are the many Jews and Christians who have faith commitments but who also trust in the power of their own rational powers and who don’t know how reconcile the two. Is it possible, they wonder, to hold on to their faith even if the Bible isn’t true?

This problem is hardly new. In fact, a form of it predated Spinoza and found expression among scores of medieval Jewish and Christian thinkers who sought to reconcile the Bible’s claims with what they knew about the world. Maimonides, for example, wrote a whole tract, The Guide for the Perplexed, precisely on this issue. This issue was, however, exacerbated by the Reformation and its emphasis on Scripture. The birth of the idea of sola scriptura, that faith is located in one’s direct encounter with the holy word, made the unmediated text of the holy word even more important than it already was. This approach engenders the kind of “all or nothing” approach to Scripture that characterizes the approach of both secularists and fundamentalists. It has, in fact, become so pervasive that it has become extraordinarily difficult for almost anyone in our society to think of the Bible in terms outside of this dichotomy.

Yet there is a third way. The greatest legacy of Scripture is much less the text itself than the ideas, interpretations, and most importantly, social communities that have formed around it over millennia. This was implicitly the position of most Catholics and Jews prior to the Reformation; the historical veracity of the Bible was largely irrelevant. Today, it is the impetus behind the shift by theologians to focus on the history of reception of the Bible rather than on its formation. When a militant secularist decries the Bible as false, or a religious fundamentalist clings against all reason to the Bible’s “literal” meaning (even while ignoring some of the parts of the text that fit less with her beliefs), they are largely missing the point. Many very serious, talented, and smart people over the course of history have used the Bible as a point of departure to consider some of our most important questions, as individuals and as a society. To ignore that is to miss the text that spawned much of Western “high culture,” and fundamental ideas of justice, love, sexuality, and meaning in the face of our own mortality. The Bible stands like the piece of grit around which a pearl grows; the original grit becomes largely insignificant. The Bible began a massive, long-running conversation, and whether the text is historically true or not, the conversation is one that we avoid only at our own peril.

Love Is As Strong As Death

June 18, 2015 by admin

Construction on campus caused me to detour the other day to an out of the way corner of the Green where a tower sits. I had, of course, seen this tower before, but never close up and its (very well-locked) entrance. The inscription above the door identifies it as the Carrie Tower, with the quote, “Love is as strong as death,” an excerpt from Song of Songs 8:6-7:

⁶ Set me as a seal upon your heart,
   as a seal upon your arm;
for love is strong as death,
   passion fierce as the grave.
Its flashes are flashes of fire,
   a raging flame.
⁷ Many waters cannot quench love,
   neither can floods drown it.
If one offered for love
   all the wealth of one’s house,
   it would be utterly scorned.

The tower has a story behind it. This from the Encylopedia Brunoniana:

Carrie Tower was erected in 1904, a gift of Paul Bajnotti of Turin, Italy, and a memorial to his wife, born Caroline Mathilde Brown, granddaughter of Nicholas Brown 1786, for whom the University is named, and daughter of Nicholas Brown 1811. She died in Palermo in 1892 after sixteen years of marriage to Bajnotti, who also erected a fountain in her memory in Burnside Park in Providence. Carrie Tower was designed by Guy Lowell of Boston, who was selected from a competition of well-known architects. It was built by J. W. Bishop Company on the Front Campus close to the corner of Prospect and Waterman Streets. The tower of red brick is 95 feet high, and is elaborately adorned with stonework, done under the direction of John L. Thorpe of Boston. There are festoons of fruit near the base, and at the top, above four clock faces on the sides of the tower flanked by eight panels of fruit, are in rising succession, 32 carved urns, eight capitals, four shields, and at the very top, four urns with flame. On the foundation is inscribed “Love is Strong as Death.” A strange occurrence in 1950 caused the clock to run erratically. When this was investigated, it appeared that an essential part of the clock’s mechanism had been removed, and it further appeared that this had been done purposely to call attention to the prank that had caused eight of the elaborate “beefeater” hats belonging to Corporation members to be lying on top of the tower.

There is something hauntingly beautiful about this story. A grieving, childless husband memorializes his love for his foreign wife with relatively simple monument. (An account of the couple and their ties to Brown can be found here.) The tower held a bell that rang to signal the start and end of each class. In every ring, several times a day, his love for her went out across campus, pointing both back at his loss and forward to the vitality of a new generation of students. Inexorably. Eternally.

Well, not exactly. The clock mechanisms broke and it appears a new bell was installed (or was the old one moved?) in another building, University Hall. Carrie Tower now sits without purpose, slowly crumbling, occasionally receiving an infusion of university funding to keep it from falling down.

There are many ways we can memorialize our love. We can give a building or part of one; create a fund for scholarships or research; set up a gravestone; or write a poem. Thinking about Carrie Tower made me ask my own wife how, if everything was possible and the situation unfortunately arose, she would wish me to memorialize her: A building would be nice, she said, but a scholarship fund better. I see that logic. An endowed fund keeps giving, serves a constructive purpose, and will (hopefully) not crumble. At the same time, every time I hear about this or that fund or endowed lecture, I tend to tune out; I have to struggle to try to imagine the pathos behind each one of these gifts of love, the stories behind the flat names. This week, though, I had no problem remembering Caroline Mathilde Brown and how much her Italian husband Paul Bajnatti loved her. And I appreciated the gift of this memory, 111 years after it was made.

Yale’s Betrayal

June 8, 2015 by admin

According to recent news reports, Yale University gave its former president, Richard Levin, a bonus of $8.5 million after his retirement. Even in comparison to the stratospheric salaries and perks given to administrators in higher education, this payment stands out. It appears to be the largest pay out ever to a university administrator, and not by a little. The bonus was in addition to his annual salary that topped $1 million, which also ranks him among the very highest compensated university administrators.

There are all kinds of obvious reasons why this is disturbing and the timing of this revelation could hardly have been worse. Many students and their families all over the country have just committed to colleges and are now scrambling anxiously to find the money to afford it. Tuition continue to soar; wages barely grow; the student loan system has become inadequate; and student debt has become a national issue. Even for Yale, $8.5 million dollars is not chump change. It could really have made a difference in the lives of many.

This is hardly news. The cost of higher education, and the spiraling salaries of administrators, has been discussed (rightly) ad nauseam. What really upsets me about this, though, is something different that to my knowledge has been discussed far less: values.

Yale College prides itself (again, rightly) on its liberal arts education. It is an education that, to be sure, is supposed to provide skills to students that will benefit them materially throughout their lives: critical thinking and reasoning; the ability to write and present oneself; quantitative and sometimes technical skills. These are skills prized by future employers. They are also, though, skills that can be obtained at almost any decent university at a fraction of Yale’s price. What sets the liberal arts education at Yale and its peers apart are the two values that lie at its heart: those of meaning and service.

The larger purpose of a liberal arts education is to provide the intellectual resources with which students can construct for themselves meaningful lives. This is not a matter of teaching a magic formula. It is a kind of habit of mind or virtue, gradually and consistently instilled, that drives a person to self-knowledge, critique, and change throughout a lifetime. Meaning is not money and money is not meaning; material goods are necessary and fun, but also a means rather than an end. Worth is measured against other standards.

To receive this kind of education is an unbelievable (and unbelievably expensive) privilege, and that privilege brings with it responsibility. Here, then, is the second value: service. If an elite liberal arts education stands for anything, it is for responsibility to others. Such service is not just the price of privilege, it is also the basis for a life of meaning. The most famous line in Yale’s school song, “For God, for country, and for Yale,” is tongue in cheek, but it also captures something true about the values of the school.

Now, I don’t consider myself to be naive. I was attracted to Yale as an undergraduate for precisely these values but I know that many of my classmates were motivated by the promise of a rich payoff. Nevertheless, when I was there (and I suspect this is still the case) the public discourse was heavily skewed toward these issues of meaning and service. We heard it from the administration constantly; we often more subtly got it out of our classes; and we talked about such issues constantly among ourselves. I am sure that was not everybody’s experience at Yale, but it was that of many.

This is why I found the $8.5 million bonus so disturbing. It was more than a matter of the questionable allocation of resources or poor optics. It was a betrayal of the values that undergird the institution.

Two primary reasons were given to justify the bonus: (1) to retain or compensate him for the money that he could have made had a chosen a job in the for-profit sector, and (2) to reward him for a job well-done. Both of these are problematic.

Presidents of large and complex institutions of higher education such as Yale have difficult jobs. They are demanding and deserve to be well-compensated. But universities cannot, indeed should not, compete with investment banks and corporations. Like leaders in the for-profit sector, university presidents must run large and complex organizations. Unlike CEOs and partners, though, a university president at a place like Yale is a national leader of higher education and has the additional responsibility of promoting its values, both institutionally and personally.

To serve as president of Yale is not a burden that needs high compensation to attract the best candidates. It is in itself a privilege and a service. We want university presidents who serve because they believe in what they are doing and because they feel an obligation to their institutions and the broader public. University administrators, and the bodies that hire them, need to practice the values that they preach. If the trustees really wanted to reward Mr. Levin, why didn’t they instead use the money to create an academic program or scholarship to honor him?

One need not be a university professor to know that there are few demographic groups more attuned to hypocrisy than college-age students. If a university administration sends the message that meaning and accomplishment is measured in money, it will not be lost on students. With its $32 billion dollar endowment, Yale is almost uniquely positioned to be able to push back against this mentality. It is disappointing that it chose not to.

I of course have no idea what Mr. Levin will choose to do with his windfall. He knows, far better than I, both how capital can best be put to socially productive purposes and that large bequests to heirs are socially corrosive. I assume that he will do the right thing, whatever that might be, even as he brings his expertise to another (this time for-profit) educational venture, Coursera, for which he is being equally well-compensated.

Yale University is not in any substantive way a business. It is a non-profit institution of higher education, whose purpose (like all non-profits) is to further the public good. In addition to fostering the creation of new knowledge through research, its goal is is to give the finest possible education to the most possible students, while instilling in them a set of values distinctive to the institution. Those values, Richard Levin’s bonus suggests, center around money. I hope that that is not true.