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I have long been interested in ways in which modern technology can enhance what I do, as a scholar and a teacher. In the classroom I have used podcasts and wikis, and I continue to work on a digital collection of inscriptions from Israel/Palestine that date from antiquity. Only recently, however, has the surge of interest in humanities computing translated into more publicly accessible tools for interested amateurs such as me.

I have found two recent initiatives from Google particularly intriguing. One is the well reported tool by which you can analyze the use of words in Google Books, called the “Ngram Viewer.” I had always been under the impression that in earlier times “Jews” were more often called “Israelite” or “Hebrew.” It took me about 10 seconds to discover that I was wrong.

A second more powerful tool is Google Fusion Tables. This enables the merging and visualization of data sets. For reasons too complex and uninteresting, I began to wonder recently about the per capita presence of houses of worship in America today: I wanted to see a color coded map, like the one you see after elections. I suppose that one could do this, or something like it, on Fusion Tables, although I have not yet invested the time and energy I would need to actually figure out how. As with the Ngram viewer, I’m not positive yet how this powerful tool can be applied to the material I more typically work with, but I’m sure that the potential is ultimately enormous.

I just finished Albert Baumgarten’s engaging biography of Elias Bickerman,
Elias Bickerman as Historian of the Jews: A Twentieth Century Tale, which was also recently reviewed by Anthony Grafton in The Jewish Review of Books. In Baumgarten’s telling, Bickerman was a permanent refugee (who for the almost forty years that he “lived” in America actually spent half the year in European hotel rooms) never in command of English who had little but disdain for most everybody except the very small group of scholars with whom he was in dialogue. He also appears to have been what I would call a misogynist. Having read much of Bickerman’s work – which even when problematic is always smart, provocative, and worthwhile – I confess that I felt a little let down. I had hoped for a more sympathetic character.

Baumgarten argues that Bickerman attempted to create a “usable past” for the Jews of his age. Baumgarten’s case here is not entirely convincing; did Bickerman know what he was doing, and for whom was he doing it? At the same time, though, Baumgarten highlights a prominent theme in Bickerman’s work that really was, and to a lesser extent remains, an issue in contemporary Jewish life: universalism vs. particularism. Bickerman took a side. The best Jews were those who remained particularist while adapting the best of universalist values. This is perhaps why, according to Baumgarten, he found the faculty at JTS far more sympathetic to his work than his colleagues at Columbia.

The case of Bickerman raises yet again the issue of the historian’s work. Should our goal as historians be to create a “usable past”? Nearly all historians, I think, would agree that historical work should be relevant, but to whom and for what? Relevant to the scholars in one’s sub-sub-field? Relevant to a particularist community? Relevant to humanity?

Earlier in my career I was very clear about my audience: other scholars. It would be an exaggeration to say that I focused on this audience solely because it was their approval that held the key to my professional success, but it would also be disingenuous for me to say that this was not an important factor. Whatever those outside of my field, or even outside of scholarship, thought of my work – well, whatever. It would be nice if they liked it and found it useful, but they would not tenure and promote me.

I still write articles for my academic colleagues but now mostly because they are fun, not for money, promotion, or prestige. I enjoy the questions, the writing, and being part of an academic community. If my academic writings add up to a “usable past” it is certainly not a conscious effort.

On the other hand, in other writings, and my teaching, I do make a very conscious effort to address a larger audience in a way that is relevant. I want to emphasize here the distinction between relevance and the construction of a usable past. The latter is but one flavor of the former. I was attracted to the study of antiquity in large measure because I found this history – like a good book, multiplied – to be a valuable conversation partner. When I engage my sources I inevitably learn from them, not only about the past but also about the present, and myself. Good historical writing does not confirm what we think we know; it challenges us to think in new ways. A usable past is in some ways antithetical to this goal, making the past familiar so that we can appropriate it for our own ends. How dull! A history should not challenge simply for the sake of challenging (some history admittedly is boring, uncertain, and all too familiar), but good history has to bring us into a world that we don’t already know. Bickerman, despite his narrow audience, did that, and I am grateful both for his work and to Baumgarten’s for bringing his world to life.

I had the pleasure this last week of listening to a lecture by Professor Carlos Eire, of Yale University. (Full dislosure: I was a colleague of Carlos’s at University of Virginia, and in addition to finding him a supportive senior colleague, have followed his work with admiration since, particularly his award-winning Waiting for Snow in Havana.) Eire, summarizing part of his argument in A Very Brief History of Eternity, argued that prior to the Reformation, the Catholic Church made an enormous amount of money off of death. Believing that their dead ancestors needed their support in the form of donations to the Church to save their souls from purgatory, Christians gave an extraordinary amount of money to it. Eire provocatively suggested that the amount of capital was in fact so enormous that had it gone into other endeavors the history of Europe might as well been very different.

So this, in addition to some wonderful presentations that I heard from Professor Elisheva Baumgarten (Bar Ilan University) this week about Jewish fasting and other rites of penance in the Middle Ages, got me thinking about synagouges and economics today.

To what extent do synagogues today depend upon death for their vitality? Many synagogues today use the institution of Yahrzeit (saying the mourners kaddish on the anniversary of the death of a close relative) to justify their daily minyan, and then to use this fact to exhort others to support the minyan. Four times a year the prayer for the dead, Yizkor, attracts Jews to the pews. Synagogues are adorned with memorial plaques for which congregants pay significant sums of money. Synagogue bulletins regularly list the names of those who gave money in memory of their loved ones.

Let me put this question bluntly: Although no synagogue today uses the idea of purgatory to persuade Jews to give money, to what extent do they depend on the dead for their continued existence? Could synagogues survive if the many Jews who give money to them in remembrance of their dead or who came to minyan a few times a year to remember them, stopped?

Judaism, it is sometimes said, is a religion of the living, focusing on the here and now. As is well-known, many of the popular customs of Jews concerning the dead, such as recitation of the mourners kaddish, are not found in classical rabbinic literature, entering into Jewish practice in the medieval period. I do not intend this as a value judgment, but it does make me wonder whether there is a connection between the continuation of these customs and contemporary Jewish institutions.

I just presented the Larry Axel Memorial Lecture at Purdue University. The talk was entitled, “Big Givers: The Origins of Jewish Philanthropy.” The publicity paragraph reads:

Whether by naming buildings, erecting plaques, or publishing name-lists, our practice of recognizing donors is so common that we hardly notice it. This lecture will examine the origins of the practice in antiquity, paying particular attention to Jews in late antiquity. When and why did Jewish philanthropy, and the public recognition of big donors, emerge? We will consider both material and literary evidence.

Tonight Rosh HaShanah begins. It is probably safe to say that many Jews associate the holiday with two theological themes. The first, emphasized especially in children’s books and early Jewish educational settings, is the birthday of the world – the day on which God created the world. The second theme, which is far more prominent in the liturgy, is that it is a day of judgment, the day on which God will determine “who will live and who will die… who [will die] by fire and who by water” as the prayer states. Rosh HaShanah opens not only the Ten Days of Repentence, but a longer period of atonement and judgment that traditionally ends about a month later with Hoshannah Rabbah, the last day of Sukkot (Tabernacles).

It is striking, though, that neither of these themes actually appear in the Bible. In fact, Rosh HaShanah is arguably the most underdetermined major holiday in the Bible. It is a day of “remembrance and trumpeting” (Leviticus 23:24). Remembrance of what? Why trumpet? When Ezra reads the Torah to the assembly in Jerusalem and introduces the people to Rosh HaShanah, he and his levitical assistants merely comment that it is day to celebrate (Nehemiah 8:9-12). Again, why they should celebrate is left obscure.

So this leads to a natural question, or better set of them: When, where, and why did Rosh HaShanah become take on these associations? Why did it become, specifically, the “day of judgment”?

To my knowledge, there are exceedingly few references to Rosh HaShanah in the literature of the Second Temple period. There may be a germ of these themes in Abraham’s prayer found in Jubilees (12:16-21), a book written around 200 BCE. There Abraham mentions, on “the first day of the seventh month” God’s creative power and asks for God’s protection. These themes, though, are so common throughout this literature that it is hard to read much into them. There is also a very vague reference to the “day of remembrance” in the Dead Sea scrolls (4Q409 1.i.5).

Prior to the Rabbis, the first century Alexandrian Jew Philo provides the most extended discussion of this holiday. For Philo, the new year begins in Nisan and is commemorated with Passover. Our Rosh HaShanah he calls the “trumpet feast,” and focuses on the meaning of the trumpet. He offers two explanations. One is that it is a remembrance of the giving of the divine law (thus solving the problem of what it is we should remember). Second is that it is a sign of war, both real war and the internal war that comprises the human condition (Special Laws, 2.188-192). He does not connect this holiday to Yom Kippur.

So what are we then to make the of the rabbinic understanding of Rosh HaShanah as a new year for judgment (Mishnah, Rosh HaShanah 1:1-2)? Where did this come from?

In my book Creating Judaism, I argued that sometimes rituals persist shorn of meaning; succeeding generations of Jews preserve the ritual but change the meaning. I think that Philo also points in this direction. Philo starts with the single ritual that is associated with Rosh HaShanah that is mentioned in the Bible, trumpeting. To him, trumpeting meant war. From that, the fuller meaning of the holiday followed.

I want to suggest – and this is admittedly pure speculation as I am writing this in order to procrastinate from my real work and don’t have time to track this down – that the Rabbis had a different association with the trumpet (or shofar), and thus changed their understanding of the holiday accordingly. According to the Rabbis, the shofar is sounded at dangerous times to invoke God’s judgment for good. Maybe the trumpet was by that time associated with civil legal proceedings; it certainly was associated with the Roman emperor. This new association of the shofar with judgment thus led to revaluing the holiday, and moving it toward a strong association with judgment, as it also got drawn into the strong gravitational force of Yom Kippur.

Perhaps a bit of stretch, but if you have a better idea I’d be delighted to hear it!