I have a new essay, “Passover and the Festival of Matzot: Synthesizing Two Holidays,” over at thetorah.com. Check it out here!
Book Launch
Although the official launch date for my book, How the Bible Became Holy, is not until April 15, I see that it is now shipping (and available on Kindle) from Amazon.
And I hope that you like the new spiffy design on this website, thanks to Ariana Parenti and the crack online marketing team at Yale University Press! I’ll be making some additions and modification over the next couple of months. I may also have a new idea or two one of these days.
The Most Popular Kind of Judaism
The other day I found myself with an awkward amount of free time between serious commitments — the kind of pocket of time that is too long to really justify playing with Facebook but too short to get engaged in any project that required concentration. So I decided to whittle away the time on Google’s Ngram viewer, which by now you might have noticed is an endless source of amusement to me.
I have nothing very profound to say about the experiment above. I searched the terms “Reform Judaism,” “Orthodox Judaism,” “Conservative Judaism,” and “Hasidism” in the entire English language corpus of Google Books from the end of the nineteenth century to 2008. This should give us some measure of the general interest that the reading population has in these movements (at least under these names). Three things immediately grabbed my attention:
- Starting in the 1950s, interest in Hasidism far outstrips interest in the other movements. Is this due to exoticism?
- Over the past decade or so there has been a decline of interest in all forms of Judaism (correlated to the decline in enrollments in Jewish Studies in colleges throughout the country?).
- The crossing of the “Orthodox Judaism” and “Conservative Judaism” lines. Although both are pretty low, perhaps this corroborates the narrative of the decline of the latter.
Just some thoughts to play with during your own awkward pocket of time today.
The Curious Case of the CCAR and Adolf Eichmann
Imagine, for a moment, that you run an organization that is staunchly anti-death penalty. Now, to make things interesting, imagine that that organization is the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR). And to make things really interesting, imagine that you just learned that the Israeli courts have confirmed the conviction and death penalty of Adolf Eichmann, who of course played a critical role in the Shoah. What would you do?
Personally, I might have let this one slide. Eichmann’s case was extraordinary and his sentence was largely considered just, especially but not solely by my American Jewish constituency. I need not vocally support his execution, but not condemning it would not in any serious way erode my organization’s opposition to the death penalty.
This, however, was not what the CCAR leadership did. They actually wrote a letter to the Israeli president urging that he commute Eichmann’s sentence:
As the representative rabbinical body of American Reform Judaism, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, which supported Israel’s right to try Eichmann and applauded the [illegible] fairness of the trial, but which is in principle opposed to the death penalty, we appeal to your Excellency to commute the sentence to life imprisonment. (One report of the text here.)
It turned out to be not only ineffective but also deeply divisive. Twelve Reform rabbis (including, coincidentally, Rabbi Louis Satlow who we believe is a distant relative of mine) immediately sent off a cable to the Israeli president protesting their leadership’s statement, calling it “unauthorized.” Later that month, though, these rabbis were rebuffed: “the convention and the CCAR executive board” supported the plea for commutation, as the leadership acted “in accordance with the standing policy of the CCAR regarding public statements endorsing accepted CCAR principles.” That is, the CCAR’s president and vice-president did not need special authorization to send the appeal, as they were simply acting in accord with a principle the CCAR already accepted.
The principle won, but I doubt that a lot of people felt very good about it.
An Alternative Canon: Part II
Last month I discussed a role-playing exercise that I did with my class, “Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible,” in which, at the very end of the course, I asked my students to recreate the Christian Bible. If all the interested parties had a voice — which they assuredly did not — what might the canon have looked like? I followed with interest the amazing conversation that this generated on James McGrath’s blog, “Exploring our Matrix.” As some of the comments there suggest (or ask), the intention of my exercise was not to make judgments about each book of the present Christian Bible (and the myriad of other contemporary writings that did not enter the canon), but rather to get students to wrestle in a more general way with the issues of canon and authority. So without further ado, this is what my students came up with:
- The canonical Christian Bible would consist of the historical and prophetic writings of the Jewish Bible and more or less the entire New Testament as it now exists. Both Greek and Latin would be equally authoritative versions;
- The remainder of the books of the Jewish Bible (including the Pentateuch) would have apocryphal (deutero-canonical) authority;
- The canon will remain open, to be revisited by council meetings every 50 years (or so)
This result certainly surprised me, but was in line with our class discussions that consistently noted how important the Jewish prophetic books were — more than the written Torah (this is arguable, but I do argue it in my forthcoming book, How the Bible Became Holy) for most Jews and Christians in the first few centuries of this era. The emperor and his court desired the historical books as helping to give authority to the monarchy; they particular wanted the story of David included. The bishops were not entirely happy with this outcome, but they also were willing to compromise with the Marcionites and Gnostics in order to keep the peace and preserve an agreement that would not lead to schism. (Interestingly, the rabbis decided that it would be best if the Jewish Bible was fully excluded from the Christian canon, as they determined that the Jews had no interest in being part of the Christian story.) The decision not to close the canon was a bone thrown to the Montanists, along with a declaration that female prophecies in the Jewish Bible were to be particularly valued.
I thought that this result was as brilliant as it was historically implausible. As several of the comments in Exploring our Matrix note (as well as my students in the post-mortem), in reality this process was not a game: many of the participants in these decisions would rather have died than compromised, and the empire decided to crush rather than negotiate with dissidents. But that said, this solution was rather nifty and makes one wonder what would have happened if the canon was formed by taking into account the concerns of the “heretics.”
Pedagogically, I thought that the exercise was quite a success. I would change a few things, but I plan on doing it again. Here are a few student comments:
- The simulation clearly showed the impact of human personality on the development of religion…. The synod also illustrated the ironies associated with negotiating a canon. In our modern context, it often seems that theological differences lead directly to violence; in our simulation, groups who came to the synod with conflicting views often had the same goals. [Despite their bitter differences], the rabbis broke into applause when the Gnostics argued that the Old Testament should not be held on the same canonical level as the New Testament.
- The simulation itself was an effective way to learn about the roles of several different political groups. By engaging in debate with them, it was much easier to gain an understanding of, absorb, and retain what their stances were on the Bible. I also took away some important lessons about how power and politics influenced and intertwined with religion.
- The simulation tied this course together perfectly. It allowed us to apply what we have learned about authority while we were forced to come to a conclusion of what texts we thought deserved authority and what texts didn’t. It was an exceptional final because not only did we put a lot of effort and work into learning and preparing for this simulation, but we also were able to do all of this in an enjoyable and comfortable manner.
- Most interestingly, the simulation put the idea in my mind of an imaginary future in which the Bible did not include the Old Testament. I am curious how history would have developed in terms of Jewish/Christian relations if the Old Testament had not been ultimately included in the Christian Cannon.
- I learned from this experience that power is not always as centralized as it seems. While we assumed at the beginning of the simulation that the emperor could dictate the outcome as much as he wished, many of the factions could, by means of negotiation and persuasion, achieve at least some of their objectives – even if they did not have a direct vote. It was also quite interesting to see how some individuals were able to sway other peoples’ opinions just by the persuasive manner of their speech.