True Ancestor

Student-Speak Lexicon, Vol. 1

 

I'm trying to build my lexicon of contemporary student-speak. I really feel this should be an open-source work, so feel free to chime in. As you can see, it's still pretty thin (because I never talk to anybody), so please help me, and all those other students, navigate the jungle of contemporary discourse by contributing your knowledge.

It seems the percentage of people who never say exactly what they mean has remained steady, at about 99%, but figuring out what they are trying to say is harder than ever.

Here's what I know so far:

2010: "We should be Facebook friends" = 1980: "Let's do lunch."

2010: "I can't make it to class; can you e-mail me your notes?" = 1980: "Can I have your digits?"

"What classes are you taking?" = "How are you? (the non-sincere variety)"

"Do you like this class?" = "Who hates this class more: you or me?"

"I really like what you said in class the other day" = "Do you ever shut up?!"

"I don't feel well" = "I'm hung over."

"I find Nietzsche's criticism of Hegel's view of history so jejeune" = "I was not breast fed."

"U. Chicago is weird" = "U. Chicago is weird."

"Hyde Park sucks" = "I'm homesick."

That's about it for now . . . stay tuned . . . and please help grow the lexicon.

--T.A.

 

"Be more stupid and you will feel better."

 
Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza, 1632-1677

Paul Mendes-Flohr is providing a fascinating look at Jweish memory and Jewish history in his class on the topic. The reading begins (chronologically) with Spinoza, often referred to as "the first modern Jew," and continues through the 20th century, emphasizing the flourishing of Jewish historiography that began with Spinoza's Biblical criticism and flowered with Mendelssohn and the Berlin Haskalah. The idea of the class is to try to gain a better understanding and fuller appreciation of how Jewish memory and Jewish historiography have been shaped by Biblical and prophetic models of memory and progress; how those models contributed to Enlightenment thinking and then circled back to separate Jewish historical consciousness from Jewish religious memory.

Professor Mendes-Flohr has even brought in that great "Jewish" thinker Friederich Nietzsche, who, while often cited as inspiration for the rise of Fascism and Nazism, also warned of the weaknesses of the "monumental" view of history he espoused. In Professor Mendes-Flohr's words (from the lecture notes he freely shares), Nietzsche understood that this view of history could result in "a frenzy of fanaticism, and [encourage] visionary hotheads and plain scoundrels to destroy empires, assassinate princes, ignite wars and revolutions." In Nietzsche's own words (from his essay, On the Uses and Abuses of History), if monumental history -- built around exemplary historical figures and their heroic deeds -- is placed in the hands of "talented egoists and wild crowds of evil rascals, then empires are destroyed, leaders assassinated, wars and revolutions instigated."

Nietzsche, of course, was not Jewish, and is tarred with the brush of being the preferred philosopher of the Nazis. Here, however, is what he said about the Jews in Human, All Too Human:

As soon as it is no longer a matter of preserving nations, but of producing the strongest possible European mixed race, the Jew is just as useful and desirable an ingredient as any other national remnant. Unpleasant, even dangerous, qualities can be found in every nation and every individual: it is cruel to demand that the Jew be an exception. In him, these qualities may even be dangerous and revolting to an unusual degree; and perhaps the young stock-exchange Jew is altogether the most disgusting invention of mankind.  In spite of that, I should like to know how much one must forgive a people in a total accounting when they have had the most painful history of all peoples, not without the fault of all of us, and when one owes to them the noblest man (Christ), the purest sage (Spinoza), the most powerful book, and the most effective moral law in the world. Moreover, in the darkest times of the Middle Ages, when the Asiatic cloud masses had gathered heavily over Europe, it was Jewish free-thinkers, scholars, and physicians who clung to the banner of enlightenment and spiritual independence in the face of the harshest personal pressures and defended Europe against Asia. We owe it to their exertions, not least of all, that a more neutral, more rational, and certainly unmythical explanation of the world was eventually able to triumph again, and that the bond of culture which now links us with the enlightenment of Greco-Roman antiquity remained unbroken. If Christianity has done everything to orientalize the Occident, Judaism has helped significantly to occidentalize it again and again: in a certain sense this means as much as making Europe's task and history a continuation of the Greek.

  

Friederich Nietzsche, 1844-1900

Nietzsche walked the line between brilliance and insanity until he fell off on the wrong side. But that's not my point. My point is that Jewish memory, as enshrined in the Bible and affirmed by the rabbis, kept Jewish memory apart from critical historical consciousness, even as Jews were kept apart from the broad stream of history. This had a remarkably profound and lasting effect on the way Jews remember things, and on what we consider progress to be. For millennia, Jewish memory was pegged to seminal events in Jewish history, and circumscribed the same mnemonic circle over and over again: every calamity was a reminder of the Temple's destruction, every victory was an Exodus.

Even now, today, we see ourselves -- don't we? -- as burdened by an enormous individual and collective responsibility to do well, get it right, be the rising tide that lifts all boats, and to remember and redress injustice. This kind of thinking isn't limited to Jews, but it is, to a very large extent, the result of Biblical imperative and rabbinic law, and the ways in which these informed Christian thought. As Enlightenment thinking pulled philosophy away from religion, "talented egoists" cherry-picked philosophy for ideas that could foment radical change and wholesale destruction.

Which isn't to say that talented egoists didn't or don't exist in the religious sphere. It's to say that our memory and history are inflected with -- messianic hopes! We remember our own and society's failures, and we work to try to help everything and everyone progress toward an Event or Goal that, in the back of our minds if nowhere else, is ultimately redemptive. As the historian Nathan Rotenstreivch said, Jewish history is "a synthesis between meaning and reality."

 
Nathan Rotenstreich, 1914 - 1993. This is the cover of the "Bibliography of the Writer Nathan Rotenstreich"

It's stimulating to read and think about history and memory -- especially when you're old enough to have a little of the former, and to start losing a little of the latter (thereby appreciating it all the more). But I wonder: what good does it do? At the end of the day, what have you got? Perhaps all this cerebrating and remembering overheated poor Nietzsche's brain. After all, he was reportedly counseled to chill out: "Be more stupid," his colleague Immermann told him, "and you will feel better."

I am fascinated to be discovering how deeply Jewish my thinking is, despite my deeply un-Jewish upbringing; amazed to understand how we are all -- even, perhaps especially the most strident atheists -- wired to think like good little messianists: there's an ultimate state at which things should arrive, and we must help get our world to that state.

"Be more stupid and you will feel better." These immortal words should be inscribed at the gates of every university and library, in order to scare away the meek, the dilettantish and the sensible.

But they haven't scared me yet.

--T.A.

The Ivory Tower meets the Security Barrier

One of the benefits of being a student at a leading university is the opportunity, almost any given day of the week, to benefit from the wisdom, even brilliance, of others: to see movies, hear lectures, attend seminars, visit museums and just plain ol' bump into people who can teach you a great deal.

And it's not always purely academic. Such was the case yesterday, when I went to a presentation by Amos Gil, former executive director of Ir Amim (City of Peoples; City of Nations), a nonprofit "civil society" group working for a "sustainable political future for the city of Jerusalem." In its "City of Peoples" aspect, Ir Amim is concerned with the needs of Israelis and Palestinians "on the ground" -- people who need services, decent housing, ingress and egress, and the ability to go to sleep at night in their own beds without fearing for their lives or their homes. In its "City of Nations" aspect, the organization is concerned with the political challenges of Jerusalem as a city comprised of some 250,000 Palestinians (about 30 per cent of the total Jerusalem population), a city in which some live in squalor and some in splendor, and a city in which previously segregated neighboroods are becoming increasingly diverse, which presents challenges of its own (more on that below).

In his presentation, Gil was pragmatic, non-ideological, extremely clear and concise, well informed, and realistic. He gently but firmly deflected questions of an ideological bent, defused emotion and corrected popular misconception.

Most important, he gave a roomful of (mostly) American students a thorough and detailed look at the geographical, cultural and political complexities of the city of Jerusalem as a capitol city -- one he hopes will in the not-too-distant future be the capital of two sovereign states -- as an administrative entity, as an interlocking system of neighborhoods, as a security challenge, a collection of holy sites, and as a profound urban planning challenge.

He began by asking those in attendance how they would define "East Jerusalem." Fortunately, the first person called on gave what Gil said was the best definition he'd ever gotten from an audience: "That portion of Jerusalem that was under Jordanian control from 1948 to 1967, and which came under Israeli conrol after the 1967 war." What he was after was probably the description we so often hear on news broadcasts: "Arab East Jerusalem." The reality, with East Jerusalem as with the rest of the city, is far more complex. One of the largest complexities is that East Jerusalem is home to tens if not hundreds of thousands of people who became permanent residents (possessed of all civil rights of Israel, other than the right to vote, and not obligated to serve in the Israeli army) when, in 1988, King Hussein of Jordan relinquished all his country's historical claims to the city. The Palestinians in East Jerusalem are citizens of the city, but of no nation.

Gil's presentation focused on the geopolitical complexities that arose in the years after the Second Intifada, which began in September of 2000. In four and a half years, more than 1,500 Israelis were killed in suicide attacks, about one third of those in West Jerusalem. In response, the Sharon government launched plans to build what Gil said is best described as "the security barrier." The government insisted the barrier was not a play for land, but a last resort to enhance security and keep civilians from getting killed in terror attacks. By defining the area contained within the barrier as "Greater Jerusalem," Sharon put an undeniable political lens over all future maps of the city.

Gil said, protestations of the government notwithstanding, the barrier's route showed a clear political agenda: in hilly country, it tends to occupy high ground. It extends, in the South, to the edge of the large concentration of Palestinians around Bethlehem, and, in the North, to the edge of Ramallah. In so doing, it carves out a wider area for the expansion of the population of Jerusalem -- especially the Jewish population.

Gil said ir Amim understands the rationale behind these measures. As a "civil society" group, its area of focus is not so much what was done, as how it was done, and the ramifications, for ordinary Palestinians and Israelis, not only now, but for all efforts at urban planning and management, and conflict resolution, going forard. The process for determining that a barrier would be built, and for determining that barrier's route, created harsh divisions and unescapable new realities in which the citizens being affected could not participate. It forced the segregation and isolation of many communities, and made others the subject of fierce competition behind ideologically oriented groups of different ethnic and religious backgrounds. Furthermore, the barrier's defensive strength in limiting suicide attacks is also its weakness: the wall creates a barrier from behind which rockets can easily be launched. Perhaps suicide bombings will be less common, but the barrier may have facilitated other, equally terrible kinds of attacks.

The barrier has also helped empower Hamas in the southern (poorer) areas of East Jerusalem. Gil said Palestinian "civil society" groups fear the increasing power of Hamas far more than they chafe under Israeli occupation. They far prefer to remain under Israeli control, although they don't say so "for pragmatic reasons." This, Gil said, was a mistake that began with George W. Bush, who compelled Israel to agree to let Hamas participate in Palestinian elections. In portions of East Jerusalem now, ultra-religious Jews and Muslims are living in close proximity to one another. "Something," Gil said, "is bound to explode."

Gil said whereas a two-state solution was anathema five years ago, it is now widely accepted as the solution that must be pursued. Because of the increasing complexity of Jerusalem, including the complexity that the barrier inadvertently created, one consideration that must be considered is "combining physical unity with symbolic division."

Such a combination of unity and division, as understood by Israelis, is a far cry from the clear ideological and geographical divisions we see form a distance. Most Western media portrays as a "settlement" any neighborhood of Jews beyond the Green Line. Many of these neighborhoods are widely considered by Israelis and Palestinians to be settled Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem. The areas that Israelis consider "settlements" are those blue areas on the map that the barrier (the blue line" juts out in order to encompass.

What was refreshing about Gil's presentation was the complete absence of shrillness, and the frank distinction between ideology and pragmatism it maintained. Ir Amim strives to make Jerusalem, in the words of its web site, "a city that ensures the dignity and welfare of all its residents and that safeguards their holy places, as well as their historical and cultural heritages – today, as well as in the future." That much was clear.

It is a clear task but an impossible task -- one that Jews and Muslims, Israelis, Arabs and Palestinians, daily confront. Still, Ir-Amim and its Israeli and Palestinian partner organizations are, if Gil is any indication, ideally suited to the impossible: pragmatic, tough, smart, realistic without being pessimistic, positive without being naive.

It is with such people that change really begins.

--T.A.

A note to all readers: I find strident ideological commentary, of any stripe and on any issue, profoundly tiresome, and I will unhesistatingly delete any comment that descends to that level. All other comments are most welcome.

Gothic Dawn

Tuesdays are my early days on campus. I have a class that begins at 9:15, but in order to beat the traffic and get some studying done, I leave the house at around 6AM, arrive on campus at around 7, and read or study (or do this) and drink coffee until class starts.

The University of Chicago was the institution that overshadowed my childhood. Many of my friends' parents were professors here. I attended the Lab School from 4th grade through high school. The university's academic rhythms set the tempo and the outlook of my youth: urbane and urbane, yet, somehow, simultaneously isolated and provincial. Condescending of and aghast at other political viewpoints. Fiercely, competitively, ambitiously intellectual but fusty, nerdy and detached from the physical. I was happy to leave this little enclave, and yet here I am again.

Walking onto campus, I'm bombarded with sense memories: the dusty smell of fallen leaves and the cool shadows of the gothic buildings transport me straight back to senior year in high school, when I just looked forward to the next slow dance, the next vacation, the cliff-dwelling solitude of my bedroom in our 4th-floor apartment.

When the Sun comes up and these gothic buildings emerge from the gloom, I feel simultaneously privileged and lost -- just as I did in high school. Blessed to be here, thrilled to be steeped in learning. Hopelessly unworthy, profoundly alone.

Being a PhD student requires a lot of collegiality and a lot of initiative (the word my dad hurled at us whenever he was infuriated at our passivity, which was often). No one will tell you what needs doing -- just be sure you get it done. This is perhaps the main similarity between my experience in the Academy and the "real world."

This morning, as the buildings glower under a gray Chicago sky, I am besieged by friendly ghosts clutching musty books, and by the smell of autumn leaf-dust. Somehow, the leaf-dust memory is a mnemonic for the smell of Herbal Essence shampoo wafting off a girl during a final slow dance to "Reasons" at a high school party.

The Sun rises from behind its scrim of autumn ennui. The fragrance of memories rise with it. The radiator in the classroom hisses. A door closes, and the echo roams down the stone corridor -- another friendly ghost.

And then, suddenly, the past recedes, and the day is bright, and voices pass by underneath, and another day in my long life (please God) as student has begun.

--T.A.

Jewish History and Jewish Memory

Professor Paul Mendes-Flohr is teaching a course on memory and history in Jewish thought. Two of the principal texts for the course are Amos Funkeinstein's Perceptions of Jewish History and Y.H. Yerushalmi's Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. 

Professor Mendes-Flohr, who is not just a historian of Jewish philosophy but a significant figure in that history, is addressing the issue of Judaism's unique historical consciousness -- an almost ahistorical (or perhaps, as Hegel would have it, a historiosophical) perspective that links all events not (or not only) to the tide of events but to the everpresent theme of redemption. As Lionel Kochan wrote -- a quote that Prof. Mendes-Flohr put at the top of his syllabus for the course -- "The Jew, regarded as ‘the most historical of peoples,’ have [until the modern era] taken little interest in their own history. At least this appears to be the case, if the paucity of historians is the criterion." Indeed, between Josephus in the first century C.E. and the late medieval period, almost no self-consciously historical Jewish text was written.

Was this because, as some historians posited, a people without a state was also a people without a history? Or was it because in Jewish thought, all history was simply the circling of a redemptive messianic beacon, coming round again through the spiral of time's ascent toward the End of Days?

As Yerushalmi notes, Jewish memory is a “dual movement of reception and transmission, propelling itself toward the future . . . The Jews,” he notes, “were not mnemonic virtuosos. They were, however, willing receivers and superb transmitters.” Reception and transmission sounds to me more like history than memory. In Jewish thought, however, collective memory was, in a very real sense, the only, or at least the most practical, form of historiography.

 

Y. H. Yerushalmi (1932 - 2009)

Funkenstein agrees. In his essay, "The Dialectics of Assimilation" (Jewish Social Studies (Winter 1995, vol. 1, issue 2)), he writes that we can scarcely “separate that which is original and therefore homegrown, autochthonous, from that which has been absorbed." In Jewish thought and practice, reception and transmission work in such close harmony that, after awhile, the exotic and syncretistic becomes the normative.

However, where Jewish memory and history are concerned, Funkenstein takes a very different approach. He asserts that attributing historical consciousness and collective memory to collectives -- "the family and the tribe, the nation and the state" is confusing. Remembering, he says, is a mental act, a personal one, confined to the one doing the remembering. It's not that "collective memory" doesn't exist, but it's a phrase that needs to be used with great care: memory is born of identity, and every memory is born of a social context. Funkenstein analogizes the relationship between cllective and personal memory to the relationship between language and speech: like each act of speach, "no act of remembering is like any other."

 

Amos Funkenstein (1937-1995)

These diverse views form the axis along which Professor Mendes-Flohr has structured his course. He has gently warned his students that the academy is not about belief, but about critical inquiry. A critical historical approach to issues of belief and praxis require patience, discipline, careful reading and a thoroughly skeptical approach. He even chided me for using the word "understanding," as any claim to "understand" a text, an idea, an historical moment meant only that other perspectives were not given their proper due. The 19th-century German historian Leopold von Ranke's determination to tell history "as it actually happened" marked a progression in history toward scientific objectivity, but historical objectivity is a historicist impossibility.

 

Leopold von Ranke (1795 - 1886). Beware the historian who wears medals!

But Jewish historical consciousness is pressed into every moment of the Bible. As Herbert Schneidau noted, "To write history, for a Hebrew, was in some sense to take [God's] view of things into account: the literal belief in his watchfulness and interventionism, the intense sense of his personal presence and will and care, seem to have led to the habit of seeing things, as it were, with his eyes" (Sacred Discontent, p. 211). The Jewish sense of history therefore cannot be surgically removed from the sense of divine omnipresence and omnipotence. Not without killing the patient.

I am, I afraid, fascinated by this subject. As history moves out of the strictly messianic orbit and into the realm of a scientific/humanist endeavor to understand (there's that word) the interaction between the human being and the world it inhabits, it shatters into innumerable shards of interpretation and subjectivity. As far as Judaism is concerned, the separation of history of religion is the removal of God as The Actor in history. We are on our own.

As Hegel noted, however, perhaps history is theodicy. Perhaps we just can't read the tea leaves of time.

--T.A.

Reflections of an Old Student

Next week, within spitting distance of my 51st birthday, I begin my quest for a PhD in the History of Judaism from the U. Chicago Divinity School. I've decided to use this blog, largely dormant for the past year or more, to write about the experience, because I'm going to need a therapist, but I won't have time for one, so this blog will be it.

In June, I earned my M.A. in Divinity from the D School. A lot of my friends, most of them Jewish, didn't know Divinity was something you studied, much less earned a degree in. I get asked about it a lot: "Divinity? What's that?" The shortest answer is that it's the study of theology. The longer answer is that it's concentrated thought about and study of the (theory of the) divine. It's viewing matters of the spirit from an intellectual and historical perspective.

It's also a kind of fudge, ironically.

The urge to learn has always been with me, as have the need to write and (more recently) the enjoyment of teaching. I hope that combining these interests will yield some kind of quiet satisfaction; that sitting in the reedy silence of Regenstein Library, or in the fusty old classrooms of Swift Hall, will proffer a delightful anonymity, and an intellectual stimulation, that will keep my gray matter from settling into the Barca-Lounger of Senility. At the University, in whose shadow I grew up, I can learn for learning's sake.

Of course, it's rarely that easy. In the business world, competition is on the surface, but in the academy, it's under layers of politesse and intellectual code, creating a cozy viciousness of an almost Kabuki-esque intricacy and intensity. In the business world, you execute. In the academy, you debate and deliberate.  And then there are the more practical considerations: how do I still get my job done? How do I devote enough time and energy to the PhD? How do I get all this done, without cheating my family?

And most important: Why am I doing this?

I thought and I prayed and I analyzed and investigated. I studied, I read, I thought. I talked to people, I meditated, I did an accounting of my "internal books." Then I took the Graduate Record Exams, my first standardized test in almost 30 years; and I applied to two graduate admissions programs, and got admitted to the Divinity School, which so far has surpassed my wildest expectations.

In this space, I'll explore the experience of the older student, not just for myself, but for everyone who's curious about it. I'll explore Jewish philosophy and theology, and life in the academy, and I'll ponder how it affects life at home (without violating the privacy of the One True Wife, or of Gabe, who does not want to be written about).

I think going back to school, if you can afford it, beats the hell out of buying a Porsche or having an affair (not that I've tried either of those, mind you). It's both challenging (like a Porsche) and liberating (like a Porsche), but it costs less.

Also, it's not some shadow existence or some prestigious and presumptuous physical asset. It's a gift. As an older student, I'll care less about what my professors think of me. I'll be more directed, hungrier, more willing to take risks (I hope). And as someone involved in business, I'll be able to watch how a major university and its departments run, how they compete internally and externally, and how they are facing up to the massive changes with which colleges and universities are about to be faced.

And of course, I'll also write about the stuff I'm thinking about: meditation, syncretism, post-Holocaust Jewish theology; Jewish memory and Jewish history; and life as a man who loves his family and is nonetheless doing something terribly self-indulgent.

Read along and comment, if you like. Wish me luck, if you would. And, perhaps, think about what you would do to make a new path open for you.

More soon.

--T.A.

Scholarrhea

As I struggle through learning the technical aspects of reading German -- the third language I've studied in the past 12 months -- it occurs to me that I'm fast reaching that point where the brain becomes so crowded with information that it actually knows less than it did before the acquisition of all that data.

To know something means -- well, wait: before I tell you what the word "know" means, I have to tell you that I went through three stages in my mind while preparing to write the definition: First, I figured I know what it means, so I began to fashion my own definition.

Then, my scholarly etiquette kicked in, and I remembered that I am not a definitive source on the meaning of the verb "to know," so I began to stand up and reach for my Random House Webster's College Dictionary. Finally, I realized I have access to numerous online dictionaries, so I went to the one that was top of mind, and retrieved these definitions, among others:

1.        to perceive or understand as fact or truth; to apprehend clearly and with certainty.

2.	to have established or fixed in the mind or memory: to know a poem by heart; Do you know the way to the park from here?

3.	to be cognizant or aware of: I know it.

4.	be acquainted with (a thing, place, person, etc.), as by sight, experience, or report: to know the mayor.

5.	to understand from experience or attainment (usually fol. by how before an infinitive): to know how to make gingerbread.

6.	to be able to distinguish, as one from another: to know right from wrong.

7.	Archaic. to have sexual intercourse with.

In order to retrieve this info, I didn't need to know anything, other than how to perform a very basic search (knowing how to spell the word "dictionary" helped). Having performed that basic task, I was provided with a wealth of information. I don't have to know it. I merely have to know how to get at it.

French was easier for me, because I had studied it (three decades ago) and I was able to dust off some dim memories: verb conjugation learned in language labs and from large textbooks with cracked spins and notes from girls scribbled in the margins. German, though, with its case system and its detachable prefixes and suffixes, its penchant for stringing words together to form new words, meant that learning vocabulary was going to be virtually impossible for my aging brain.

However, for the reading exam at the University of Chicago Divinity School, I'm told I'll be allowed to use an online dictionary. What a bonanza! All I have to do is be able to copy a word from the test into the online dictionary, and it will provide me with not only the definition of the word itself, but (perhaps) some variations of the word that may have very different meanings. This means I don't really have to learn the vocabulary, so much as I have to learn the rules of the grammatical road.

Welcome to the new knowledge.

Now that the Internet has become the most ubiquitous, most omnipotent research tool of all time, scholars (just to name one field of endeavor) are able to dig up much more information with much less work; they can access rare documents in far-flung libraries, all the scholarly research on those documents, footnotes and all; they can more easily create new interpretations, new articles, new online journals, new conferences; in short, they can bury us under heaps of new information, if not knowledge, as they forge their careers from the privacy of their darkened offices, between classes, before office hours, during exam periods, or while still in their robe and slippers at home.

Maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but maybe not. The historian Y. H. Yerushalmi noted this in Zakhor, his great book on Jewish history and Jewish memory. Yerushalmi wrote, "the notion that everything in the past is worth knowing 'for its own sake' is a mythology of modern historians." And yet, there's hope: "Western man's discovery of history is not a mere interest in the past, which always existed,  but a new awareness, a perception of a fluid temporal dimension from which nothing is exempt."

Perhaps nothing is exempt because everything is available. And by everything being available, its value, and its meaning, have been radically altered.

If I pursue a PhD in the History of Judaism, at my relatively advanced age, I'll have to contend with a quantum shift in the nature of knowledge: everything is available, so everything is up for grabs. Everything is accessible, which makes everything open to interpretation. Radical interpretation is becoming conventional. Truly knowing something, in an area as subjective as the humanities, is not nearly as valuable as interpreting something in a new way.

The result, which Yerushalmi laments in his book, is that the profusion of scholarly texts (especially in the area of Jewish history) raises everything up for inspection but may actually obscure meaning, instead of enhancing it. "Delving into increasingly circumscribed yet complex areas of study," Yerushalmi wrote, "the contemporary Jewish historian often accomplishes prodigies of scholarship even as, concomitantly, he is inable to remove himself thereby from the 'large' issues that only the whole can pose with any urgency -- the uniqueness of Jewish historical experience (if not in a metaphysical than at least in an emporical sense); what was once called the "mystery" of Jewish survival through the ages; the relationship between Jews and Judaism (is all of history "Jewish"?); the value of Jewish history itself, not for the scholar, but for the Jewish people."

This is one small corner of the academy that is suffering, I fear, from the Scholarrhea virus: it spreads the inability to truly digest knowledge; the virus is spread through profuse explusion of information, and it has so far resisted all attempts at cure or vaccination.

--T.A.

The Younger

For nine months, my days were filled with, defined by, people who were half my age, or less. Suddenly, they're gone. I feel old again.

The funny thing is, it's not hard to be with them -- a) because I'm immature, so I fit right in, and b) because they remind me of my daughters (more mature, in many ways, than I -- certainly more mature than I was at their age).

But today's maturity is so -- I dunno -- immature. People who are in their late teens or early twenties have seen so much, done so much, sampled so much; but it's sampled from sanitized and digitized life-drives. Sometimes their lives seem to me like one big iPod, where if you don't like the song, the class, the interaction, the drug, the sex -- you just push a button and begin a new experience. They've played every sport, but never in pickup games on the street. They've been to every continent, but only on organized tours. They are aware of everything, but think that's the same as knowing everything.

The most indelible sense-memory I have is of sitting in the back of a fairly large lecture hall, with about 200 students arrayed in front of me, and the glowing forest of electronic devices, the snackety-snack sound of keyboards beneath the droning professors, the multiple screens on the PCs and Macs, upon which students took notes, checked e-mail, chatted, listened to music.  When I was growing up, the world was a ghetto. Now it's a playlist.

And yet, for all that curmudgeonly complaining . . . I love my fellow students. I am so in awe of their humor, their bursts of vulnerable humility, their hysterical senses of humor about their own neuroses, their desire, their insistence on seeing and doing and learning and being as much as possible. Theirs is a much more cynical world, but they are, somehow, much less cynical than my generation was. Having been reared in the shockwave of the (first) Kennedy assassination, under the mushroom shadow of the Cold War, and coming of age during Watergate and Vietnam, there was nothing for us to do but proclaim that everything was bullshit, even if you didn't believe it. My colleagues in the classroom, perhaps because of their fluency with accessing information, seem way less inclined to willful self-deception.They know everything's bullshit. They find it funny, challenging, stimulating.

On the other hand: the Internet turns everything into instant history. Relatively recent history -- Kruschev, Mickey Mantle, Elijah Muhammad, Flannery O'Connor -- may be buried forever beneath the new, lost to them in the landfill of contemporary noise.

This I'll say for them. They've been trained to learn, and their brains are learning machines at the peak of their function. They absorb information the way a thirsty plant sucks up rain. They're good, very good, at what they do.

I miss them.

--T.A.

My first symposium

This past week, I participated in my first religion symposium, an affair for graduate students at Indiana University. I submitted a paper proposal in December, and -- to my shock -- my proposal was accepted. Which meant I had to write the paper. Which wasn't on a topic I really knew anything about.

The subject of the symposium was "The Art of Religion," which I took to mean the intersection of religion and the Arts. I proposed a paper about how the original Broadway production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, and in particular Lee J. Cobb's portrayal of Willy Loman, heralded the death of a distinct American Jewish identity. It was fun to research -- the middle of the 20th century in America was a time of enormous change for Americans generally and American Jews in particular. Death of a Salesman not only captured what had been the American Jewish experience -- in many ways it foretold a great deal about where the lives of American Jews were headed.

Above are Cobb as Willy (center), with Arthur Kennedy as Biff and Cameron Mitchell as Happy, in the original Broadway cast.

Seventeen years later -- well after his compelled testimony to HUAC, and his naming of names, had stunted Cobb's career and nearly ruined his health -- he appeared in a television adaptation of Salesman, with George Segal as Biff.

 

I reflected on how Cobb's experience -- wanting to belong, wanting the world to change, and being hunted for both -- must have been reflected in his reinterpretation of the role that he made famous, and vice versa. Though dated, uneven and in some ways melodramatic, this adaptation of the play captures its nightmarish power; you can probably get it at your local library, and you should. It captures one of the great American stage performances if the 20th century.

The other presenters -- there were 12 of us in all -- covered a range of fascinating topics, from Gregorian chant to the goddess Parvati and the evoloution of female Hindu wedding attire, to violent imagery in early Christian poetry, to the question of whether Quranic chant was music (and the wider issue of the relationship of Muslim societies to music).

The symposium's keynote speaker, Maria Heim of Amherst College, talked about the prolific 5th century Buddhist scholar and monk Buddhaghosa, and his articulation of how to be receptive student and reader.

Buddhaghosa (seated)

Just to be able to think about Buddhism, the Qu'ran, Indian wedding attire, Gregorian chant and Death of a Salesman over the course of 48 hours was thrilling. It was also fun to be in Bloomington with the One True Wife, who had attended IU's School of Music in her college days. The memories came flooding back to her; we were only a few hours from Chicago, but she'd been transported back to a particular vivid and liberating time in her life.

The best thing about the event was how interesting the people were. Many of the professors in IU's religion department were U. Chicago Divinity School grads. Their perspectives on the experience were tremendously helpful to me. One professor said he only realized, upon going back into the school on a visit a few years after graduation, "how miserable I'd been almost the entire time." Miserable not because he was unhappy, but because of the pressure and the demands of the D school's rigorous curricula and exams.

Tomorrow I will briefly return to work, and turn my attention back to real estate.

--T.A.

Taking the stairs -- again

Gabe came through his surgery fine. The venous malformation is history. He was astonished by the power of the general anesthetic; he was smiling sleepily when we joined him in the recovery room: "My hands are so heavy!," he said in a slurred voice.

Within minutes he was his normal self: laconic, curious, a little impatient. He was also starving. I drove him and the One True Wife home, then went and got him his much-anticipated treat from Dunkin' Donuts: a grilled cheese flatbread, hash browns, and three donuts.

You'd think, with a diet like that, he'd be a little tub of lard. He's anything but. Sunday we do our third skyscraper stair-climb of the winter, and at 94 floors, the second longest. Gabe will beat me by at least two minutes, probably more. He will be sitting on a windowsill on the Hancock Building's observation deck. He will not be drenched in sweat the way I will.

Gabe is beginning to develop a young man's body. When he runs now, it seems as if his feet don't even touch the ground. When he throws a baseball as hard as he can, I'm starting to be a little afraid to catch it, and when he punches me in the shoulder, it hurts like hell. His hands and feet are enormous. His legs are starting to get hairy.
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On the academic front, I had to give a presentation in a class yesterday. I tried to think of the last time I did this. It may have been in a religion class, ironically, in college, more than 30 years ago. This presentation was on Jacob Lassner's Demonizing the Queen of Sheba: Boundaries of Gender and Culture in Postbiblical Judaism and Medieval Islam. 
 
Lucas de HEERE; 1559, St Bavo cathedral, Ghent, Belgium

What's fascinating about this book, and the area of scholarship of which it's representative, is how it explores the extent to which the foundational stories of Judaism and Islam are interwoven. More than interwoven, the canonical stories have continued to evolve -- depending on folk-tales, renditions, editions and additions that pass between the two faiths, that emerge in one faith as a response to the other (sometimes in polemic, sometimes to fit the story to the adapting faith's theology, and sometimes just because it's a cool story).

Lassner's book does this through the story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, whose encounter is touched upon in I Kings and II Chronicles, the Quran, and in numerous adaptations that emerged when Islam and Judaism were in close and sometimes harmonious contact (as you can see by the painting above, the story also fascinated the Christian community). It seems Islamic renditions of the story emphasized the fact that Solomon was a prophet of God with unprecedented mastery over the natural domain. As such, he easily mastered the riddles and challenges the Queen (who was said to be half jinn and possessed of significant powers herself) posed to him. The Jewish versions, on the other hand, were more concerned with reinforcing the natural order of God's universe -- including, of course, that men should rule over women. (On the other hand, Lassner quotes the Prophet Muhammad as saying: "No group prospers that appoints a woman to rule over them.")

What you quickly learn, when reading academic texts and then discussing them in an academic setting, is that each book raises far more questions than it answers, providing glimpses into fruitful areas of study that are still relatively untouched while delving into just one. I remember one teacher saying to me that each academic's special territory is like "his own little asteroid" -- painting a picture of a universe of Little Princes, shooting forward on their little projectiles, discovering new frontiers in their own private and parallel universes.

Is this a fruitful endeavor? I don't know. I do know, though, that my brain is tingling with new neural connections.

Or is that an aneurysm? By Sunday morning at around 8:45, when I reach the Hancock's top floor and get a glimpse of the view below, I should know.

--T.A.