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.

Neural Buddhists and the Rest of Us

In the space of a couple of weeks, the New York Times ran at least three articles about how therapy, neurology and the search for spiritual fulfillment are converging. On May 13, the Times published a much-discussed column by David Brooks that ran under the headline "The Neural Buddhists." In it, Brooks noted that "scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states." The moral: "The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits . . . Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They're going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day."

Twelve days later, under the headline "A Superhighway to Bliss," Times Reporter Leslie Kaufman wrote an article about Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard neuroscientist who experienced nirvana when she had stroke that temporarily silenced the left lobe of her brain.  Dr. Taylor was able to "see that the atoms and molecules making up her body blended with the space around her; the whole world and the creatures in it were all part of the same magnificent field of shimmering energy." The article goes on to describe her electrifying speech at the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference and a subsequent appearance on Oprah. (I've embedded a link to the talk, below, but it doesn't seem to be working. Use the link above as an alternative.)

The moral: "I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be."

And two days after that, Benedict Carey wrote the lead piece in the May 27th Science Times section. It described how mindfulness meditation is rapidly gaining credence with therapists across a variety of disciplines. Although research doesn't seem to indicate that meditation is universally helpful, the "Buddha-like effort to move beyond language to change fundamental psychological processes" is changing the focus of many therapists from merely reframing thoughts to changing one's relationship to the content of one's thoughts.

It seems that the underlying premise of these articles is that science will help discern the real essence of what religionists have been misunderstanding and exploiting all these millennia -- that by understanding the processes at work within distinct and diverse regions of the brain, we'll be able to put the poetic nonsense aside and get at Oneness the way we might get at a flu vaccine or an endoscopy.

It's an intriguing thought, but in the end, I don't think it'll work out that way. There is a mystery that neither religion nor science can own. Religion at its best celebrates, at its worst exploits this mystery. Science at its best exploits that mystery, and at its worst turns it to deadly effect.

In my mind, neither will ever corner the market on Truth.

I'm writing this in the few moments before the beginning of Shavuot, the Jewish holiday celebrating the giving of the Torah to Moses at Mt. Sinai. We will never know what truly happened to a band of Jews on the run in the wilderness. But if all that happened was that Moses had a stroke, or ate some 'shrooms, and the event had been handed down to us with that narrative, we'd have a religion where we went about inducing strokes and hallucinations in ourselves (some would say this is, in fact, the case).

Thankfully, this isn't what happened. We received the narrative of that event and its aftermath in the form of a system of laws that, according to an intriguing paper by a Maryland undergraduate named Eitan Freedenberg,  "start at a single point and expand into a vast array of wavelengths." That point is Mt. Sinai -- wherever it is -- and those wavelengths are the spokes of law and custom, narrative and ritual that are the bedrock of at least three major religions and much of the moral and ethical framework of modern life.

But sometimes I wonder: if Moses had been Jill Bolte Taylor and taken a detached view of his revelatory experience, would we really be that different? After all, Moses said the word of God is "in your mouth and in your heart, that you may do it" (Deut. 30:14). Professor Taylor says that anyone can choose to live a more peaceful, spiritual life (by sidestepping their left brain).

As the sun sets and Shavuot dawns, I find myself hoping -- praying, really -- that we take advantage of the confluence of these mighty rivers of thought, and ride them to a new sea of wisdom, still riding our rudimentary rafts of choice.

--T.A.

Thought for Shabbat -- and Shavuot

There is only one way to wisdom: awe. Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you. The loss of awe is the great block to insight. A return to reverence is the first prerequisite for a revival of wisdom, for the discovery of the world as an allusion to God. Wisdom comes from awe rather than from shrewdness. It is evoked not in moments of calculation but in moments of being in rapport with the mystery of reality. The greatest insights happen to us in moments of awe.

A moment of awe is a moment of self-consecration. They who sense the wonder share in the wonder. They who keep holy the things that are holy shall themselves become holy.

--Abraham Joshua Heschel, God In Search of Man

Why I didn't go to the AIPAC conference

Cross-posted on Jews By Choice

The short answer: because I'm lazy, because the One True Wife and I had a fight and I didn't want to travel with her, and because I'm busy.

The longer answer, packed inside the shorter one: I don't like being part of Jewish efforts at political influence. It's not a bad thing -- in fact, it's a necessary thing -- and I'm glad there are people engaged in it. I'm also glad that I'm not one of them.

The reason is that I think Judaism -- more than any religion, any ethical discipline, any race or ethnicity; in fact, more than any other single mode of being -- conflates legislation and religion in ways that help the former at the expense of the latter.

I came to realize this reading the text of the Gerson Cohen Memorial Lecture, given by Rabbi Gordon Tucker at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and published in the Winter 2007/08 issue of Conservative Judaism. In this lecture, Rabbi Tucker is clearly talking not about religion and secular law, but about religion and halakhah, or Jewish law. He notes that the tendency to see law as the highest expression of religious practice was the tendency that Spinoza famously identified (and that got him excommunicated) when he said that Judaism was not a religion but a legal system. Centuries later, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel noted that Spinoza's "doctrine has been coursing through the body of modern Jewish thought like venom."

In deeply religious communities, the legalistic tendencies of Jewish thought are expressed in painstaking debates over and rulings on halakhah. In more secular Jewish communities, it's the law of the land, and the establishment of legislative precedents and relationships between nations, that seems paramount.

In other words, as Jews, we have come to see the brief, the ruling, the precedent, the statute as our highest expression of relationship to the Divine. We preserve the sacred at the expense of the living. Rabbi Tucker also quotes the philosopher William James who, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, defined how the path toward the establishment of formal religion can extinguish the very essence and insight it hoped to preserve:

" . . . religious thinkers attract  disciples and produce groups of sympathizers. When these groups get strong enough to ‘organize’ themselves, they become ecclesiastical institutions with corporate ambitions of their own.  The spirit of politics and the lust of dogmatic rule are then apt to enter and to contaminate the originally innocent thing. . . when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn.  The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration."

This is the kind of development against which I strain, in spite of myself and in spite of the millennia of Jewish experience. Toward the conclusion of his address, Rabbi Tucker asks a provocative, even radical question, followed by an assertion that's remarkable for any clergy person, much less a Conservative rabbi:

"But has such a community achieved a glimpse of God, and what God truly wants of us, by ruling out the collective religious intuition?  They have, I submit, resigned themselves to an incomplete loaf.  By failing to admit the necessary incompleteness of our systems, hallowed though they be, to capture the infinite, real essence and will of God, they have sentenced themselves and communities they lead – we might even say the movements that they lead – to existential incompleteness."

What Rabbi Tucker is saying is hugely important: that we're incomplete because, in building a fence around the Torah, we've kept deep religious intuition and sponteneity -- sometimes referred to as prophecy -- out of our lives.  That's what's missing. That's what I'm concerned about, even dedicated to.

And that's the main reason, believe it or not, that I didn't go to the AIPAC conference.

--T.A.

Going Negative

I'm in one of those periods in which my skin is incredibly thin, my patience terribly short. I'm hurting people around me, and their expression of hurt only pisses me off more, as if I'm the one being wronged.

I can discern a couple of contributing factors. One is my anxiety about going back to school. Another is the interrogations to which I'm regularly subjected about this midlife adventure, and the incredulity and condescension with which it's often greeted. I suppose if I were able to hold onto a shred of equanimity I'd see that some people are jealous, some are threatened, and most are just plain ol' surprised that a guy with a family and a mortgage and a decent job would chuck it all. They have every right to be surprised, don't they? Heck, I'm still surprised.

Another factor: I'm sort of between worlds right now -- still focusing a lot of energy on work, even though it's now official that I'll be cutting my hours back. People have begun to take over some of my duties. School doesn't start until late Fall. I feel a little untethered. I'm not so good at that.

Also, I'm not meditating enough. When spiritual discipline goes, everything becomes personal. There's a direct correlation between how much you cast yourself at the mercy of the Great Mystery, and how personally you take things. Of course, some things are meant to be taken personally. Still, when you viscerally understand how interconnected It all is, we all are, even the barbs aimed at you don't hurt so much. You have a better understanding of the force that propels them, and better medicine with which to salve the wound.

But when I'm feeling like this, I feel claustrophobic. I can't get enough space. Every interaction is an interruption. Everything nettles. The closer someone is to me, the harder I push them away. The One True Wife has had just about enough, and I guess I don't blame her. The Daughters, in various stages of transition out of the house, want nothing but space anyway, and are blissfully unaware. Gabe, whose life is still centered in the house, takes it all in and says not a word. But at times like this, he has a nickname for me: Mean. It's not an accusation -- it's a moniker.

Buddhism helps you cultivate a peaceful acceptance of even the unsatisfactory. Judaism sets you at odds with it. Buddhism goes with the flow. Judaism struggles upstream. Buddhism meditates. Judaism thinks, prays (equal parts petition, praise and thanksgiving) and thinks some more. Buddhism grows silent. Judaism grows loud. Buddhism opens its arms. Judaism takes up its tools. Buddhism nods and smiles. Judaism shakes its head and cries.

With all this turning around in the overheated dryer of my cranium, I have several simultaneous responses to every world event, every snotty remark, every casual injustice. I can't sort them out or express them clearly. On the one hand, I think I'm suffering from a wider syndrome, a kind of ethical hypochondria (on which Charles Martin waxes eloquent), in which all actions are weighed for their ethical and moral content, and, if found wanting, merit Fixing. On the other hand, I am sick unto death of fuming invective, obnoxious, anonymous commentary and high-handed judgment from people who have no skin in the game.

With the aid of my Zen training, I hereby rededicate myself to making peace with the Unsatisfactory. And, with the anchor of my Jewish soul and all to which it answers, I resolve to make peace with the Unsatisfactory by slowly, persistently, challenging it.

Starting with my self.

--T.A.

Time to Grow Your Own

From a young age, I fantasized about living on a farm. I decided at about age 5 that, in the summer before I turned 17, I was going to work on a farm. It never happened, so I still dream about it, even though 17 is long gone.

I loved the sight of farms from a young age. I adored the orderly rows of crops, ridged like corduroy, zipping past the window of our VW bus as it made its pokey way along  the highway on long trips. I loved barns. The smell of hay. The idea of coming in exhausted at the end of the day and having a huge meal.

I was idealizing farm life, in a way, but I was a kid. I worked harder at understanding farm life than any other city kid I knew. I got up early every morning to watch the Farm Report on Channel 9, and hear the orotund orations of Orien Samuelson as he read and analyzed the latest commodity prices, and I loved the fact that farmers were watching right along with me.

When I was at summer camp, at around age 13, I told a counselor of my yearning to work on a farm.

"Well, my aunt and uncle will put you to work on their farm in Virginia anytime," Dave said. "But you'd better be ready to work your ass off about 12 hours a day, hurt over every inch of your body, and sit around in the evenings, drinking stuff you shouldn't be drinking and shooting cans and road signs with a shotgun."

I never worked for Dave's aunt and uncle, or any other farmers, for that matter.

I regret it more than ever after reading about the nascent movement of "energy survivalism." It features learning the skills to cultivate energy and food independence, or at least self-reliance, and removing oneself from the collapsing grid of modern excess. The pioneers of energy survivalism may tend to the wild-eyed prophetic types: some anticipate having to fend off hordes of starving disoriented urbanites -- folks who can't grow an herb or make their own latte but who might use their GPS systems to head to the country in search of food, or a least a B&B at which to weather the storm.

I find it pleasingly ironic that, at the possible onset of global upheaval, I'm heading to Divinity School -- and facing a 60-mile round-trip commute to school. A less practical choice could hardly be invented, especially by a person who's been the primary breadwinner in a family with three children, two of whom will be in college next year; especially in a time of rising oil and food prices.

I still can't believe I made this choice. I quake in bed at night and curse myself during the day.

And yet I can't shake the notion that on many levels -- including the practical -- it's a choice I won't regret.

Tomorrow, however, I'm digging a hole to begin a compost heap in the back yard. More vegetables are going in this year.

But face it: I was a city kid, now I'm a suburban dad. I couldn't build a cabin out of Lincoln Logs, much less the real thing. And I couldn't grow a weed without fertilizer.

But farming life, on a smaller scale, may be the wave of the very near future.

--T.A.

Do you speak "Student"?

I'm counting that among the languages I'll have to learn when I return to school in the Fall.

The Academy, from which I've been absent about a quarter century, doesn't function the way the business world does. For one thing, the academy uses more syllables. Do business people regularly, or ever, use a word that has as many syllables as, say, epistemological?

For another thing, the overweening and overbearing bureaucracy of most academic institutions is stunning. I see where I'm going to have to get all up-to-date on my vaccines, as if I were Middle Daughter trekking off to the Steppes of Asia. I'll have to register for courses, and petition committees of the faculty to accept my proposed course of study, and get various approvals from various deans . . .

On the other hand -- how different is that, really, from the business world? You want to do something, you usually have to put your plan in writing and get several layers of approval. You have to talk a good game.

But in the business world, that talk is business-speak. In the Academy, you have to speak "student."

Oh -- I'll have to learn Hebrew, too. I mean really learn Hebrew. And pass a reading exam in another language (most likely German), before it's all said and done.

James Robinson, a professor in the History of Judaism at the Divinity School, has been very supportive of my mid-life adventure. I asked him which other professors I should meet before choosing courses for the Fall.

His advice: You don't need to meet them. You need to read them.

Ah, of course, I thought. Academic networking is an exchange of ideas, not contact information. The monograph is the business card of the Academy.

I just finished reading three works, recommended to me by Professor Robinson, on the "ecstatic Kabbalah" of Abraham Abulafia, a 13th-century Spanish Kabbalist who came to be convinced that he was the Messiah. After becoming convinced of this, he decided he had to meet Pope Nicholas III. Abulafia was persistent until an audience was arranged. Little did he know that Pope Nicholas had given instructions that Abulafia should be taken outside the gates of Rome and burned.

Abulafia was on his way to the audience when the Pope suddenly suffered a massive stroke and died.

Abulafia's radical idea was that you could achieve prophecy through the careful study and practice of meditation and chanting of various combinations of Hebrew letters. He thought that every Hebrew letter was a name of God, and therefore every combination of letters another Divine name with different mystical properties. He believed that, when one achieved the highest levels of prophecy, the student became, in a sense, one with the Divine. Having achieved that, Abulafia figured he must be a Messianic figure. He lived as an itinerant mystic, traveling and teaching throughout Europe until his death at the age of 50.

Why is this interesting to me? Because I think it's an early example of Judaism using meditative practice to discover Oneness.

Because Abulafia was a master of non-attachment.

Because he spent his life teaching that mystical experiences are accessible to anyone.

Because he was a nut.

Because there's power in the Hebrew language.

Because it's part of Jewish history.

And because he taught Jewish meditation seven centuries before it was cool.

--T.A.

Theological Thoughts for the Day

What would an effective signal [of God's existence] be like? . . . To cope with the fact that anything can be interpreted in various ways, the signal would have to show its meaning naturally and powerfully, without depending on the conventions or artificialities of any language . . . A perfect signal should be spectacularly present, impossible to miss. It should capture the attention and be available by various sense modalities; no one should have to take another's word for it. It should endure permanently or at least as long as people do, yet not constantly be before them, so they they will notice it freshly. The signal should be a powerful object, playing a central role in people's lives. To match God's being the source of creation or standing in some crucially important relation to it, all life on earth should depend (mediately) on the signal and center about it . If there were some object which was the energy source of all life on earth, one which dominated the sky with its brilliance, whose existence people could not doubt, which couldn't be poked at or treated condescendingly, an object about which people's existence revolved, which poured out a tremendous amount of energy, only a small fraction of which reach people, an object which people constantly walked under and whose enormous power they sensed . . .

Of course, I am being somewhat playful here. The Sun does exist, it is about as good a permanent announcement as one could imagine or devise, yet it has not served to prove God's existence, even though viewing it as a signal does provide a unified explanation of why all those properties listed happen to be conjoined on one object. Since we do not find it easy to imagine how God could provide anything that would be a permanently convincing proof of his existence, why should we expect to be able to do it ourselves?  -- Robert Nozick, The Examined Life

Our religious understanding of evolution means that the divine energy is ever reaching forward and upward, in whatever halting, multiple, and spiraling ways, toward more sophisticated and complex levels of development. From where we stand in the evolutionary process, and given our ignorance of extraterrestrial conscious life forms, it seems right to say that human consciousness is a significant and qualitative leap in this process.    -- Arthur Green, Seek My Face, Speak My Name: A Contemporary Jewish Theology

                                                                        

Remember

Cross-posted on Jews by Choice

They said it couldn't happen. Some are still saying it never did.

Many claim to have witnessed it, survived it, fought against it. They are heroes to many, but sometimes they are called fools, liars or worse by many others.

Every year, those who perished are commemorated. As the grass blushes over their anoymous graves, their memories are invoked, against a tide of denial and hatred, by the ones who survived, or the ones born to the survivors.

The survivors' stories are ones of super-human determination to simply be human in the way that they were born to be human.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has put it concisely:

Judaism is the world's most sustained protest against empires, because imperialism is the attempt to impose a single truth, culture or faith on a plural world. God, said the rabbis, makes everyone in His image, yet He makes everyone different to teach us to respect difference. And since difference is constitutive of humanity, a world that has no space for difference has no space for humanity.

The act of remembering beyond this lifetime -- of consecrating a terrain of experience on which you may never have stood, but which is mapped in your bones -- is the central project not just of Jews but of any individual who insists that the world can be made whole, or at least better.

If you haven't already, please pause a moment -- soon, today; even now --  in remembrance of all those who have perished at the hands of empires.

Shabbat Shalom.

--T.A.