I am tickled to announce that my book, How the Bible Became Holy, has been released in Italian translation. It is titled, E il Signore parlo a Mose: Come la Bibbia divenne sacra. A description is here.
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The Diaspora in Berlin
Last month I gave a lecture at the Jewish Museum in Berlin as part of a program on “What Does the Diaspora Mean for Jews and Muslims?” My 30-minuteish lecture (in English) begins at minute 4:27. The other speaker’s (excellent) lecture (in German) on Islamic views follows, and the panel discussion and questions (in English and German) begin at minute 1:15:00.
My argument, in short is that even in antiquity three quite distinct notions of Jewish “Diaspora” existed, and the emergence (and acceptance, or not) of each can be tied to distinct socio-political conditions. These notions are:
- A center-periphery model, in which the Land of Israel was considered the center and was in many respects hierarchically above the periphery. This is probably the most common way in which Diaspora is viewed today;
- A center-periphery model, in which a center of Jewish learning is seen as hierarchically superior to the Land of Israel. This model is especially prominent in the Babylonian Talmud. Many Babylonian rabbis saw their own community as the center, to which those in the Land of Israel (and elsewhere) should defer;
- A trans-regional, diffuse model, in which there either is no center at all or are shifting and weak centers. This model, discussed extensively in Daniel Boyarin’s provocative book, A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora, was suggested by Philo and was probably regnant throughout the Middle Ages. The interesting feature of this model is that it promotes lateral ties between different Jewish communities rather than the hub-spoke image of the center-periphery models. It creates a relational web.
Toward the end of my lecture I wonder about whether a fourth model is emerging that largely follows my third model but has a stronger place for the modern State of Israel.
There has been, of course, an incredibly robust and diverse discussion of this issue among Zionist thinkers beginning in the nineteenth century. My goal was not to rehash those discussions but to try to look into more distant Jewish history in order to recover a range of opinions.
A more personal aside. I have traveled in Germany before and while I have felt heavily during some of these trips, I have always been impressed with both the country and its citizens, even if they seem to scowl a lot. The Germans I have met were almost always bluntly and honestly wrestled with the meaning of the Holocaust for them, and in its response to the current refugee crisis Germany has shown admirable leadership. I had never been to Berlin, though, and Berlin – well, Berlin was something different. Berlin evoked within me, more strongly than I ever would have anticipated, thoughts of Hitler and evil. Berlin carries this weight, and marks in its urban landscape not only the Holocaust but also, and perhaps more prominently, the scars of the East-West division. Most Berliners, I am sure, understandably look past these markers of their past as they go about their daily lives. For me, though, Berlin creaked under the weight of history; it is a living and breathing memorial to fascism. It was hard for me to stop thinking about death and wondering how in this place Germans so easily turned on and killed each other.
To be a Jew today, no matter where, always means to some extent wrestling with the idea of Diaspora (or center) and trying to figure out what that means, individually and communally. To be a Jew in Berlin today, though, seems to me to bring that struggle to an entirely different level.
Love Is As Strong As Death
Construction on campus caused me to detour the other day to an out of the way corner of the Green where a tower sits. I had, of course, seen this tower before, but never close up and its (very well-locked) entrance. The inscription above the door identifies it as the Carrie Tower, with the quote, “Love is as strong as death,” an excerpt from Song of Songs 8:6-7:
6 Set me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm;
for love is strong as death,
passion fierce as the grave.
Its flashes are flashes of fire,
a raging flame.
7 Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can floods drown it.
If one offered for love
all the wealth of one’s house,
it would be utterly scorned.
The tower has a story behind it. This from the Encylopedia Brunoniana:
Carrie Tower was erected in 1904, a gift of Paul Bajnotti of Turin, Italy, and a memorial to his wife, born Caroline Mathilde Brown, granddaughter of Nicholas Brown 1786, for whom the University is named, and daughter of Nicholas Brown 1811. She died in Palermo in 1892 after sixteen years of marriage to Bajnotti, who also erected a fountain in her memory in Burnside Park in Providence. Carrie Tower was designed by Guy Lowell of Boston, who was selected from a competition of well-known architects. It was built by J. W. Bishop Company on the Front Campus close to the corner of Prospect and Waterman Streets. The tower of red brick is 95 feet high, and is elaborately adorned with stonework, done under the direction of John L. Thorpe of Boston. There are festoons of fruit near the base, and at the top, above four clock faces on the sides of the tower flanked by eight panels of fruit, are in rising succession, 32 carved urns, eight capitals, four shields, and at the very top, four urns with flame. On the foundation is inscribed “Love is Strong as Death.” A strange occurrence in 1950 caused the clock to run erratically. When this was investigated, it appeared that an essential part of the clock’s mechanism had been removed, and it further appeared that this had been done purposely to call attention to the prank that had caused eight of the elaborate “beefeater” hats belonging to Corporation members to be lying on top of the tower.
There is something hauntingly beautiful about this story. A grieving, childless husband memorializes his love for his foreign wife with relatively simple monument. (An account of the couple and their ties to Brown can be found here.) The tower held a bell that rang to signal the start and end of each class. In every ring, several times a day, his love for her went out across campus, pointing both back at his loss and forward to the vitality of a new generation of students. Inexorably. Eternally.
Well, not exactly. The clock mechanisms broke and it appears a new bell was installed (or was the old one moved?) in another building, University Hall. Carrie Tower now sits without purpose, slowly crumbling, occasionally receiving an infusion of university funding to keep it from falling down.
There are many ways we can memorialize our love. We can give a building or part of one; create a fund for scholarships or research; set up a gravestone; or write a poem. Thinking about Carrie Tower made me ask my own wife how, if everything was possible and the situation unfortunately arose, she would wish me to memorialize her: A building would be nice, she said, but a scholarship fund better. I see that logic. An endowed fund keeps giving, serves a constructive purpose, and will (hopefully) not crumble. At the same time, every time I hear about this or that fund or endowed lecture, I tend to tune out; I have to struggle to try to imagine the pathos behind each one of these gifts of love, the stories behind the flat names. This week, though, I had no problem remembering Caroline Mathilde Brown and how much her Italian husband Paul Bajnatti loved her. And I appreciated the gift of this memory, 111 years after it was made.
How the Bible Became Holy Syllabus
In order to make paperback edition of the book (just released last month!) more attractive for course adaptation, I have prepared a modifiable (.docx) syllabus structured around the course. It can be downloaded here or from this page, which also contains other resources that would facilitate using the book as a teaching resource.
When the Center Does Not Hold
Centrifugal force, entropy, call it what you will, but life has a way of drifting. All those good habits and intentions slowly, subtly, but inexorably begin to crumble, like the masonry on my porch. Three times a year I usually find enough energy and mental space to step back, take stock of the widening gap between what I set out for myself and where I am, and then recalibrate: the Jewish High Holidays; the secular New Year; and the end of the academic year. This year, for a variety of reasons, I was unable to do this effectively in January and now at the end of May I find myself with a bigger gap, and a bit more work to do, than usual.
If you are reading this, you would know that one of the things that has fallen through the cracks much of this year has been updating this blog. I doubt that you’ve lost any sleep over this, but I have felt the absence. In part, this is because my posts here (at least the ones that are not self-promoting) are generated by original but not fully developed ideas that excite me, which in turn are generated by having some mental space to think them and at least some time to get them down in minimally presentable form. Both have been in short supply this year but that is not really an excuse. I enjoy writing for this blog and one of the reasons that I have not done as much as I would like is simply sloppiness and I let my daily routines dissolve in the wake of crises and deadlines.
I’ve been taking stock recently with the help of Mason Currey’s fun book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. Umberto Eco’s reflection about not being “master of my own time – there is always somebody else deciding what I should do” (p. 119) during term-time resonates. In the summer, though, academics have the incredible opportunity to be master of their own time and set to at least some degree a workable routine that enables creative thought. I’ve long been attracted to Ernest Hemingway’s routine (without the suicidal depression): rise early; write until empty until around noon; answer correspondence; and use the rest of the day to engage in some physical activity and recharge (although I might not pick the same ways of doing so as Hemingway). I aim, as I move more toward fashioning my summer routine, to build in weekly or bi-weekly times for updating this blog.
Finally, a housekeeping item. A few reviews of How the Bible Became Holy have appeared that I do not think I’ve mentioned here. In no particular order, they are (and apologies if I did not get them all and that some might be behind pay walls):
K.N. Dalton in Religion 45:2 (2015)
Chad Spigel in Review of Biblical Literature
Mark Smith in AJS Review 39:1 (2015): 164-167
James Rosenberg in the Jewish Voice and Herald May 22 (2015)
P. Davies in Theology 118:3 (May/June, 2015): 219-20 (I cannot figure out how to link to this, but the doi is 10.1177/0040571X14566762j)