Michael L. Satlow

Then and Now

religion

Jewish Time in Early Nineteenth Century America

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lopez

A new article of mine just appeared in the American Jewish Archives Journal.

Abstract:

Jewish Time in Early-Nineteenth-Century America: 1–29

In 1806, a clerk in Newport, Rhode Island, by the name of Moses Lopez published the first free-standing Jewish calendar in the Americas. In this article, Satlow investigates both the historical context in which this calendar was produced and how American Jews used it in the nineteenth century. Through the lens of Lopez’s calendar and its use, we can thus catch a glimpse of how the American Jewish community used material objects to form and reinforce its self-identity.

A link to the Journal is here, and a full PDF is here..

How to Write a Dissertation Prospectus

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I have read countless dissertation proposals and few of them are, well, good.  That’s a shame, and not only because I often find the experience aggravating.  After all the hoops of courses, languages, and exams that you’ve jumped through, the dissertation proposal is your first real introduction to academia.  The dissertation proposal not only lays the groundwork for an effective dissertation completed in a timely fashion, but also introduces you to the genre of the book proposal, of which you will hopefully write many more throughout your career.

There are many, many books and essays devoted to writing a dissertation proposal.  So many that it would be relatively easy to spend months simply reading them rather than getting on with your own actual writing and research.  They can be useful, and for some they help alleviate anxiety, but the basics of proposal writing are, in the end, rather simple.

The most important thing to remember about a proposal is that it is a “specification document.”  It is a road map for how you will be spending your time over the next year or two.  It thus almost never needs to be more than about 15 pages, double spaced, including bibliography.  It is not a place for you to hone your creative writing skills.  It is not a place to prove that you have done all the reading for your preliminary exams (from which you might still be recovering) or to prove that you are the smartest person in the program with jargon or what not.  It is certainly not the place to repeat all kinds of information that your professors already know.  These are the most common mistakes that I see; many students think that this is a far more complicated and involved document than it really should be.  It should be written so that anybody in your department can flip through it and in no more than about ten minutes have a good sense of what you are doing.

The most important part of the document, by far, is the question that your dissertation is going to try to answer.  Nobody expects you to have an answer yet, although you may have a good sense already of the argument you think you want to make.  By this stage, though, you need to be able to articulate a clear and precise question and to convey succinctly why it is an important question.  This question – which should have a question mark – you should print and paste to the top of your computer.  This is your question, and everything you will be doing from now until you complete your dissertation should be directed toward answering it.

Next you need to specify your approach to the question.  This really involves three parts.  If appropriate, will you use a different theoretical framework from those who have approached the question before?  What are your sources – are any of them newly used to answer this question?  What is your method?

That’s about it.  I often like to see a short chapter outline, timetable, and select bibliography at the end.  The bibliography should be no more than two pages and include only those works with which you will be most directly in dialogue.

Your advisor’s primary job through this stage is to help you to articulate a good question.  A good question is one that: (1) is significant for the discipline; (2) can be answered with the agreed-upon methods and sources in the agreed-upon time.   If others read it, they too really just want to know the answer to two questions: Does this plan have an excellent chance of yielding a dissertation?  Is the question being answered significant enough to warrant a dissertation?

The prospectus will also serve as the basis for future grant proposals and job letters, most of these addressed to those outside of your field.  The sooner that you can explain what you are doing succinctly in a way that “ordinary” readers think is interesting, the better.  You might try your parents as readers of your prospectus to see if you succeeded.

There are no tricks to prospectus writing.  It is a relatively straight-forward process designed to yield a relatively straight-forward document.

Now get to work.

Note:  You know you should never take medical, financial, professional, or spiritual advice from random websites.  So too here, please consult your advisor or Director of Graduate Studies before actually using any of the advice offered here!

The Self and Science

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Several years ago I wrote an article, “‘And on the Earth You Shall Sleep’”: Talmud Torah and Rabbinic Asceticism” (Journal of Religion 83 [2003]: 204-225).  In that article, I compared rabbinic “asceticism” (which I broadly define as a set of self-disciplinary practices and training of the self) to similar techniques employed by contemporary Greco-Roman philosophers (as well as early Christians).  For both rabbis and philosophers, he entire point of these “ascetic” practices was to train or discipline the self.  My own essay builds upon the studies of Pierre Hadot, who argued that the function of the Stoic exercises performed by Marcus Aurelius and others was precisely to cultivate the virtue of self-discipline, which in turn is a prerequisite for knowledge.   The application of this insight to the rabbis was further extended by both Jonathan Schofer and Eliezer Diamond.  Self-discipline, for these ancients, was not a single act but a state of being.

Earlier this week I was pleasantly surprised to hear a story on the radio about the latest scientific research on willpower.  We have, it turns out, a single source of willpower.  Every time we resist a temptation – that is, exercise our willpower – we deplete our store.  And yet, like exercising a muscle, as we fatigue it we also strengthen it.  By engaging in acts of self-discipline we strengthen our willpower.  The piece went on to note that the practice of religion helps to “build up that self-control.”

Marcus Aurelius and the early rabbis may not have had access to controlled studies, but they were clearly onto something!

Between Us and Them

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Praised be You, YHVH, our god, king of the universe, who has not made me a gentile;

Praised be You, YHVH, our god, king of the universe, who has not made me a slave;

Praised be You, YHVH, our god, king of the universe, who has not made me a woman

These three lines are recited daily as part of the series of blessings found at the beginning of the traditional Jewish morning liturgy.  They have also been extensively discussed.  Scholars have long noted the similarity of this triad to a similar daily thanksgiving attributed to the Greek philosopher Thales.  Over the past century liberal Jews have wrestled with, and in most cases abandoned, these three blessings; they are too at odds with modern sensibilities.

These three blessings are but a single, relatively insignificant reflection of the binary thinking of ancient rabbis, which in turn reflect much much wider cultural assumptions.  You are a “this” or a “that.”  A man or a woman.  One of us or one of them.  For the sectarians who wrote the Dead Sea scrolls, you (if a man) were a “son of light” or a “son of darkness.”  No “sons of beige” lived at Qumran.

In a funny way, we have not progressed all that far from this way of binary thinking.  In most of our thinking and our forms, people are male or female; white or “ethnic”; Democrat or Republican.  Sometimes we allow for other boxes as well, but these are often found on the spectrum defined by two poles that we define as opposites.

There is an article in a recent New Yorker describing a thought experiment offered by the philosopher Derek Parfit.  Parfit asks us to imagine if we were replaced, cell by cell, with those of Greta Garbo.  At the beginning of the process, we are clearly us, and at the end we are clearly Greta Garbo.  But what about the middle?  Who are we?

Parfit’s thought experiment is itself based on a spectrum anchored by a binary pair.  But it reopens an old philosophical problem of the “self,” creating an opportunity for imagining selves – us and others – much more fluidly.

Here is another thought experiment: what if we refused to classify others or even ourselves in terms of checkable identities?  How would our self-understanding change?  On the one hand, it is easy to subscribe to the idea that we should recognize people in all of their unique, idiosyncratic glory.  On the other, go ahead and try it.  It is not at all easy to conceive of ourselves, to articulate our identities, without using blunt, pre-supplied categories.

Language thus becomes an agent of constraint, creating and limiting the very terms of our self, and different languages offer different limitations and opportunities for self-understanding.  Am I the same in all languages?  If not, who am I?