I have just added two new syllabi to my “Teaching” page. Both are to classes that I will be teaching this fall: “Religion and Sexuality” and “Religion in the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
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Fanatics
We need fanatics. By keeping true to their ideological positions – whether by threatening to bring down the modern global financial markets or by banning vegetables for consumption because they contain microscopic bugs – they remind us of the power and importance of their ideas. Fanatics are very good as serving as embodied and visible reminders of the power of ideas. In their unbending idealism, however, they are not as good as leaders or dinner companions.
The rabbis of antiquity struggled with the fine line between fanaticism and a reasoned commitment that required negotiation with unpleasant material realities. In the well-known story of the destruction of the Second Temple, the Talmud ambivalently blames a Rabbi Zechariah ben Avkulus for provoking the Romans by not offering their sacrifices; the rabbis were willing to let slide a small blemish on the animal (B. Gittin 56a). Later in the same passage a radical opinion of Rabbi Akiva, apparently supporting armed resistance to the Romans, is reported but marginalized. Elsewhere, Pinhas is warily admired and condemned at the same time. The rabbis almost guiltily acknowledge the fanatical position as pure, but unworkable.
I recently came across a striking Talmudic legal passage that exemplifies this kind of reasoning. According to an obscure and slightly uncomfortable Mishnah, one “may not stable an animal in the inn of ‘idol worshippers’ because we suspect them of bestiality.” This immediately provokes a long discussion in the Talmud about whether non-Jews really should be assumed to engage in bestiality whenever given the chance. This in turn leads to a discussion of the “red heifer,” which is rendered impure if it was engaged in bestiality. If this is true, though, what about its mother? Shouldn’t we worry about its mother, and its mother’s mother, all the way back? After all, if one of them had been.. well, you know… then they should all be unfit to serve as red heifers. “To this whole degree, we are not worried,” the Talmud finally concludes (B. Avodah Zara 24a). We do not need to inquire back into the lineage of the animal. What we see is enough.
We don’t need the Talmud to highlight the tensions inherent in fanaticism. What is interesting about these rabbinic reflections is that in a sense the rabbis really were fanatics. Maybe better, a good number of them much of the time wanted to be fanatics; they scorned compromise and frequently looked askance at those who did not devote their lives to Torah study. But at the same time they realized the limits of their thinking. Fanaticism might feel good, but in reality it doesn’t work so well in practice.
A New Home
It has taken me some time, but I finally have managed to create a site that consolidates my blog, my personal website, and my site devoted to resources for my book, Creating Judaism. I have imported past blog entries, a procedure that I have discovered makes a few of them look a bit funny. Future posts should have a smoother look. In the meantime, though, please update your links if necessary, and welcome.
Apocalypse, One of These Days
I had the good fortune of recently attending “The Enoch Seminar,” which this year was devoted to study of the books of 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra. These two books are both thought to originate in first or second century Palestine, written in Hebrew by Jews. Both contain a series of visions, given by the angels (or God) to the protagonist, in both cases a scribal seer. (Baruch is known from the Bible as Jeremiah’s scribe, and in the biblical book named after him, Ezra too is described as a scribe. Neither, in their biblical context, receive visions.) Some of these visions, which the angel interprets, have to do with the end of time.
One session of the seminar was focused directly on apocalypticism in these books. The session took place at the Catholic University in Milan and was unlike any other academic session I had attended. It took me some minutes to figure out that the charge to the speakers was not only to recover the apocalyptic elements in the ancient texts, but also to reflect on apocalypticism as an ecumenical category. That is, could apocalypticism bridge Judaism and Christianity?
Now, my first reaction to this realization was disbelief. Leaving aside my discomfort at mixing ecumenical activities into academic contexts, it was hard for me to see apocalypticism as a unifying force. After all, wasn’t apocalypticism all about last days of judgment and punishment for those who didn’t accept the “true” deity during their lifetimes? Hasn’t the primary difference between Jews and Christians been precisely in the closely related issue of redemption, in which Christians understand the world as already redeemed by Christ and Jews still await the world’s redemption? Couldn’t there be better places to look for theological dialogue between Jews and Christians?
Yet as the session progressed, I found my attitude shifting. Of course there are stark differences between Jewish and Christian notions of apocalypticism, and Lawrence Schiffman correctly warned against simply trying to find a broad, common rubric into which to collapse them both. But the speakers underscored that under both, maybe all, notions of apocalypticism is hope, perhaps with a healthy dose of fear. Apocalypticism is less a religious phenomenon than a human one, in which we all share a hope for a better future. While it was not discussed by the panel, I think that this extends beyond the namby pamby banal belief in progress and calls to act in bettering the world. There is something deeply psychological here. We can approach the future with hope, but there is no denying the trepidation that contemplation of the future also brings; apocalypticism is as much a feeling as an idea. In very human terms, 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra, these largely forgotten ancient texts, may be on to something big.
Through the Lens of "Judeo-Christian"
The phrase “Judeo-Christian” – as in, “America is based on Judeo-Christian values” – is a strange beast. Given the not insignificant and often fatal tension between Jews and Christians over 2,000 years over matters of doctrine and belief, what does it mean to meld Judaism and Christianity into a common concept? When and why would one do this?
According to Adam Kirsch in his recent review in Tablet Magazine, this is precisely the question that Kevin M. Schultz tries to answer in his book, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held America to Its Protestant Promise (Oxford). The answer Schultz supplies, according to Kirsch (I have not yet seen the book), is quite simple: “The change came about in the 1930s and 1940s, thanks primarily to the concerted effort of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, a lobbying and educational group founded in 1927.” Schultz tells the story of the NCCJ and its (largely successful) mission to forge a common language in America between Jews, Catholics, and Protestants. The argument is certainly plausible, particularly during World War II and the post-war period. It fits neatly into the narrative of the development of the multi-cultural melting pot that was America in the post-war period.
A very quick look at the quantitative data for the use of the term “Judeo-Christian” in all English books contained by Google from 1890-1900, though, at least suggests a more complex story. Take a look at the plot produced by the Google Ngram Viewer, available here (the picture above is a thumbnail). The first use of the term appears around 1900 and lasts about five years. This would accord with the coining of the term and a brief period of popularity. The second bump, of about the same scale, occurs from about 1945-1960 (with a weird dip in the middle) – this is the story that Schultz tells. To my mind, though, the real story occurs post-1960, when the slope of the curve increases dramatically. The NCCJ’s work may have been reflected in all kinds of ways, but not really in published discourse.
The dramatic increase in the use of “Judeo-Christian” seems to buck against the replacement in America of the image of the “melting pot” with that of “multiculturalism” or the “mosaic” as the governing metaphor in America of cultural relationships. (This is dramatically illustrated here.) Jews and Christians – all of them – are now lumped into one category, perhaps in recent years, as Kirsch might suggest (I am stretching his words here) to contrast America with Islamic civilization or the like – and this is before 9/11.
Kirsch, and Schultz in his telling, seem to like the concept of “Judeo-Christian”, which shows a nice, benevolent ecumenicalism. Others, such as David Novak and Jon Levenson, have emphasized its negative side: it waters down Jewish and Christian distinctiveness into a pool of anodyne platitudes. Personally, the term makes me uneasy for similar reasons. Be that as it may, though, there is a rich and complex cultural history to be told through the lens of the phrase “Judeo-Christian.”