True Ancestor

Jewgenics, Part II: Genes, Identity, History -- and a compelling book on the subject

Cross-posted on Jews By Choice

In a previous post, I've explored the ideas behind a book that looks at the cross-currents of genes, identity and values and tries to answer the question, "Who is a Jew?"

The answer, according to that post, and the book discussed therein, was "almost everyone." A new and perhaps even more compelling book on the subject is Jacob's Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History.

The book -- beautifully reviewed by Jerome Groopman in a recent issue of the New Republic --  views the complexities of identity, and the blurred and often-buried history of Jewish identity specifically, through a scientific lens. Genetic research indicates that there is a clear continuity in genetic makeup amongst the descendents of the Cohanim, the priestly tribe of Israelites, but Groopman -- and, through him, the book's author, David Goldstein -- note that the urge to use science to ratify belonging leads us along dark paths down which we've been dragged before. While genetic research does point to common strands (literally) of experience, Goldstein notes that answers to questions of belonging are as complex as the genetic research that gives rise to them.

In our thirst for answers and connections, and in the profusion of our Google-ized sources, we often seize on the most available answers: they satisfy us without making us work too hard. Media distillations of the implications of genetic research routinely distort the overarching fact that genes don't trump history. The sequence of events, the narrative that captures those events and the environment in which both are produced are even more complex than the microsatellite markers embedded in the Y chromosomes of descendents of Aaron. People who have chosen Judaism -- who have learned it, practiced it, embraced it, lived it -- are Jews.

Genetic history, says Goldstein, "is both more and less significant than it is depicted in popular accounts." Science affirms history's complexity; history shouts down the determinism that springs from simplistic proclamations, and nefarious ambitions, on the subject.

"The great and beautiful irony," Groopman says in his review, "is that this ancient assessment of position and potential in society, this hostility to biological determinism and respect for free human choice and its consequences, is also at the core of modernity. It is refreshing to have this truth now affirmed, and in this context, by a geneticist." 

In plainer terms, the answer to the question, "Who is a Jew?," is:

"Anyone who really, truly wants to be."

(h/t: Me True Ann-Sister)

--T.A.

Mind-blowing Heschel Quote of the Day

"The statement 'God is' is an understatement."
                             -- God in Search of Man

(This book is amazing, but very hard to read, because each sentence is a book.)

--T.A.

The Righteous Indignation of the Jewish Left

At the invitation of Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, the editor who published my piece in Zeek, I attended a talk and author event yesterday in the mezzanine meeting room of a Gold Coast apartment building on Chicago's Near North Side.

The location was somewhat ironic, as the occasion was the publication of Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice, which, according to Publishers Weekly, "seek[s] to provide a set of intellectual and spiritual resources to encourage a sophisticated conversation about Judaism, social justice and environmental responsibility." Ms. Kaiser (whose parents hosted the event), Rabbi Or Rose and Margie Klein edited the book and solicited the contributions, which show Judaism's contemporary, left-leaning edge as being committed to both the social justice and spiritual aspects of the concept of Tikkun Olam, or repairing the world.

Today's young, progressive Jews are adamant that world-healing happens in increments, through very specific, very hard work; they believe they, and we all, have the tools and the will to make significant progress against prevailing inequity and injustice; and they believe that the practice of Judaism, in all its various forms, by all its diverse adherents, has an important role to play in that work.

I probably heard the phrase "grass-roots coalition" at least 50 times, but aside from that, the event was inspiring. I had to admit that, whether or not I shared these peoples' views (and I did roughly half the time), I admired their moxie, their organizational smarts and the ideas represented in the few pages I had the chance to read in their book (example: did you know that the phrase Tikkun ha-Olam first appeared in the Mishnah, circa 200 C.E.? And did you know that it had primarily to do with maintaining an almost karmic balance among diverse alliances, interests and relationships within society?).

This is an important book, because it shows the direction being taken by the next generation of Jewish leaders. They're young and smart, and they're not inclined to whine and hand-wring in advance of this election. They're already planning a reprease of "Operation Bubbie," in which they'll be taking elderly voters to the polls in the swing state of Florida during the November election.

The book addresses the pressing issues of our imbalanced world from a progressive Jewish perspective. Can't be all bad.

--T.A.

The Amba-Anchoress Book-Meme

Me True Ann-Sister tagged me to participate in this meme, via the Anchoress.

The instructions are:

1. Pick up the nearest book ( of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

The nearest shelf to my computer has a collection of Buddhist and Jewish texts that are all at arms' length. The biggest one, and the one directly to my left, was Jeffrey Hopkins' gigantic tome, Meditation on Emptiness. Hilariously, page 123 of this 1,017-page book ends after three sentences.

Directly next to it is The Emptiness of Emptiness, C.W. Huntington, Jr.'s introduction to the early Indian Madhyamika philosophy. Here are the meme-required sentences:

It is an axiomatic principle of Candrakirti's text, and of all Madhyamika philosophy, that through immediate and uninterrupted awareness of the emptiness or "suchness" of everyday experience the bodhisattva finds liberation from suffering now -- in this life and in this world. The bodhisattva is a being who has awakened to the emptiness of all things, and what is called the thought of awakening is the growing  non-inferential awareness of this profound dimension of freedom hidden in the inescapable web of our natural interpretations and associated observational languages. A bodhisattva recognizes that the objects and beings populating the world, and the concepts and percepts [my note: it is percepts, not "precepts"] through which they and all possible experience take shape, do not possess self-contained meaning or structure, and that everyday life is simply the totality of relations obtaining between these empty dichotomies.

Whew.

I'm now supposed to tag five people. Not sure if there are five bloggers who stop by regularly, but here goes:

1. Charles Martin
2. Alison Bolen
3. Avi Unger, founder of Jews By Choice
4. Seth Chalmer
5. Leah of Accidentally Jewish

Have fun!

--T.A.

I read "The Omnivore's Dilemma," so I'm a weirdo.

I've had two conversations with separate friends -- successful, intelligent, warm-hearted friends -- who cannot understand why I bothered, with all the books out there, to read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.

I find this even more troubling than the book itself, which takes a deep but clear-eyed look at the dysfunction of our industrial-based food system and its ominous deficiencies. The reaction of my friends is troubling because it is evidence of the author's conention that as Americans, we pay more attention to what kind of cars we drive than to what we put in our bodies.

It's true that the book is a rather extreme look at how our food chain has been twisted beyond recognition by our dependence on (and chronic overproduction of) corn, chemical fertilizers and monoculture. But it's also true that this way of producing food is at the very heart of our mental, physical and spritual malnutrition. We believe we can and should have whatever we want, whenever we want it. And we make it so, at great personal cost to ourselves and our environment.

Pollan is a very fine writer, and he's too smart to be dogmatic or doctrinaire. And he's learned more about food than you or I will ever know, so it's worth paying attention to him.

"Who is this guy?," one friend asked when I described the book, "Marx and Engels?!"

Uh ... no, I said, he's just a guy who thinks we ought to know, really know, where our food comes from.

"Why?," my friend shot back. "Are grocery chains evil? What should we do about it? Go out and forage for everything?"

No, I said, not necessarily. Although you'd learn a lot about your food if you did.

"Yeah, but you know what?," my friend sad, "I don't want to learn about my food. For thousands of generations, my ancestors could think of little else. Now that we're freed from that particular form of mental slavery, we can study, we can think, we can enjoy our relationships; we can work out and stay physically healthy. We can spend more time helping people who need help."

Well, we'd be a lot healthier if we didn't grow plants and animals the way we're growing them now, I said. But this particular friend is a cardiologist, and this was his opening to hold forth about how we have so much more heart disease now largely because we're living longer, and how we have more tools at our disposal to stay healthy than humankind has ever enjoyed.

Another friend, a stay-at-home mom whose husband works in her family's very successful business, could not believe I'd spend a week on a beach in Mexico reading a downer of a book about how awful contemporary agriculture can be, and about a guy who wants to learn about food so he goes out and kills, dresses, cooks and eats a wild pig. Eww. I told her I couldn't find my back issues of People.

Pollan does his homework in this book, and he shows how the monocultural practice of agriculture is not only unsustainable but also not particularly healthy. He finds and spends time working at farms  -- large, organic farms -- at which farmers rotate crops and livestock so that one's waste is another's nourishment, and the whole environment is the better for it. He slaughters chickens at one of these farms, and he's horrified by it. Then he spends a long chapter in the book deeply but openly pondering whether vegetarianism is the only morally defensible eating philosophy (he winds up deciding that we are meant, on the whole, to be carnivores, and that many of our healthiest landscapes and communities depend at least in part on the grazing of livestock).

We consume so much, and we consume so much fossil fuel in order to grow, harvest, transport and prepare so many of our foods, that we owe it to ourselves to be very educated on and mindful of the origins of our food. The Omnivore's Dilemma will get you most of the way there.

--T.A.

Orthodoxy and Meditation: Having a go at at the Jewish Learning Exchange

Last night, the main hall at the Jewish Learning Exchange in London was packed with people, probably more than 200, to hear Rabbi Tatz and me speak about Letters to a Buddhist Jew, our experience of working on it together, and my particular, and peculiar, spiritual path.

To my delight, Oldest Daughter was in attendance as well. She's in the final weeks of a semester at King's College here in London, and had never heard me speak about the book or my own spiritual odyssey before.

The audience was very attentive, very polite and asked very intelligent questions, as have all the groups I've spoken to here. A couple of people approached me afterwards who were full of vitriol about Orthodox Judaism, and who were disappointed because they felt I was too much of an apologist for Orthodoxy. While I made clear (I hope) that I'm not Orthodox, I also tried to emphasize that Orthodox Judaism is a storehouse of incredible wisdom. Most Orthodox Jewish practice has, however, become cerebral and exclusive, and many Jews don't feel compelled to become part of that, or even investigate it.

Nonetheless, I told one gentleman who was disappointed in me that, as Franz Rosenzweig said, Judaism is like a landscape painting: just as there are many ways of the eye to enter a landscape, there are innumerable ways for a person to explore Judaism and to find meaning in it. I also tried to say to this guy, reasonable and polite as he was, that his expectations were not my problem.

Today I'll engage in Round 2 of a lively discussion with Rabbi Aaron (Aubrey) Hersh, who is, if you'll pardon the expression, hell-bent on making me an Orthodox Jew. I guess I've been too influenced by Zen to find his efforts either appealing or insulting. I am fascinated by people who are certain they possess the Truth, and Rabbi Hersh is one of those.

There is a truth beyond logic that the original Rabbis understood, but that Judaism today is in peril of losing, and which Orthodoxy has all but lost. Rabbi Hersh has tried to impress upon me that the tenets and historical facts undergirding Orthodox Judaism are "True," and asks me for my refutation. My answer to him is that light is both wave and particle. That there is such a thing as the sound of one hand clapping. And that the true/false dichotomy isn't up to the task of grasping or communicating the paradoxical nature of our existence (there's a self, there is no self).

I got the entire room to engage in a 3-minute, silent objectless meditation. No one in attendance could remember so many observant Jews, in one place, being so quiet for so long. I said this experience was nothing but the experience of existing, a miraculous and paradoxical movement called "life" that must be contemplated, simply and silently, to open us to greater truth and a richer experience of being alive.

Many in the audience at JLE last night expressed a palpable thirst for learning to meditate in a Jewish context, and Rabbi Tatz admitted that Jewish meditation is a valid practice and that it can be taught. People asked why the JLE doesn't teach it; the answer, between the lines, seemed to be that it is not something that this generation of rabbis has learned or practiced.

I probably was the first non-Orthodox presenter at JLE. That was an honor that I hope they'll extend to others, who are seeking in Judaism what is there in rich but neglected veins of the tradition.

--T.A.

Author Andrew Keen to bloggers: Shut the hell up

For some reason, posting on this blog has recently felt like an actor's nightmare. I feel as if I'm dancing around naked (not a pretty sight, I assure you) in front of a sound-proof, one-way mirror, and that legions on the other side are either snorting in disgust or, more likely, not paying attention.

Last night, Andrew Keen's new book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture, was discussed on the News Hour, and the author -- an erudite, irritated looking Brit -- was interviewed on the show.

His point seemed to be that we are all making too much noise, blathering on about our opinions with decreasing knowledge and increasing incivility. We're coalescing into oblasts of opinion, nuking others who don't agree with us, and in the process undermining civil discourse in larger or more traditional media venues that serve as the backbone of a democratic society.

Because we are all transformed into experts through the "radical democratization" of the Internet, we are losing the ability to listen and learn. Keen laments the death of expertise, fearing that it creates a din in the marketplace of ideas that drowns the most learned in the wrath of the loudest.

Becoming a doctor, a lawyer, a musician, a journalist, or an engineer requires a significant investment of one’s life in education and training, countless auditions or entrance and certifying excims, and commitment to a career of hard work and long hours. A professional writer spends years mastering or refining his or her craft in an effort to be recognized by a seasoned universe of editors, agents, critics, and consumers, as someone worth reading and paying attention to. Those in the movie industry submit to long hours, harried schedules, and insane pressure to create a product that will generate profit in a business in which expenses are high and hits are unpredictable. Can the cult of the noble amateur really expect to bypass all this and do a better job?

(His examples are revealing: he seems as concerned with losing his place as a writer and a font of knowledge as he is of YouTube swamping 20th Century Fox.)

Well, that's enough about Andrew Keen. Now, it's time for my opinion.

I can attest to the fact that blogging has created new relationships and new kinds of communities that don't replace, but that are also in no way inferior to, the traditional social or meritocratic circles that the author wistfully mentions. These communities coalesce around ideas, and voices, and values that can affect the world -- have affected my world -- for the better.

Keen acknowledges this, but thinks that the Web has become about chatter instead of change. When asked what he proposes to change, or what he wishes we would change in his interview last night, he said something like this: "I would ask that the 70 million bloggers in this country, when next sitting down at their computer, would honestly ask themselves, 'Does the world really need to know what I had for breakfast this morning?'"

Expertise is different from popularity, the author says. However, I would staunchly defend the expertise of Danny Miller or me True Ann-Sister: by virtue of their distinct kinds of omnivorous curiosity, they attract readers, divulge knowledge, explore new ideas, and participate in debates of their own creation with a depth to which a traditional expert would probably not condescend.

Unfortunately, as the author points out, civility is often trashed by the cloak of anonymity, and listening -- deeply, patiently taking in an author's point -- can die in a dumpster full of vituperative comment and libelous screed. Which is kind of fun -- like watching a train derail in slow motion.

But that's enough about me. What do you think of me?

--T.A.

The Ancient Jewish View of Jesus

Me True Ann-Sister sent me a link to an over-long review of Jesus in the Talmud by Peter Schafer. It's an intriguing -- and I'm sure, for many -- troubling book about the early development of the Jewish view of Jesus, as propounded in the Babylonian Talmud.

The book seems to show clearly why Jewish leaders in Babylonia felt they could, and had to, denounce Jesus as a fraud. While their relative security and prosperity in Babylonia made them confident in their safety, that remove also created some urgency to denounce claims that Jesus was the Messiah. The rabbis felt it was necessary to denounce Jesus as a fraud and a criminal who deserved his fate -- but they didn't foresee how this stance helped to stoke the fires of anti-Semitism for centuries to come. Jesus in the Talmud also shows that the rabbis of the time went to some lengths to read and understand what the Gospels -- and why they deemed them a profound threat to Judaism.

While the early Jewish view of Jesus is interesting, even more intriguing is what you might loosely call "scholarship" about Jesus' lost years, and how he might have spent them in India, becoming influenced by spiritual traditions there and, in turn, influencing them. (Both links feature an illustration that was the cover a book on the subject by Elizabeth Clare Prophet.)

Schafer's book seems to be an earnest attempt to get at the roots of what we can actually know about how the Jewish view of Jesus was formed.

Research like Schafer's already seems to be leading toward a clearer understanding of two paths diverging, which in this day and age can only be a good thing.

--T.A.

The Emergent Rabbi

Rabbi David Nelson is an unusual man. An avid reader, and yet legally blind; a very intellectual and yet very spiritual man; a Reform rabbi who until recently has seen God as a metaphor for the human effort to constantly rise above appetite and circumstance toward greater understanding and holiness.

He spoke yesterday at this synagogue where both rabbis are friends of mine (Rabbi Kedar from life in the 'burbs, Rabbi Linder from college). He also led the morning service, complete with his guitar, and his glasses, which were only useful if he held his reading so that it was literally touching his nose.

Rabbi Nelson is to me the archetype of the kind of spiritual exploration that Rabbi Marc Gellman talks about in this excellent piece (which helped occasion a guest post at Ambivablog that now has 119 comments and counting): he approaches God not as some truth to be propounded, but as a question that needs continual reframing or a hypothesis that begs for constant testing. Rabbi Nelson is an avid amateur scientist, and his book, Judaism, Physics and God: Searching for Sacred Metaphors in a Post-Einstein World, is an exploration of how we might see God in light of emerging scientific knowledge and discipline.

He points out that metaphors aren't just grade-school symbols, and sacred metaphors aren't just myths. He believes metaphor contains and points to aspects of higher being, but until recently he saw higher being as a path for Humankind to tread, not an All-Knowing Consciousness with Whom we could enter into relationship.

However, Rabbi Nelson's quest for knowledge has led him from seeing God as a composite metaphor to something much more immediate and, for lack of a better word, real. Rabbi Nelson's latest project is to understand Emergence Theory, and specifically Downward Causation, and to begin to apply those ideas to Jewish text. The best way to describe Emergence Theory and Downward Caustion would be to say that simple systems and interactions can give rise to more complex ones, which then in turn can interact with and add increasing complexity to the systems out of which they arose. The Internet is probably the most obvious example of this. A termite cathedral is another good example (But you should probably look at the links above instead of taking my word for it).

And when it comes to Emergence, God may be the best example of all.

"Do you mean," I asked Rabbi Nelson at dinner last night, "that until you began exploring Emergence Theory and Downward Causation, that you saw God as a metaphorical construct?"

"That's right," Rabbi Nelson admitted.

"And now, Emergent Theory is leading you to see God as something more real, more present?"

"Yes," Rabbi Nelson said. "Emergence would suggest to me that we created God because God needs us."

Think about that one. We created God because God needs us.

Note that he's not saying we created the idea of God. He's exploring the possibility that God literally arose out of us, and led us, or is leading us, toward possibilities and evolutionary pathways which we would otherwise not have even glimpsed.

Is this just a fancy form of Intelligent Design? Or is this one edge of the multi-dimensional reality we're only beginning to apprehend?

I'm looking forward to his next book, which will pick up where Judaism, Physics and God left off.

--T.A.

Religious Scientists I Have Known (or read)

My co-author on Letters to a Buddhist Jew, Rabbi Dr. Akiva Tatz, is an MD, a medical ethicist, and an ultra-Orthodox Jew. In that regard, he bears a passing resemblance to Moses Maimonides, aka the "Rambam," who was a physician to the royal court in Egypt in the 12th century. While history hasn't yet judged the merits of Rabbi Tatz, it views Maimonides as perhaps the towering figure in the interpretation and propagation of rabbinic Judaism; the keystone in the bridge between the Second Temple period and the Medieval period and beyond.

Rabbi Tatz doesn't hesitate to use medical and scientific fact and imagery in support of Torah law and rabbinic interpretation thereof. Nor does the Rambam, thought to be the greatest physician of his day.

Here's Rabbi Tatz, from p. 75 of our book:

The Torah idea is that in any organic system, all things that comprise that system unfold from an ultimately simple yet multipotent root. In the conception of a child, for example, the first moment contains all; in that moment of fusing of genes, all that will unfold is coded. The process thereafter is only a revelation of what the first moment held. Each moment unfolds from the previous moment, reveals it, and in itself holds the next and the root of all the rest, until finally the entire sequence has been revealed when the last moment brings to full revelation what was deepest in the first.

Compressed in all beginnings is totality. At the stage of conception, the most minute of changes may have global consequences. That is the nature of reality; source contains all, source is compressed essence.

Here is the Rambam, from his Mishneh Torah:

Do you not see the following fact? God, may His mention be exalted, wished us to be perfected and the state of our societies to be improved by His laws regarding actions. Now this can come about only after the adoption of intellectual beliefs, the first of which being His apprehension, may He be exalted, according to our capacity. This, in its turn, cannot come about except through divine science, and this divine science cannot come about except after a study of natural science. This is so since natural science borders on divine science, and its study precedes that of divine science in time.

I shared this with me True Ann-Sister today, and here's what she said:

I kind of feel like all the mitzvot and little behavioral rules are along the lines of "the devil finds work for idle hands."  Structure people's every moment with tasks consecrated to God and designed to remind them of the gratitude they owe to God for everything they have. Left to their own devices, they'll only go astray.

Of course, Amba had hit the nail on the head. Here's Maimonides on that very subject:

Know that all the practices of the worship, such as reading the Torah, prayer, and the performance of the other commandments, have only the end of training you to occupy yourself with His commandments, may He be exalted, and not with that which is other than He.

Amba goes on:

And you can't deny, there's some truth to that.  Some.  But Jews keep busting out of it and going astray because (among other less savory reasons) it keeps their creativity on too short a leash and in too narrow a chute.  They want to play more in the open, which entails the danger of replacing God with yourself, but which also might be a kind of daring God is rooting for.  Go figure.

Like every tradition, it starts out in an eruption of daring and then cools over the centuries into something phobically conservative, renewed periodically by outbreaks of lava like Hasidism.  (A volcano is a really interesting analogy for a religion.  After the original upheaval, the mountain is pretty permanently there, but every once in a while it erupts again and changes.  But it forms around a channel from the molten core of the universe, so you can count on it being a site of periodic action.  Funny they used to worship volcanoes.)

To which I said:

Which may be one example of why Maimonides said you had to study natural science: you'd see the extent to which the body, the mind, the entire Universe adhere to strict rules and yet constantly remake and renew themselves. The Source of these strict rules is pointed to by every action and reaction, and yet cannot be fully known. Like a solar eclipse, you can see its effects and representations, but you can't look right at it without getting really f***ed up. Or worse.

Objectively speaking, this exquisite structure is not readily visible in the Torah, which on the surface is a tapestry of battle scenes, miracles, arguments, mutinies, murders and couplings, voluntary and otherwise. Maimonides says there's a reason for the obscurity of Torah's exquisite logic and symmetry:

...because of the greatness and importance of the subject and because our capacity falls short of apprehending the greatest of all subjects as it really is, we are told about those profound matters -- which divine wisdom has deemed necessary to convey to us -- in parables and riddles and in very obscure words.

And Rabbi Tatz amplifies on that theme:

So the root is simple and unitary, but it contains incipient within its simplicity all the manifold complexity that it will express. The world is a complex revelation of an unrevealed unitary root, a complex unfolding of myriad detail, but a complexity of detail that always holds within it the simplicity of the root that generates each detail. I am not claiming that this is an easy idea, in fact it represents an unfathomable mystery; but a certain level of grasp in the area falls within the ambit of the obligation of Torah study, and that is the primary reason that we grapple with it.

These scientific minds grasp law as the very structure of the universal and the particular, the physical and the spiritual. That law protects and propagates spirit; it both makes possible that "eruption of daring" that's needed from time to time and restrains it mightily.

Could the Krakatoa of spiritual daring be imminent?

--T.A.