Michael L. Satlow

Then and Now

Judaism

Poverty and its Relief

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I recently had the opportunity to speak at Connecticut College on the topic of poverty and its relief in Jewish thought.  It was great fun, in part because the discussion helped me to better articulate something that has been bothering me for some time.

The issue is this: Early rabbinic texts define a poverty line, usually as an objective value of assets (which is itself an interesting measure, as opposed to income, which is how we usually calculate it).  If a person owns eligible property (there are some exclusions) of under 200 zuz, s/he is entitled to glean the leftover produce from the field and to receive some other minor forms of relief.  The Mishnah, which promotes this approach, seems quite aware that it is engaged in an academic exercise.  Who, after all, is going to certify that someone has met this standard and how?  Even if there was such a certification (as there was in some medieval Jewish communities) who would check it at the entrance to a field?  There seems to be a subtle acknowledgment of this problem in the very next passage of the Mishnah, that goes on to declare that if someone who is not entitled does glean, s/he will ultimately fall into poverty as a divine punishment.  Poor relief was to work under an honor system “enforced” by the promises of divine threat and reward (for those who do not take relief for which they are eligible).

While all early rabbinic texts are not in complete agreement about this, there is a gradual move over time from an objective definition of poverty to a subjective one.  Medieval and recent rabbinic texts declare that when determining whether someone should be considered poor for the purpose of receiving communal support, the person’s entire context should play a role.

Now – and this is the thing that has been bothering me –  in our society we have given ourselves over entirely to objective measures for the determination of poverty.  There are some rather obvious benefits to such an approach (e.g., it assures equal and just treatment and is potentially efficient) but it has a downside.  Such an approach dehumanizes the poor in two ways.  First, it quite literally considers them only as a set of numbers.  Second, though, it reinforces a system designed to relegate responsibility for our poor to the “government,” away from us.  It turns poor relief in a “commons problem” that allows it to slip between the cracks as few want ownership of it.

Jewish texts (or at least some of them) resist this move in ways that do not map easily onto our modern political approaches.  On the one hand, they assert an absolute obligation on each and every one of us to support the most vulnerable at at least a level of sustenance.  On the other, though, they recognize that such support takes the full humanity of the poor into account, something that is very difficult if not impossible for large, state-scale programs to do.

I do not think that these reflections lead to simple or easy programmatic conclusions.  Some other countries (particularly of Switzerland, which I blogged about here) embed their notion of poor relief in larger social contexts.  There has been much discussion of the role that “mediating institutions” (e.g., faith communities and NGOs) did and can once again play in our civic lives.  Liberals especially tend to downplay the role that these groups can play (when compared to the massive power of the state) but they have the potential of better humanizing poor relief.  I am entirely unsure if transferring more responsibilities of poor relief to them is for better or worse, but I have the feeling that given the current political situation that may increasingly become the reality.

What are the Ten Commandments?

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The “Ten Commandments” occupy an iconic place in popular imagination.  Whether as a result of Cecile B. DeMille’s epic 1956 retelling or not, most of us know the basic outline of the story: Moses goes up Sinai where God gives him the Ten Commandments, writing them with His own finger on the tablets.  The people, though, scared because Moses stayed on the mountain forty days, made a golden calf.  Moses comes down the mountain and in fury breaks the tablets.  He soon reascends to receive them again from God, but this time in Moses’ writing.

I have the privilege this semester of teaching a course on the Ten Commandments and the other day, in going over the biblical accounts (and DeMille’s movie), I was struck by how firmly this narrative is entrenched.  The biblical accounts are actually far more complex, or better, confused.  Scholars have long noted these discrepancies (see, e.g., here) but they are worth reviewing.

  1.  In Exodus 19, Moses ascends the mountain where God tells him to get the people ready.  He goes down and does this, then goes back up, then God tells him to go down again and then to come back with Aaron (19:24-25).  He goes down but does not come back up, and at that moment God speaks the Ten Commandments (20:1).
  2. God’s direct speak to Moses (not Aaron) begins only in 20:18, where God launches an extensive monologue that includes various civil laws.  God then commands Moses to come up the mountain with the elders (24:1) and after they do so commands Moses alone to ascend the mountain (perhaps further up) to receive the stone tablets inscribed with the teachings (24:12).  Then God launches into another monologue, this one dealing with the Tabernacle.  This account ends with the giving of the tablets (31:18).
  3. The incident of the golden calf occurs in chapter 32.  Verses 15-19 describe the tablets, written by God, and how Moses broke them.
  4. In chapter 34, Moses reascends the mountain at God’s command.  In verses 6-26 God issues a series of commands that are almost totally different than the Ten Commandments, and then, the narrative continues,

And the Lord said to Moses: Write down these commandments, for in accordance with these commandments I make a covenant with you and with Israel.  And he was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he ate no bread and drank no water; and he wrote down on the tablets the terms of the covenant, the Ten Commandments.

It is worth pausing here for a moment.  According to Exodus, what exactly are the “Ten Commandments”?  Are they the “traditional” ones of Exodus 20, that God seems to say to everybody?  Are they the long account of the Tabernacle (2)?  Or are they the rules on the second set of tables (4)?  The narrative is far from clear and is further complicated by the account in Deuteronomy.

  1. Deuteronomy 4:10-14 seems to try to reconcile some of the problems of Exodus: God spoke the (traditional) Ten Commandments to everybody and then wrote them on the tablets.  He then further instructed Moses about the various civil ordinances.
  2. Deuteronomy 5:4-5, though, seems to say that the (traditional) Ten Commandments were given to Moses, who stood between God and the people.  Deuteronomy 5:19-20 then reverts to the explanation of 4:10-14: God spoke to all, inscribed them on stone, and then kept Moses on the mountain to receive more instructions.
  3. Yet in Deuteronomy 9:8-11, Moses receives the tablets at the end of the forty day period of instruction – who knows what is on them – and then comes down, only to break them in fury.
  4. Finally, Deuteronomy 10:1-5 tells of the second set of commandments, written in the hand of God:

The Lord inscribed on the tablets the same text as on the first, the Ten Commandments that He addressed to you on the mountain out of the fire on the day of the Assembly; and the Lord gave them to me. (10:4)

At the end of the day, it’s hard, at least for me, to make a single coherent narrative out of these passages.  There are differing accounts of what is on the tablets, who heard or received them, and who wrote the second set.  Most scholars explain these differences as resulting from the inelegant splicing together of different sources.  Whether or not that is true, these differing accounts are worth observing.  The story is far from obvious.

In teaching this material the other day I was also left with another question:  Exactly how important is the account of the giving of the Ten Commandments in the narrative of the Torah?  In the DeMille movie, it is the climax of the Moses narrative.  If you didn’t have such a preconception, though, would it really seem all that important or would it seem “flatter,” just one of the Torah’s many stories and law collections?  I’m still pondering that one.

Shared, but How?

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What is a “ball”?  Does a ball exist when there is nobody around to see it?

Over the past couple of months I have been exposed to the thought of Bruno Latour.  Latour tries to thread the needle between seeing all of reality as a social or rhetorical construction and a strictly realist or objective approach.  For Latour, a ball is a “quasi-object.”  In the sense that it is a sphere made of some material and has a certain set of physical properties, it is an object.  But it is only in its interaction with humans that this sphere becomes a “ball.”  At the same time, as soon as a person interacts with such an object they are themselves transformed into a condition of “play.”  The relationship between person and object (or by extension, place or activity) is a reciprocal and interconnected one.  (I have much more to learn about Latour, and the example of the ball is not really his, but for a summary see here.)

Latour first came up for me this summer while I was attending  a conference entitled “Shared Ritual Practices and Divided Historiography: Media, Phenomena, Topoi” sponsored by the Dynamics of Jewish Ritual Practices in Pluralistic Contexts from Antiquity to the Present Research Centre at the University of Erfurt.  It was an interesting conference, not simply because it was full of excellent scholars discussing interesting ideas, but in a strange way also because I think few of us – or maybe I speak primarily for myself – knew exactly what we were supposed to be discussing.  What is a “shared ritual practice” and how are we to think about it in the context of “dynamics”?

Most of the participants took this to be a conference about Jewish rituals in a Christian or Roman environment (the program was heavily waited toward Late Antiquity and, somewhat less so, the Middle Ages).  Most of the papers that took “shared” as referring to such “trans-religious” rituals followed a historiographic trope that probably can be called the dominant one today in such studies: namely, that Jews tended to appropriate the rituals of the dominant cultures in which they lived and adapt them for their own use.  Probably convincing enough, but also a little flat.

Not all the papers took “shared” in this way, however,  Some (including my own) were more interested in understanding “shared” as referring to the rituals of rabbinic and non-rabbinic Jews.  How might we describe the “dynamics” of such rituals?  While nearly all scholars would reject a top-down explanatory model, in which rabbis advocated for new rituals and non-rabbis blindly followed, it is clear that we still have not developed a good and well-accepted model to replace it.

I was asked to talk on historiography and I had to flail around a little to avoid the well-trodden topic of the am ha-aretz, the group that the rabbis construct as a kind of contrast to themselves.  So instead I went for the other end of the spectrum, focusing on the hasidim ha-rishonim, the “pious men of old.”  There are six distinct traditions about them in classical rabbinic literature and scholars have usually argued that whether organized or real or not, the rabbis present them as a model to emulate.  In reviewing the traditions I argued that the evidence is actually far more ambiguous; in several cases, especially among later rabbis, the hasidim ha-rishonim seem to be intentionally dismissed as good role models for contemporary Jews.   They are the constructed “super-pious,” with whom the rabbis can think through whether it is possible to be too pious.  Previous scholars, I think, did not see this ambiguity in large part because through the Middle Ages and early modern periods Jews took the term hasid and hasidim as positive expressions of piety.  There was a bit of anachronistic projection.

This is where I am intrigued by Latour.  A person doing a strange set of practices isn’t pious; he (or she) is only pious when we call him (or her) that.  So too, some practices are denoted as “rituals” and laden with meaning and (most) others are not.  Can we treat practices, or “doings,” as quasi-objects and, if so, does that get us anywhere beyond traditional theories of ritual?  I’m not sure, but if you have any ideas I would be delighted to know.

 

And Moses Said Unto the GOP…

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The other day Nicholas Kristoff published a satirical take-down of Paul Ryan and his budget priorities in the New York Times.  He imagines a conversation between Ryan and Jesus, in which Ryan pushes back on Jesus’ call to have mercy on those who are poor .  Such mercy, Ryan essentially argues, amounts to a policy of moral hazard, because it encourages the downtrodden to continue the same behaviors that led them into trouble.  Jesus, of course, demurs.

Kristoff got this imagined conversation partially right.  While recovering the opinions of the historical Jesus are beyond what we can know with much certainty, the Gospels tend to portray Jesus in a much more radical light than Kristoff suggests.  In economic terms, Jesus is portrayed less as a social democrat than as an anarchist: in this new age of God’s kingdom, money matters so little that the best path would be to give it all away.  As the new age dawns, the rich will be left behind – not because of anything they do or did, but simply because they are rich.

This anarchist streak in the New Testament (which is not the only voice we find there) has continued to echo through Christianity, especially in the practices of asceticism, monasticism, and vows of poverty.  Regardless of whether one agrees with it or not, though, it represents a genuine struggle with a perennial and enduring human problem.  We, as human beings, like to consider ourselves as better than animals if not quite divine.  And that leads us into all kinds of difficult questions about how we relate to the material world.  How do we behave in a way that fully realizes our distinctive humanity?  When we copulate and eat, should we do so like animals – which we surely have the ability to do – or should we seek to behave in a way that “transcends” our animal nature?  So too, do we seek to acquire as much as we can in the belief that to the strongest belong the most spoils?  Or is living the “good life” really about developing behaviors concerning our urge to accumulate wealth that allow us to live more fully human lives?

I have been working (slowly) on editing a collection of Jewish sources through the ages that grapple with this problem.  Kristoff’s column got me wondering how one might imagine a more “Jewish” conversation (okay, not one that really is confined to Moses and the Torah).  I am not as clever as Kristoff and so will not try to reproduce an actual conversation but will emphasize the three (out of many possible) points that “Moses” might make:

  • The poor and vulnerable must be supported, but only to the level of sustenance.  We – each and every one of us, as individuals and a community – are obligated to support the needy.  No one in our communities should die of hunger, lack of shelter, or access to health care.  Yet while traditional Jewish sources do not make a moral hazard argument, they also rarely recognize a need to extend that support beyond sustenance.  The poor are free moral agents and must work hard.  At the same time, though, there is no shame to being poor; it is a sign neither of their moral standing nor of their character.  The vicissitudes of life threaten to bring us all to poverty in an instant and our treatment of the poor should recognize that.
  • There are people who take advantage of poor relief, but they are not our problem.  It is our responsibility to help the needy but not our job to ascertain that every claim to our help has a basis.  Traditional Jewish texts recognize that there will be abuse but also that the fear of abuse has negative consequences (i.e., it will give us an easy excuse not to give) and that the scale of this abuse will be relatively minor.  Communal institutions do have a role in minimizing the possibility of abuse but ultimately it is better for us to err on the side of generosity.
  • Capitalism is a good system but it needs heavy regulation.  The Torah prescribes two economic “reset buttons.”  The first, every seven years, cancels all debts.  The second, every fifty years, is a full economic redistribution.  Neither are practicable, but they represent an economic ideal based on the recognition that markets lead over time, inexorably, to increasing inequality.  Jewish texts recognize the importance of a free-market but also the need to control the natural excesses that it engenders: merchants, for example, are not free to price gouge and communities have the right to levy taxes for the public good.

I don’t think that Moses, any more than Jesus, was a social democrat.  But I also don’t think that either one would have much sympathy for the budget plans on the table.  Now if only I knew what they would say about the NEA or NEH….

Tagging the Talmud

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This essay is cross-posted at thetalmud.com where it kicks off a series on digital humanities.

The other week I attended a workshop called Classical Philology Goes Digital Workshop in Potsdam, Germany.  The major goal of the workshop, which was also tied to the Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities was to further the work of creating and analyzing open texts of the “classics”, broadly construed.  We have been thinking about adding natural language processing (including morphological and syntactic tagging – or, as I learned at the workshop, more accurately “annotation”) to the Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine project.  While we learned much and are better positioned to add this functionality, I was must struck by how far the world of “digital classical philology,” focused mainly on texts, has progressed and it got me thinking about the state of our own field.

Running underneath the workshop was the uneasy knowledge that classical philology, as traditionally understood and practiced, is on a sharp decline.  There is increasingly little interest on the part of students, administrators, and funding agencies to support, for example, the creation of textual editions of Greek and Latin texts.  The gambit at the heart of this workshop is that going digital provides a new and more exciting approach to classical philology.  Instead of focusing on individual texts, philology becomes a collaborative exercise in “big data” and “distant reading.”  Electronic editions of each text are prepared with this in mind and then enter this wider corpus to which a variety of digital tools can be applied.  At the workshop several of the larger initiatives, such as Perseus, Open Philology, and the Digital Latin Library, were discussed.  All of these projects, unlike the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae for example, are open access.  Open access is a critical part of this vision as its value is not simply its accessibility but its availability to digital analysis, revision, and reuse.

Most of the presentations dealt with practical issues dealing especially with standards and annotations: What does one do to a text (other than give free access to it) to maximize its scholarly utility?  How does one annotate not only morphology, syntax, and named entities (e.g., proper names and places) but also actions and events?  Canonical Text Services (CTS), an architecture for precise citation of digital texts, turns out to be particularly imporant, because it facilitates the linking of lines of text in one manuscript to another (thus allowing for the automated production of synoptic editions), to parts of images, and to various translations.  Tools like iAlign (being used in Leipzig) were particularly interesting in this respect.  Other presentations focused on creating treebanks, that is, something that looks like the sentence diagrams I had to do in middle school.  These can then be analyzed and compared across texts for rhetorical similarities and differences.

Another area of focus in the classics is interextuality and the tools that can reveal citing or reuse of one text by another.  One important site that shows its utility it Tesserae, which supports this kind of analysis across several Latin texts.  TRACER is also a powerful tool for Latin.  While this digital approach to classics and distant reading still has its strong critics (see, e.g., here), there is little question that these and tools like them will yield import, perhaps transformational, scholarship.

And this finally brings me to rabbinic literature.  Where do we stand in relation to the application of the digital to the classics, and where are the opportunities?  In some surprising respects, we are very much on or ahead of the curve.  Large swathes of texts already have been digitized and some (e.g., Mechon Mamre and Sefaria) are committed to an open-access policy.  The Bar-Ilan Responsa project contains a vast number of texts that are also tagged for morphology, allowing, for example, searches by lemma.  Two sites in particular, the Lieberman Institute and the Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society contain digitized manuscripts, transcriptions, and some kind of CTS architecture that links images and different transcriptions, although neither allows for fully automated open access.  One model is the  Digital Mishnah which is open-access and has many of the features noted above.

The question that occurred to me in Potsdam is how we deploy and utilize these resources to move us into the age of “big data” and to make possible the kinds of larger-scale, cross-corpus analyses that our colleagues in classics are beginning to do.  We have only just begun to think about visualizing the links between documents (as in this example from Sefaria) and, in general, applying the approach of “distant reading” to the rabbinic corpus (see, for example, the dissertation of Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky).  What are the opportunities and how do we get there?

To be transparent, I confess that I have dreams.  I am intrigued by the idea of creating digital editions of rabbinic texts.  I would like to see links between images, transcriptions, and different translations.  I would like to be able to map places and events found in this literature and to create a social network analysis of the rabbis.  Using treebanks as a new approach to form analysis could be exciting.  Further down the road, perhaps literary and formal structures of talmudic sugyot could be created at the push of a button.  What kinds of questions would these analyses allow us to answer?  What kinds of new questions would we ask?

But open-access digital editions are the first step.  These editions would ideally  use a CTS architecture and include multiple manuscript transcriptions and images; morphological, lexical, and syntactic annotation; links of words to such places as Ma’agarim and the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon; and annotations of named entities. Given what has already been done, should the various resource owners desire to cooperate, such editions might be easily and quickly produced.  Of course, any efforts to do this would have to be accompanied by a viable and sustainable financial model.

In the United States and Israel (and I suspect Europe as well), the traditional practice of “rabbinics” in secular universities has, like classical philology, is in a precarious position.  It is increasingly important for the survival of the field to make our texts relevant to larger academic concerns.  Big data and distant reading are not the only possible approaches to making rabbinic literature more relevant, but they are receiving increased attention (and funding) and offer a largely unexplored set of new research possibilities.

This is a curve we can get ahead of.  Any takers?