True Ancestor

Shrunk to Fit

When I was little, I used to have a recurring daydream/nightmare. There'd be a thrumming in my ears; my whole being would vibrate and my tongue would dry and cleave to the roof of my mouth.

And I would shrink.

I'd shrink til I fit between the bottoms of the doors and the doorjambs in my childhood home. I'd be so small I'd have to climb over the fingerprints of my sleeping siblings, as if I were scrambling over sand dunes. The whoosh of the slightest air current could send me sailing, thudding into passing dust motes, until I landed, helpless but unhurt, on a giant, woolen tuft of carpet or a vast runway of floor tile.

That feeling has begun to return as I get hooked into various academic listservs and get buried in an avalanche of inquiry, analysis and cerebral tedium. The amount of information (or what passes for it) that must be produced, consumed, digested, analyzed, pored over with forensic ferocity, then reanalyzed, repackaged and resold to the mental marketplace -- it's completely overwhelming.

I am now a snowflake in this avalanche, and the onslaught of memory at my childhood miniaturization comes rushing back at me like an angry bull.

Feeling as though I had to learn to play this academic infogame, I submitted my first proposal for a paper, to a graduate religion symposium at Indiana University. To my astonishment, my proposal was accepted. I learned one of the graduate student's first, most valuable lessons:

Don't propose a paper for a conference unless you've already written the paper, or at the very least, researched the topic.

The symposium seemed like a natural fit for my interests: the topic is religion and the arts. Or, more accurately, the "Art of Religion." As someone who once worked in the arts and now studies religion, I figured I could opine with the best of them. I might even sporadically know what I was talking about.

I proposed a topic that appealed to me, even though I had nothing to back it up: Lee J. Cobb's performance as Willy Loman in the original production of Death of a Salesman, I said, was actually a prophetic act heralding the death of American Jewish identity. Seen as one bookend of a cultural moment -- the other being Cobb's testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee, three years later, in which he named more than 20 names -- I proposed that Miller's play and both Cobb's performances were deeply Jewish expressions of a desire to belong, to a society that was about to punish them for their particularity, and more specifically, for bringing redemptive and even messianic passion to their desire to change America, at a time when America feared change fomented by outsiders (among which Jews numbered).

I spent dozens of hours researching -- hours that had to be squeezed in with the thousands of pages I've been reading on other topics like Spinoza, Mendelssohn, medieval Jewish study of the Bible -- and the study of both French and Hebrew (long story).

I became aware of a virtual forest of academic journals, clubs, conventions and societies; a universe of online databases containing thousands of dissertations, catalogued according to author, subject, boolean phrase and keyword; and a vast web connecting academic libraries, departments, collections and digitized volumes all over the world.

And I felt that thrumming in my head and the dryness of my tongue, and again the doorjamb loomed above me like a wooden wave. And I began to clamber over it . . .

The paper on Willy Loman and Lee J. Cobb and the death of American Jewish identity is spectacularly uneven, but it's done. I present it at the graduate religion symposium at IU on March 6. The responder to my paper has published a scholarly article in which he says that "the Bible is a weapon fashioned under the exigencies of coloniality."

I fear the conference may be another shrinking experience for me.

--T.A.

Academic Amnesia

I've been done with school for about a week now. Even before I was done, I had to plunge back into life at work, which is a very scary place these days. The economic freefall has played havoc with the multifamily real estate business, and the worst is probably still to come.

My "little nonprofit that could" isn't in peril yet, but 2009 looks like it could be a very bad year in the apartment business, among others. Will our businesses survive? Will we be able to pay our kids' tuitions -- let alone mine?

As immersed as I was in study -- of Hebrew, of the study of religion, of Jewish memory, to name a few juicy topics -- I'm now immersed to a similar degree in the concerns of work: can we survive? Where do we need to cut back? Can my little nonprofit actually buy a property in this environment? Is there such a thing as a bank loan in this environment? Will states and municipalities still issue tax-exempt bonds for do-gooders like me? Will buyers buy, and sellers sell?

I feel as though I've already forgotten everything I learned in my first quarter of graduate school. Yesterday, I tried to shoehorn my mind back into the academic glass slipper. I was reading a scholarly article on prophecy after the Second Temple period -- and there was a footnote that contained references to more books on the Second Temple than I've ever read. And that was one footnote.

I'll soldier on. May you soldier on, too, and have restorative, rejuvenating holidays.

--T.A.

Memory: in the Academy, on the Beach

Working feverishly on a paper on religious vs. historical memory. It's been interesting to be thinking so much about memory, and what it actually is. Paul Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting is a wonderful guide through this terrain; so, in a very different way, is Y.H. Yerushalmi's Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory.

Two nights ago, sister #4, her husband and I watched a compilation he had put on video: almost 50 years of our family's home movies, including the beach here in Florida as early as 1957. Back then it was a forlorn tropical barrier island, lined with the skeletons of departed docks; now it's a cheesy resort chock-a-block with hastily built condos and 7-Elevens. In some of the videos, my parents are younger than I am now. They were both gorgeous. The men smoked and drank bottled beer caught fish by the boatful and smiled broadly through stubble and cigarette smoke; the women always wore lipstick and cat's-eye sunglasses and tied a kerchief on their head. They smoked, too. We kids, at first unused to having a lens trained on us, stared at the camera quizzically. Then we horsed and goofed for it; then we ignored it.

Before coming on this trip, I watched, with Gabe, another video taken here in Florida, at a family gathering in December 1994. The girls are getting their first look, in the video, at this whole raft of step-cousins they've inherited through me. Middle Daughter is on a different lap in each shot. Oldest Daughter is on a beach -- the subject of virtually all her childhood artwork. She is happy. Gabe was conceived on that trip.He and I marveled at the fact that in this video, he exists, though none of us knows it yet.

And in that way, memory reaches into the future, even as our forgetfulness erases the past. The beach, though vastly different, seems like a character in these videos -- an intelligence with its own memory,desires, obstacles, treasures. It's the mnemonic metronome, pr the archive that keeps yielding sacred manuscripts, hidden in the Qumran caves of our past, looming above and behind us, hidden in plain sight.

 --T.A.

I've been called worse (I think).

I must stand out like a sore thumb in these lecture classes. Here am I, with my thinning salt-and-pepper hair and my middle-aged-man attire, looking for all the world like some dilettante auditing the class. And when I ask questions, I betray the middling intellect and bourgeois assumptions of -- well -- guys like me.

The guest lecturer in our Introduction to the Study of Religion class yesterday was William Schweiker, a professor in theological ethics at the Divinity School and director of the Martin Marty Center.

I asked a question after his dense but fascinating lecture about the ethical implications of the text we were studying. The question was about whether mysticism has a place in society. I argued that the text  indicated that mysticism is an inherently solitary and even asocial pursuit, and that established society and organized religion, rather than facilitating connection to the Divine, tend to inhibit it.

I said this because the main character of the 12th-century Islamic text -- Hayy Ibn Yaqzan (which is Arabic for "Aware, son of Awake") -- returns to his secluded island after a brief visit to a neighboring, peopled island. He returns to his hermitage because he concludes that "most people are no better than animals," and that the pursuit of closeness to the Divine is best achieved not in society but in solitude.

To which Professor Schweiker replied, "that's a wonderfully Consequentialist statement you just made."

I had no idea what he meant. But I had the sense I'd been insulted, and I wanted to challenge him to a duel, right then and there. Or say something impudent ("Oh, really? And you da consequence of yo' mama").

Consequentialism, it turns out, is a school of philosophy that holds that the moral rightness of acts can only be determined by the consequences of those acts. The most prominent type of Consequentialism is the Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and the like. Here's how the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes the classic Utilitarian formula of "hedonistic act consequentialism":

[A]n act is morally right if and only if that act maximizes the good, that is, if and only if the total amount of good for all minus the total amount of bad for all is greater than this net amount for any incompatible act available to the agent on that occasion. (Cf. Moore 1912, chs. 1-2.) Hedonism then claims that pleasure is the only intrinsic good and that pain is the only intrinsic bad. Together these claims imply that an act is morally right if and only if that act causes "the greatest happiness for the greatest number," as the common slogan says.

Who knew there was a whole school of philosophy centered around this radical idea? I sure didn't.

So I guess, then, that when I asked Professer Schweiker my question I was saying, or assuming, that acts have consequences.

School is a great place to discover that you can never really have an original thought or ask a question that hasn't already been asked, debated and answered. And where your most foundational assumptions can be called into question, analyzed, poked full of holes and handed back to you.

I'm learning a lot from these people.

But I don't care how smart they are, they'd better stop calling me names.

--T.A.

Divinity School vs. Business School, or: a lesson in humility

Back when the University of Chicago was being built, it wasn't hard to find a religionist on a campus that was, in the words of the university's first president, the Baptist educator William Rainey Harper, "bran splinter new." After all, the university was co-founded by the American Baptist Education Society (with John D. Rockefeller): religion was at the heart of the enterprise, and Swift Hall, home to the Divinity School, is at the heart of the campus.

Today's campus, however, has a much more secular feel and a different gravitational center. That would be the Charles M. Harper Center of the newly re-christened (if you'll pardon the expression) Booth School of Business. The Harper Center looks like a three-dimensional Excel spreadsheet, proclaiming itself as the Prophet of Profit with a soaring -- well, squatting, glass atrium

across the street from the "Prairie Gothic" spire of Rockefeller Chapel.

 

At Swift Hall, we squeeze into those horrid little chairs with the right-handed, comma-shaped tabletops attached, in this ornate and gloomy homage to Oxford, and the professors intone above the sighing of the old steam radiators. People dance that odd little dance of ducking and wandering throughout the building when they're on their cell phones; God is everywhere, yes, but here He only has one bar.

At the business school, students lounge in comfy leather chairs under the atrium, sipping lattes and eating fresh panini from the in-house cafe (the word "cafeteria" seems beneath the reality), working on their laptops and/or BlackBerries, because after all, the building is one huge wireless network.

Even though the contrast is a little ironic, it's exactly as it should be. As religion touts humility, so the study of religion should be a humble enterprise. I enjoy the basement student lounge in Swift Hall, with its donated 70s sofas that are literally crunchy with prehistoric sandwich crumbs, and its cast-off computers that Bill Gates may have built in his garage.

And I enjoy the hissing of radiators and the Gothic gloom of the buildings, and the trees with their sclerotic branches raised in prayer toward the spires, and the genteel shabbiness of the perpetual seekers who wander Swift's step-worn stairwells.

And if I occasionally want to mooch a good snack or a clear cell-phone call over at the business school, no one can say me nay.

--T.A.

It was ever thus.

In a lecture yesterday, sitting at the back of the room, I watched as the students, most of whom around half my age, texted friends, checked e-mail, doodled, or watched movies on their laptop.

It was almost 80 degrees in the room -- a good 40 degrees warmer than outside -- and it was near the end of a long day. The text we were considering gave the following diagnosis of the student mind:

The pupils themselves are not without blame: they have abandoned the Pythagorean model of teaching, according to which a pupil should listen and believe for seven years, and ask questions only in the eighth. Instead, from the first day of school, even before sitting down, they question and, in fact, what is worse, they pass judgment. They study carelessly for the space of a single year, and think that the whole of wisdom has accrued to them, whereas they have merely snatched rags from it; they leave school full of the wind of loquacity and pride, empty of a solid knowledge of things. And when their parents or others listen to them and discover that there is little or nothing of any use in what they say, they are at once led to believe that this is all the pupils received from their teachers: so the authority of the teacher is impaired.

The author:

William of Conches, who wrote the above approximately 860 years ago.

--T.A.