Contentment vs fact

For lunch on Sunday, I made "Israeli Salad" (and the accompanying cocktail) from Zahav.  This was a deliberate choice on a number of levels: 1) it's summer, and tomatoes and cucumbers are in season, and delicious and 2) Saturday was mostly spent running around and all I could really manage to eat was potato chips, rice snacks, and a bowl of cereal, so I was feeling kind of carb-heavy.

Now, #2 is entirely silly.  Eating vegetables for lunch was kind of an act of "cleansing" which doesn't work.  The idea that some foods rid your body of other foods is entirely unscientific, except for the possible exception of insoluble fiber.  I know this is a nonsense idea.  But psychologically, it feels satisfying to eat vegetables to make up for eating lots of carbs.

And I am wondering if this psychological sense of contentment, of something that feels satisfying in the face of facts, is partly what is going on in this election season.  I mean, when majorities of Trump's supporters don't even believe half of what he is saying, facts are obviously not what is carrying the day.  It feels good (for them) to hear someone saying what he is saying.  It feels scary to know that black people, brown people, non-English-speaking people, and women are gaining power in society, power that had previously been reserved for white, English-native men.  Even if they have never actually seen these effects, they know they're out there.  It's not the actual disenfranchisement as much as the fear of it.

I'm not really sure what can be done about it, though.  In pastoral care and counseling classes, we are taught that feelings are neither right nor wrong, and that one of the first steps to dialogue is validating the other person's feelings, regardless of whether the other party thinks they are "valid" or "fair."  But when those feelings and emotions lead to real harm, to hatred and violence, validating them may not be the way to begin.  Where do you go when you've validated vitriolic hatred?  Not even that the hatred is valid, but that the person feeling it has good reason to.  That is what people are doing when they point to the hollowing of the middle class, wage stagnation, and the disappearance of jobs that don't demand a college education.  But for all the analysis of the validation, no solution is offered to get the people who are hating to stop hating.  Value systems aren't easily changed after generations.

And even educated, informed people can act contrary to fact and their own knowledge.

Swinging hips and feminism.

Taking a break from academic and theological reflections to engage in something I haven't done in a long time: film theory.  With Freud!

I spent last weekend with my sister, so she decided we must watch Frozen together.

I hadn't seen it since it was out in theatres, but of course I've read about it since then.  And there seems to be an undercurrent of frustrated feminism with the animation accompanying Elsa's "Let It Go" ballad.  A lot of that frustration hangs on Elsa's "makeover" in which her skin is suddenly revealed and she swings her hips when she changes her hair and dress.

I can understand that.  There's too much sexualisation of women's bodies out there, and it's depressing to see yet another woman get the "sexy treatment."  And yes, a lot of what is put forward as "expressing a woman's sexuality" is, in fact, expressing sexiness, that is, catering to male sexuality by becoming an object of desire, leaving the subjective gaze male.

But I think, ironically with the help of Sigmund Freud, that Elsa's makeover might not be as bad as it seems. 

"Let It Go" is undeniably a claim to power.  Elsa, catastrophically facing the fact that suppression is not control, gives in and really learns to control her ice powers for the first time by freeing and expressing them.  She is overjoyed to finally claim and use her power.  And let's not forget that this comes on her coronation day; she is not only claiming magical power, but also political power.  She is the Snow Queen.

In Freudian theory, female power is always sexual (ok, in Freudian theory, everything is sexual).  The womb, and even more so, the vagina, are tied to death, or the fear of death for men.  Male power is penetration.  When Elsa makes herself over, she is claiming her political power, her magical power, and her sexual power.  And here is the thing: she is claiming them for herself.  She has left everyone behind and wants to remain alone.  She is not remaking herself for a man.  Slightly later, one of her icicles very nearly penetrates a man who has come to kill her.  Elsa's new hair and dress are for her, and for her alone.  She even remains uncoupled at the end of the story.  I think it's also worth noting that she's striding forward aggressively when the makeover happens, not sitting back on a couch and winking in a come-hither manner.  And the men in the story are terrified of her.

Traditionally, the destabilizing, powerful, single female character is domesticated at the end of a story by marriage (or by death if it's a tragedy).  Having threatened the destruction of family and/or nation, she is reabsorbed into its structure and penetrated by her new husband (e.g. Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, or Eowyn in The Lord of the Rings). 

Yes, Frozen is a film.  Yes, Elsa remains on screen, a spectacle for the male gaze.  But in the context of the film itself, she is the opposite of the faux-feminist sexiness; she has claimed power for herself, she remains unpenetrated and uncoupled.  She does not need a man to make her happy or to perform for.  Instead of marriage, her instability is domesticated in the story by having her take up her proper position as queen, guided by a ruler's love for her people and country (this being traditional story conventions, Classical and Medieval "divine right of kings" stuff here,  not my personal opinion).

There's a debate over whether it's really appropriate to use Freudian theory to analyze texts, and I agree that sometimes it's used inappropriately.  But Elsa's song and makeover are just so perfectly explained by it and ironically rescued as indeed feminist by it that I just couldn't help myself.  Suppression, female power, female sexuality, male fear of death, penetration, it's all there. 

Now.  You can certainly debate the appropriateness of having an adult character with adult sexuality set as a role model for pre-pubescent girls.  But I think the message of Elsa's makeover isn't quite as anti-feminist or domesticating as it might seem.  In claiming her power, Elsa removes herself from male power and defies the male gaze.

You don't have to believe.

One of the things that has bugged me for a long time and has been a driving force personally in my very vague career direction is people tacking things on to Christianity and forcing people to accept a whole bunch of stuff that is not, in fact, universal to Christianity. 

As far as I'm concerned, the Nicene Creed pretty much sums it up.* 

There are a whole bunch of things that people of all stripes add on that drive people away from Jesus.  So I'm going to list some of the things here that piss me off.

You do not have to believe:

1.  The earth is 6,000, or 10,000 or whatever years old.

2.  Evolution doesn't happen.

3.  God meticulously controls everything.

4.  God created evil.  Also under this heading: God planned the Holocaust, God plans for children to die, God plans serial killers, God endorses war.

5.  God likes or endorses patriarchy.

6.  Only certain special people control access to God.

7.  The Bible is an instruction book.

8.  God is obsessed with what you do with your genitals.

9.  The best Christian is an unthinking, blindly believing Christian.

10.  One slip-up in activity dooms you for life and/or eternity.

11.  Christianity is just a series of guidelines invented over the years to help people live better.

All of these things are things you can believe if you want.  I would argues that all of them are wrong, actually, but I don't condemn anyone for believing them.  But absolutely none of them are essential to being a Christian.

*Normally, I would have linked here to Wikipedia or whatever, but I'm actually working on my own translation of the Nicene Creed.  I'll probably unveil it some day.  In the meantime, GIYF.

Including tradition.

So many things I could have blogged about this week. 

But I'm going to take on something that I should have written last week that is still bugging me.

I haven't been to church in over a year.  Part of that is that I've been very, very hurt by a church in the past, part of that is that I've moved 3 times and I'm not in a place with weak public transportation, and part of it is that I don't really know how to go to church anymore if I'm not staff.  And yet one more factor is that I am, as my blog says, quite eclectic in my theology, and it's hard to find a place where I'm comfortable. 

One of those eclecticisms is that I'm both traditionalist and progressive.  I love a lot of the classic hymns of Christianity, but I don't love a lot of the masculine language they contain.  Last week, I woke up from a dream with the hymn "Be Thou My Vision" stuck in my head.  This is a lovely hymn with 2 quite problematic lines.  The first appears in the second verse:

Thou my true Father and I thy true son

And the second is the first line of the third verse:

Riches I heed not nor man's empty praise

 The last church I attended was a moderately conservative Episcopal church, and I remembered that in the hymnal, that second line had been changed to

Riches I heed not nor vain, empty praise

which I think is nice, and works.  But I couldn't remember what the other line had been.

And that line has bothered me for a long time.  I know "man" has been used for "human" for a long time, and while I don't like it, I can kind of at least slide myself into it when I sing a traditional hymn.  But I can't be a son.  "Sons" maybe I can sort of include myself in because I know it's a clumsy translation in the Bible from בני b'nei or παιδός paidos (both of which, yes, can mean "sons" but they also stand in those languages generally for "children" especially in Hebrew which doesn't have another word for "children").  But "I thy true son" just doesn't work in my head.  And it was driven home strongly several years ago when the hymn was sung as a solo by one of the women on our music team.  She had a gorgeous voice, mezzo-soprano-ish, and that line just sounded utterly ludicrous when she sang it.  And it's funny because that community usually changed the pointless masculine language to inclusive language when it could.

I think the problem is the next line.  You see, the usual arrangement of this hymn is in rhyming couplets.  So it goes:

Thou my true Father and I thy true son
Thou with me dwelling and I with thee one

This also makes sense in the context of the original hymn, which was composed and sung by Irish monks.  They were all male, and they had dedicated their lives to a kind of life that centers around God and worship.  But as much as I might long for unity with God, I'm not a monk and I cannot really be a "true son."  I'm not so great with rhyme and rhythm language, and I couldn't think of a way to alter those two lines to keep the meter and rhyme.  "Child" really doesn't work - what in the world could it rhyme with?

So, as we do, I turned to the internet.  Googling "be thou my vision inclusive" doesn't, helpfully, bring up an inclusive version of the hymn, but instead a lot of people bitching about changing hymn lyrics.  Which, just, ugh. 

I don't mind traditional masculine language for God, as long as it's properly balanced by acknowledging that there is plenty of traditional feminine language for God and I do prefer if people avoid pronouns generally.  And I don't mind the "king" language, because that is rather part of God's character and what makes God God.  If God isn't ruler, no one is, and we are God's creation, so God has authority over us and the rest of creation.  I'm as pacifist as anyone, and I'm all for the church avoiding taking power and authority, but I don't mind if God has it.

But there are people out there who bitch about any change to any masculine language.  Including that referring to people.  Sometimes they claim it's about translation and respecting the original grammar, but somehow they're ok with never referring to the Spirit of God as feminine the way it is in Hebrew grammar.  So basically that argument is intellectually bankrupt.  Appeals to "original language" are just appeals to keep women from being fully included, and are no better than the Victorians leaving obscene bits untranslated "in the modesty of the original language" (which was, of course, perfectly understood by women in ancient Greece or Rome). 

One of the things that drove me away from the fringes of evangelicalism where I was and to the Episcopal Church was that I am just sick of fighting about gender.  I'm a woman (more or less), God called me to teach.  I'm not going to fight about it.  I'm just tired.  Other women are called to, and I'm glad for them.  But I'd rather be part of a community that lets me get on with doing what I'm called to do and not interested in deciding if it's ok first or not.  It reminds me of one of my professors at JTS.  He is orthodox, and JTS is conservative (which is to say, less observant and slightly more liberal).  I once asked him why he was at JTS and not YU and he said at YU, he would say something, and the class had to spend 20 minutes discussing whether what he said was heretical or not.  At JTS, they just engage in what he actually said.  I'm not interested in people debating whether I can talk or not.

It took me a while of slogging and fine-tuning the Google search, but I finally found a lovely inclusive re-phrasing:

Thou my true Father, thine own may I beThou with me dwelling and I one with thee

 Keeps the same theme and sentiment, just re-works the word order for a nice couplet.  So now I can sing this hymn again.  Thank God for community.

Rhetoric has consequences.

I hope I don't need to provide links.  There have been so many violent events recently that it would be depressing to go trawling through websites looking for examples of all of them.  Other people have done the reporting, and some have even attempted to look at the context.

What is, and I hate to use the word, but, interesting is that it seems to be a transnational western/northwestern global thing right now.  The rise of nativism and populism in the United States is trailing a similar rise in western Europe.  While the U.S. has a somewhat unique racial context and history to some that rhetoric, western Europe is itself grappling with the legacy of colonialism which radically and violently othered those with darker skin, and the philosophical underpinnings of those histories is quite explicitly shared.

At the same time, a new rhetorical power (from those of darker skin) is also rising right now and explicitly designed to cause its own violence. 

As long as those in power somehow believe that their history and wealth and light skin absolve them of the actual, real, violent effects of their rhetoric, as long as they lie to themselves and say, "they're not like us, we are rational and would never commit those acts," they will continue to cause them.  A friend of mine was lamenting to me today about the predictability of that violence.  This rhetorical and ideological world that is being created inevitably, logically leads to violence.

Yes, yes, everyone has to make an individual decision to be violent eventually.  Shut up.  The nativist,  populist, othering, even apocalyptic rhetoric that is coming from all corners is, in fact, creating an environment where making that decision to be violent seems logical, reasonable, and even praiseworthy.

As long as dehumanizing rhetoric is being used, humans will continue treating other humans as things, not human beings. 

As Jews and Christians (I don't actually know about Islam), we affirm that all human beings are created in the very image of God, that there is something divine and therefore worthy of respect and love in every single human being.  Colour of skin or religion or wealth are not enough to deprive anyone of that divine image.  The destruction of it in other human beings is an act of violence not only against them, but against the image of God in the one committing the violence as well.

quick update.

lack of caps,  in the old style.

i'm moving tomorrow, so my life is in shambles right now.  i keep looking for things and thinking, "oh, i packed that already."

however, i've been trying to leave a comment on my own blog and said blog is eating it o.O

so thanks to Jonathan in the post below for the update on aramaic at cal.  i am specifically interested in the post-biblical stuff, so not sure where the epigraphic content falls.  i could hope for DSS and Bak Kochba, but who knows.

probably the only person capable of instructing palestinian jewish aramaic is my old midrash professor at JTS.  traditionally, you are simply handed the rabbinic texts and told, "good luck, kid."  Professor Visotzky kept complaining about "the gremlins of Bar Ilan" who "corrected" palestinian jewish aramaic to bablyonian jewish aramaic. maybe i'll just have to take a semester and go back to NYC!

A bit much.

This is getting a bit ridiculous.

Because of a misspent youth, I ended up having to learn a whole bunch of languages.  French, because you needed a language in high school.  Latin and Greek because I was a Classics major.  Italian because, uh, actually, just because.  I got to live in Florence for a month which was a lot of fun.  Biblical/classical Hebrew, because in seminary I already had Greek, so why not?  Syriac because... uh, well, because by that time I was kind of collecting languages, and it was really interesting to not only learn a new language but also a new Christian tradition.  Modern Hebrew because JTS requires all their students to learn it because Jewish (and most Israelis I've ever spoken to insist that Modern Hebrew and Classical Hebrew should really be categorized as different languages.  Just like I wouldn't say I can speak Modern Greek).

So I'm up to ... 8 languages.  4 modern (yes, English counts even if it is my native language), and 4 ancient.  And that's still not enough to satisfy PhD requirements.

I'm taking German this summer.  And my department wants me to take either Aramaic or another ancient language.  If I could learn Palestinian Jewish Aramaic instead biblical Aramaic, I'd rather that.  Palestinian Jewish Aramaic is the language of the later Amoraic rabbis, after the Mishnah, and after the Roman empire went Christian.  It's the language the later Midrashim are written in, as well as the Yerushalmi Talmud, not the Babylonian Talmud, which is the famous one.  I'm trying to keep my research focus on the eastern Roman empire, and I'm interested in Jewish belief and practise before the hegemony of the rabbis and the Babylonian Talmud.

And I'm kind of thinking of learning Arabic because it seems like it might be useful, and also because of world events, etc.

So that would make it... 11?

Uh, yeah.  This is getting a bit much.  But it is also interesting and fun.  The more languages I learn, the more literature opens up to me, and also more people and cultures to learn about and understand.  And I feel like in our current socio-political environment, understanding other people and cultures and being able to speak their language is a good and important thing.

Finished, sort of.

Well, that's over.

Thesis written and approved.

Last class paper written, submitted, and graded.

Final exam taken.

I'm done with another Master's degree.

I never really wanted this degree, and parts of it have been a huge pain in the ass and disappointment, but despite having to take a bunch of courses I never wanted to, I can't really say it's been a waste of time.  I did learn a lot that I wouldn't have otherwise, and I made some very good contacts who probably helped me finally get that PhD admission.

On the other hand, a number of the courses I took were really fascinating and I learned quite a lot that I wanted to and acquired new academic tools.  I now have a credible background for handling rabbinic texts, which will only be beneficial moving forward.

What has been most fascinating to me, and what I think has actually been the most helpful, has been learning to navigate the subculture of Jewish academics.  (Gentile) Christians read some of them, but there are whole subtexts that I think are being missed, because the Jewish scholars are fundamentally asking different questions and coming at the texts from a slightly different way.  Whereas (Gentile) Christian scholars either come from a faithful Christian perspective or pretend to be interested in dispassionate history, Jewish scholars almost always have the question, "What does it mean to be Jewish?" hovering in the background of their writing.  In many ways (except maybe for the colour of skin), Jewish scholarship really does fit better with minority/minoritized scholarship instead of "mainstream"/"unhyphenated" scholarship.  I am certainly asking this Jewish question, and I am unapologetic about it.  All scholarship is biased; it's better to acknowledged our biases up front than either hide them and pretend they're not there, or to completely ignore them and be un-self-conscious about them..

So.  On to the next degree!  I've worked really hard to get here.  I'm finally a PhD student.

6 million is a lot of people.

On Yom HaShoah, I am once again pondering the effects of the Holocaust on twentieth and twenty-first century scholarly imagination.  I already posted about the "crisis in theology" that resulted among Christian scholars, but today I have a different thought.

We forget how many Jews there used to be.

6 million is a lot of people.  It's a number that gets thrown around, but I think it really is kind of incomprehensible to think of how many people that really is.  And then there are, to my surprise, almost 200,000 survivors living in Israel alone today, not to mention how many there have been over the last few decades.  These are even more people that were removed from the European population.

I once preached a sermon, I forget which one it was now, and a visitor (who therefore didn't know I was Jewish) came up to me afterwards and said to me, "I always resisted calling us 'Judeo-Christian' because I didn't think there was anything really Jewish about who we are and I didn't want to be associated with Jews.  But you've kind of changed my mind."  I was... a little flabbergasted, to be honest, and responded with a smile and something polite about the accuracy of history and how many Jews there were in the Roman Empire.  He laughed and said, "Yeah, all point-three percent of them!" and went on his way.

But he was wrong.  Jews weren't 0.3 percent of the Roman Empire.  By some estimates, 10% of the population of Rome in the first century BCE were Jews (I think.  I know I've read that somewhere but I can't find a source at the moment...).  Jews were a significant portion of the population in Alexandria, and all over the eastern Mediterranean.

We, today, are so used to the decimated Jewish population in Europe that we really don't have a sense for how big and apparently influential the Jewish population was in the ancient world.  I say influential, because there had to be a reason Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Herodotus, and Suetonius, at a minimum, mentioned and wrote about Jews.  Claudius' expulsion of the Jews from Rome was a momentous enough event that Suetonius included it in his biography a hundred years later.  The Jewish population was not always the small minority it is now, but was a much more significant minority which had political standing and enough weight that special legislation was written for it.

This has led to some interesting scholarly reactions.  The one I'm thinking of right now is recorded in Cynthia Baker's chapter "'From Every Nation under Heaven' Jewish Ethnicities in the Greco-Roman World" in Prejudice and Christian Beginnings (eds. Laura Nasrallah and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza) where she points out that all the people "from every nation" in Acts 2 were probably all Jews.  Christian scholars have such a hard time wrapping their minds around the phenomenon of a) lots and lots of Jews from all over the ancient world, inside and outside the Roman Empire and b) Jews who speak other languages.

This is, in an odd way, both the triumph and tragedy of the success of Zionism and its projects of both the modern state of Israel and Modern Hebrew.  It has become so ingrained in the contemporary imagination that Jews are focused on Israel and have some knowledge of Hebrew.  The Holocaust and the subsequent establishment of the state of Israel so drastically changed the face of Europe's Jewish population that people today have problems conceiving of any other way of things being arranged. 

Language and preconceptions.

I finished my thesis last Thursday!  And it was approved by my advisor! So I'm that much closer to my second master's degree.

For today, something that isn't my thesis.

Yesterday after Ulpan Hebrew, one of my classmates asked me if the Ten Commandments were given in Aramaic.  And I shrugged my shoulders and said, well, they're written in Hebrew, and that's the only form we have them in.

But more important, I think, is the question or assumptions behind her question.  She's a scholar, I think she has a PhD, and she's leaving Sunday to travel around Europe giving talks on Ladino, the Hebrew/Spanish/Latinate creole of Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula (similar to the Hebrew/Germanic/Slavic Yiddish of Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe).  So her specialty is Medieval, not ancient Jews.

There's this long assumption, and because of its history, it's the one in popular culture/non-specialist academics, that Hebrew was mostly a written language and Aramaic was the spoken one.

There are two problems with this assumption.  One, Aramaic and Hebrew are different languages.  And it's not like Latin to French, it's more like Spanish to French.  Both are Western Semitic languages which developed in parallel, not one from the other.

The second is that Hebrew must have functioned like Latin in the late Medieval church, because even though the Mishnah and the early Midrashim are written in Hebrew, it's a different Hebrew from the Bible, so it must be a corrupted version, like Medieval Latin was to Classical Latin, and the rabbis were obviously speaking Aramaic.  This assumption, I shouldn't have to point out, comes from Christian scholars in the 19th century.  I usually do have to point out, however, that these Christian scholars were by and large either straight-up anti-Semitic, or more casually anti-Jewish.  Underlying either stance is the unquestioned assumption that Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple was a dead religion, dry and legalistic, with no spirituality, non-life-giving, and abandoned by its God.  It's also worth pointing out that many Jews from the 19th and early 20th centuries who trained in European, and therefore Gentile, Christian universities adopted and perpetuated some of these assumptions because they were the accepted scholarly opinions of the day.

In 1947, the caves at Qumran were discovered, and eventually the thousands of manuscript fragments there gave quite a different picture.  Most of them are written in Hebrew, and it is a Hebrew that is obviously a spoken, living language, one that is used for letters, scriptural commentary, poem and prayer composition, and speculative theology.  Also discovered in wadis in the Dead Sea area were the Bar Kokhba letters and the Babatha Archive.  While the Babatha Archive is mostly in Greek, the Bar Kokhba letters are in Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew, and these are not religious but political documents.  Together with the scrolls from the Qumran sect, these documents show the Hebrew was, in fact, a living, spoken language, well into the second century CE, and that Mishnaic Hebrew, far from being a corrupted memory of a dead "liturgical" language, was instead probably the language the rabbis were actually speaking when they composed their texts.

It is true that eventually, later in the third and fourth centuries, Aramaic did apparently become the main language, as the later Midrashim and the Yerushalmi (Palestinian/Jerusalem Talmud) are written in Palestinian Aramaic, not Hebrew.  But there doesn't appear to be any historical evidence backing up the old assumption that by the Second Temple period, Hebrew had already faded into a barely remembered "liturgical" language.

Graduation approaches

Hebrew started this week, so I think blog posts (assuming I remember to write them) are moving to Thursday.

As the title says, graduation doth approach, which means I am starting to feel kind of stressed out about my thesis.  Since I am, I'll write about that today.  It turns out that I did indeed decide to build my thesis on top of my good paper from last semester.  I'm just adjusting it slightly so that it's not a paper about 4QMMT anymore, but about a sociological analysis of Second Temple Jewish groups.

It's generally accepted now that during the Second Temple period, Judaism was moderately diverse and divided into different groups or sects and even to speak of "Judaisms."  Most analysis of these follows standard sociological constructs, in the vein of Max Weber or and Ernst Troeltsch. These scholars both built generally applicable sociological models to explain groups or sects in any human society.

One aspect of the Second Temple sects that I think has been overlooked is the importance that halakhah played in these groups' various self-definitions and also as a cause for sect formation in the first place.  I am using "halakhah" (הלכה) to refer not to the Torah itself, but to its interpretation and specifically practical interpretation.  The discovery of the documents known as 4QMMT at Qumran and the apparent attestation to a halakhic debate that also appears in the Mishnah invigorated study of the Qumran sect and their possible provenance, but I still think even Jewish scholars overlooked the importance of halakhah itself.

I am arguing that halakhah was in some cases the cause of group/sect formation (as in the case of 4QMMT) and definitely one of the primary characteristics of self-definition.  Josephus tries to explain the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes to his Gentile audience by making them look like Greek philosophical schools, but he cannot hide that many of the disagreements between the groups were halakhic in nature.  Even, I am arguing, the Jesus movement cared about halakhah, recorded their group's halakhic decisions, and cast Jesus as their group's halakhic authority.

What crisis in theology?

It is common to say that the Holocaust caused a crisis in theology.  What kind of god would allow the systematic and mechanized murder of millions of human beings?  But it also caused a deep crisis for many Christians who had to stare at the rhetoric of the church's history and its use by the abhorrent Deutsche Christen of the Nazis as well as the general acquiescence to anti-Semitism by European and white American Christians.  Not only God, but the church itself had to undergo redefinition.

Earlier this week, I was reading a very insightful article on Donald Trump.  The author argues cogently

Barack Obama is many things, but conservative rhetoric aside, he’s no radical.

We can’t say the same for Obama as a political symbol, however. In a nation shaped and defined by a rigid racial hierarchy, his election was very much a radical event, in which a man from one of the nation’s lowest castes ascended to the summit of its political landscape.  ...

For millions of white Americans who weren’t attuned to growing diversity and cosmopolitanism, however, Obama was a shock, a figure who appeared out of nowhere to dominate the country’s political life. And with talk of an “emerging Democratic majority,” he presaged a time when their votes—which had elected George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan—would no longer matter. More than simply “change,” Obama’s election felt like an inversion. (emphasis original)

This "shock" is the loss of white power and loss of the white perspective as normative.  And I think this is the same shock that Christian theology is undergoing in the century after the Holocaust.  It is not so much that Christianity was wrong as it was centuries of white male theology culminated in something so horrific.  That the "historical-critical method" could be brought to bear on the wholesale slaughter of human beings.

However, for anyone who was paying attention, this should not be surprising.  Many of the scholars who pioneered the historical-critical method were openly anti-Semitic, because the Christian church had been for centuries.  From the constant expulsions and denial of citizenship to the slaughter of Jews during Passion Week to the forced conversions of the Inquisition to the pogroms of eastern Europe, the church had been arguing, in many of its myriad Roman Catholic and Protestant forms, that Jews were members of a decadent, dead religion, abandoned by their God, and deserving of death.  The famous documentary hypothesis of Welhausen rests implicitly on these assumptions (e.g. P must be late, because the Law was a corruption of God's original religion).

And so, with a weekend's reflection, I am going to say that there should be no crisis of theology or faith for Christians because of the Holocaust, but only a crisis of unexamined, un-self-conscious assumption of white supremacy.  White Europeans are not special, and have no more intellectual capacity and insight than anyone else, and the Holocaust proves they can sometimes get it catastrophically, barbarously wrong.

Same sex marriage and category errors.

I've been on here before stating that many of the arguments against same sex marriage fail because they attribute characteristics to different sex marriage that don't exist or are historically implausible.  Today I'm going to attack another: the idea that if we legitimize any "alternative" to 1-male-1-female marriage, we open the door to all of them.

This stance is not only very common, but is unfortunately helped by the "love is love" argument, which I have made here myself.  I'm going to call that a category error because marriage is not 100% about whom you are attracted to.  The similarities between two people of the same sex getting married are far greater to two people of different sexes than they are to any of the ridiculously suggested "slippery slopes" like human-animal, child, or incestuous marriages.

Validating same sex marriage is not validating any and all variants of human sexual attraction.  This is the argument, and it is false.  Two men or women who wish to commit their lives to each other and form a household as consenting adults are pretty much equivalent to a man and a woman who wish to do the same thing.  They are adults.  They are both capable of fully informed consent.  Both couples are capable of raising and providing for children which will not, from the conception, be genetically disadvantaged.  All of these things are impossible for the "alternative" marriages described above.

The other question that comes up, especially in regards to child marriage, is one of cultural norms.  If, as was common throughout human history, children or young adolescents entering marriage is a cultural norm, shouldn't we tolerate it?  In this case, I think the answer is still no, because we have decided that, generally, children and young adolescents are not capable of making those kinds of decisions.  The frontal cortex is not fully formed until the late teens or twenties, and this development has significant impacts on a person's decision-making capabilities.  The other factor is that child marriage is much more often the girl or young woman being married to a much older man. which initiates not only an impressive power imbalance, but also pairs someone who may or may not be capable of consent with someone who is able to force a decision.  In this case, the woman is undervalued from the start, and this is simply not what we should be striving for.

I've avoided the word "biblical" several times here because there are examples in the Bible of all kinds of marriages, including ones today we would find abhorrent (e.g. children, rape, slaves).  However, what is described in the biblical text and what God has established as ideal for God's people are not the same thing.  I think the biblical text is pretty clear that the ideal marriage in God's kingdom is monogamous and equal and based on love.  These characteristics are easily matched by both same and different sex marriages.  They are not by any other "scary" alternative.

Can we please stop using "lady" for just about anything?

I am so sick of reading about anything "lady." "Lady parts." "Lady talk." Anything prefixed with "lady."  Also, calling women "ladies."  It's irritating in its faux sarcasm and irony.  It's also ridiculously infantilizing, especially when referring to genitals, but generally, because God forbid we should use the word "women."  Honestly, "girl" is better because at least it doesn't come with the smarm of look-at-me-I'm-so-ironic. 

What really bugs me is when I see it used with self-conscious cuteness by otherwise feminist writers.  As if there's something special and different when "ladies" do something opposed to men or mixed company.  It still has the effect of othering women and women's experiences.

Just stop.

The shortsightedness of commoditizing the mind.

I live in Silicon Valley now.  I miss the east coast, and specifically New York.  But certain things seem sharper here.

"Everyone should learn to code!"

The United States government is planning to invest four billion dollars in teaching American students to learn to code.

Obviously, a lot of smart people are convinced that computer science is the way of the future and that it's becoming a necessary skill to generally be a competent adult.  Which is to say, get a job.

There's a problem with this, however.  Well actually, there's a lot of problems.  The first is that to teach someone computer science and coding, you need to choose a language to teach them.  And that language is either a) written for the express purpose of teaching someone to code, which will turn out lots of people who know that specific language but not much else or b) trendy at the moment you are teaching them, but will go out of fashion in a few years.

The underlying problem here is treating education as if it is job training.  Neither of the products of a) or b) above will be able to "hit the ground running" when hired for a job, which is more or less the stated goal of teaching people computer science in the first place.  The education system in this country, public school up to university, is treating students, that is human minds, as if they are commodities to be pumped out the door into corporations.  And those corporations are and have been complaining that this system is producing substandard products.

I am and have been, as you might guess, a liberal arts student.  But I can code.  And I wasn't a bad coder.  I can't get a job coding because I haven't done it since 2007, so I appear as if I am out of fashion.  The thing is, because I'm a liberal arts student, I know how to think.  And computer science requires a shitload of good logic.  Philosophy teaches logic.  Give me a book and a week and I can learn a programming language (I can say this because that's precisely how I learned Python).  I can do this because I've studied philosophy and logic and languages and all programming languages do basically the same thing, you just need to learn the specifics of how that particular language handles it.  It's even easier than learning human languages (Ancient Semitic languages, for example, don't have verb tenses.  There is no past or future.  It makes translating... fun).  But I can also do lots of other things besides code.

And this is the problem.  Four billion dollars would be a lot better spent teaching people logic and philosophy and then tacking a basic comp sci course at the end.  But people want instant results and when a human being is just another commodity, it's a lot easier not to worry about the future of that human being.

State churches, ecclesiology, and history.

The news in part of the Christian world this week that is being quite talked about is the "suspension" of the Episcopal Church in the USA by the Anglican Communion.  Unfortunately, the mainstream press has gotten a lot of it wrong, and made outrageous statements about it.  I've been following it because for several years now I have been circling around the Episcopal Church and considering pursuing ordination in that denomination.

This is a ridiculous and illogical article.  The author complains that the Anglican Communion has "disciplined" the Episcopal Church in the USA for changing their rites to allow full gay marriage "while unambiguous sins of other leaders have gone unaddressed."  And those sins are supporting repressive and punitive anti-LGBT legislation in their own home countries.

It is completely illogical because the people who voted to discipline the Episcopal Church are the very same ones engaged in supporting anti-LGBT legislation.  Of course they are not going to chastise themselves for their sins; they think they are right!  It is not hypocritical at all, what it is is unidirectional bias and consistent thinking.

This is one of the things that, unfortunately, makes me lukewarm about the Episcopal Church.  I am not sure I want to be associated with an organization that has such virulent anti-gay attitudes. 

But there's another, deeper problem here for me, theologically.  The Episcopal Church, and the Anglican Communion in general, are descended from the Church of England.  And the Church of England is an established state church.  We don't have those in this country, so I think Americans often miss the theological dangers of state church traditions (Americans in general have pretty wide ignorance about state churches and their history.  I once read a journalist reporting on the German parliament ask indignantly what happened to the separation of church and state.  Newsflash: it doesn't exist in Germany).

Besides the inhumanity of anti-LGBT legislation, the African primates are not only within their rights to affirm such legislation, but the history of state churches encourages them to get involved in the legislative process.  Until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was baptism in the state church that granted citizenship (this also, by the way, opens a huge window that most people ignore when discussing European anti-semitism and the Holocaust).  It was the state church that made marriages and therefore inheritance legal.  Bishops in England still officially have seats in Parliament.  And this has led to a certain theology of church and society, one where the "wheat and tares" of Jesus' parable refers to the general population as a whole, who are all baptized as infants and then don't make good on the Christian baptismal commission.

I was raised in an amalgam of Anabaptist traditions, and I do think they have a better ecclesiology.  The church is made of those who have joined it voluntarily, it does not look for power in the world, and it operates separated from the world's structures.  For an Anabaptist, love is the guiding principal, and political legislation is irrelevant to the church's practises.  Even were a Mennonite bishop anti-LGBT, he or she would never endorse legislation criminalizing their lives.  It was, in fact, the huge population of German Anabaptists in Philadelphia (from whom I'm partially descended), as well as William Penn's Quakers, who made it possible for the framers of our Constitution to consider the possibility of no state church at all.

So the other reason I get a little leery of the Episcopal Church is its state church history.  It was the state church of Virginia and many of the southern colonies until the Constitution, and many Episcopalians unconsciously associate their church with social and political power.  When I look at the history of the church global, especially the first few centuries after Jesus left it, I don't see a church that was formed for power.  I see one that was formed in social and political weakness and extended love to those on the edges and margins of society.  Any Christian claim to political power is, I feel, not a Christian claim at all.

Winter break.

My plan was to update this blog at least every Wednesday. But now it's Wednesday and I'm sort of having trouble thinking of something to write. I should probably mention that it's also the middle of the winter break - no classes for 6 weeks, whee! - so I'm a little braindead generally.

 I am also supposed to be coming up with a topic for my MA thesis. I'm not having much luck with that either. I proposed one very badly-considered idea to my advisor and he never responded, which was not entirely unexpected, but I hoped he would have some alternate suggestions. On the other hand, the last time I tried that, it resulted in one of the worst papers I've ever written, so maybe he learned we're quite different people.

Here we go. I shall post the abstract of the paper I wrote for my Dead Sea Scrolls class last semester.

4QMMT, Halakhah, and Second Temple Sects

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran opened the study of the history of the Second Temple period wider than it had been before. The historical reconstruction of Jewish belief and practice, especially in the field of halakhah, or Jewish law, has been greatly enhanced by the legal texts found among the Scrolls. But questions about how to read and where to place these texts still linger. E. P. Sanders has convinced many scholars that “covenental nomism” was the common religious ground in the period; other scholars believe that the only common ground was diversity itself. The Qumran legal texts seem to provide evidence that many of the post-Destruction rabbis’ concerns do indeed have roots in the Second Temple intra-Jewish debates, but the question is how to read this evidence and how it illuminates the reconstruction of the Qumran sect, the picture of diversity in Second Temple Judaism(s), and the development of the rabbis.

The discovery and publication of 4QMMT in particular opened the floodgates of debate on halakhah in the Second Temple Period. It reinvigorated two areas of study around the Qumran sect: the first of the identity of the sect, as the text indicated some very intriguing possibilities, and the second of the historicity of Jewish halakhah, especially as it is recorded in the earliest rabbinic texts. 4QMMT witnesses that as today and as among the talmudic rabbis, halakhah was one of the sociological determining characteristics in Jewish culture even before the destruction of the Second Temple. The text not only provides us with a window into this debate, but it also enriches what we know both about the earliest Jesus-followers as they are recorded in the New Testament and the rabbinic traditions which claim to be from the first century either before or just after the Destruction in 70 CE. One of the more interesting angles to be investigated is the depiction of halakhah in the New Testament, and a possible interpretation of Jesus being depicted in some instances in the Gospels as a halakhic authority.

Hello again.

In honour of joining Twitter, I'm re-opening this blog.  And since it's the feast of the Epiphany, I'm posting a sermon I never posted here because I never preached it.

It was an assignment for a class about the embeddedness of anti-Judaism in Christian theology and preaching.  It is so habitual and, quite frankly, lazy of Christian preachers to use "Jews" or Jewish characters in the Bible as examples of the other, the non-Christian, the culture and worldview that Jesus fought against or left behind.  This is, of course, sociologically impossible.  As a Jew, Jesus was just as Jewish as his Jewish audience, and shared with them the same culture and worldview.  This has become the focus of my research (maybe I'll post an excerpt or abstract of a paper later), but this sermon was the first place where I was really challenged to tackle it in a non-academic context consciously.  I do naturally, as a Jewish Christian, avoid explicit anti-Judaism and supersessionism when I preach, but those habits of thinking and theologizing hover in the background, even for me.

So here is the sermon.  The text is Matthew 2:1-12.  The particular anti-Jewish tendency in preaching this text is to vilify Herod and the Jerusalem Jews as those who got it wrong while praising the Gentile Magi as those who got it right.  It's hugely easy, and presents a challenge for the preacher to break out of that pattern.

The sermon was written as if it was to be preached to the church where I was a pastoral intern at the time, a moderately conservative Episcopal church.

The Epiphany

Today is the feast of the Epiphany, also known as the twelfth day of Christmas.  You will be glad to know we have dispensed with the lords-a-leaping and maids-a-milking.  And we couldn’t fit five gold rings for everyone into the church budget.  But today is the day Christians traditionally celebrate the arrival of the magi, and it may have been where the whole gift-giving thing started.  So, this church festival might be the root of the consumerism of Christmas.

And this is really both a shame and very ironic, because it obscures what Epiphany is about.  An “epiphany” is a revelation - and sometimes the word is still used in that sense in language today.  You might have an epiphany after spending all day on a problem at work, then finally coming home and going to bed.  Neuroscientists tell us that our sleeping brains often re-order data so that when we wake up, the problem is solved.   But according to our gospel passage today, there are other ways to receive epiphanies.

The magi saw a star in the east.  The language is imprecise here, and there are disagreements regarding exactly who the magi were, but there are two conclusions that seem to be pretty accurate: 1) the magi were astrologers, because they saw the star and drew meaning from it, and 2) they were Gentiles, both because they came “from the east” and because God’s Law outlawed astrology and other forms of predicting the future.  But nevertheless, they received an epiphany, a revelation, in God’s creation as they watched and tried to read the stars.

Isn’t that funny?  God uses astrology, something he has outlawed, as a way to get a hold of their attention.  But you might notice the star does not lead them straight to Jesus.  No, they know the “king of the Jews” has been born, but they are not sure where.  So once they get to Judea, they go to the current king, Herod, and ask about this new king.

And Herod - well - Herod gets a little freaked out.  This is not too surprising.  For one, Herod is not a legitimate king.  He doesn’t come from the historic royal line, and he isn’t really a Jew; he comes from an area to the east called Idumea, which was conquered and forcibly converted to Judaism about a hundred and fifty years before.  And we also know that Herod became paranoid in his old age, even going so far as to kill two of his sons and his favorite wife because he suspected they were plotting against him.  The third reason Herod is not entirely a legitimate king was because he held onto his power by being backed by the Romans.  The Jewish people hated the Romans and thought of them as Gentile oppressors, mostly because they were.  Roman justice in its provinces was notoriously violent, and Roman leaders had on more than one occasion tried to force the Jewish people to worship their gods.

So Herod is not happy at all to hear there is another king of the Jews.  For one, it means a threat to his own personal power.  And for another, this new king might become a rallying point and cause a rebellion against Rome, a rebellion that Herod knows will be put down brutally and violently.  And Herod also knows who the true king of the Jews is.  Remember what the text said: when Herod called together all the chief priests and scribes, he asks them where the Messiah was to be born.  The true, legitimate king of the Jews, one whose birth would be heralded by God with a star, is the Messiah, the Christ, God’s anointed one.

How did Herod know that?  Well, Herod obviously knew some of his Bible. 

“The LORD forbid that I should do such a thing to my master, the LORD’s anointed, or lay my hand on him; for he is the anointed of the LORD.”

Do you know who said that? 

David said it after he had crept up behind King Saul and cut off a corner of his cloak.  You see, the LORD’s anointed, the messiah, is the king.  Even though David had already been anointed as the next king by that time, he still respected the status of Saul as the LORD’s anointed. 

So Herod had paid attention enough to that part of his Bible. By this time, the Messiah had taken on a special meaning, that of another king like David who would be the anointed one to drive the Gentiles out and save God’s people.  Maybe Herod concentrated on the bits about kings and ignored the rest of it, so he had to ask where the Messiah would be born.  We’re all a little guilty of that, aren’t we?  We listen to the readings that are interesting to us and don’t really pay attention to the other ones.  So Herod turns to the experts: the chief priests and scribes, people who study the Bible for a living.  And they tell him where the Messiah is to be born as it is written in the prophets, in this case, in the prophet Micah. 

We did read from the prophet Isaiah today as well, but he comes in later.  You see, this little passage from Matthew is crammed to the brim with allusions to, and quotes from, Israel’s scripture, what we call the Old Testament.  Since there was no New Testament yet, this was the only Bible that existed.  And here is another way to experience an epiphany: through the Bible.  The magi saw the star, but they needed more.  They needed the Bible as well, the written record of God’s interaction with God’s people, especially through the prophets.

So, back to Herod.  Remember, Herod is a paranoid old man, but he’s also a savvy politician.  So after talking to his experts, he secretly sends for the magi to find out precisely when the star appeared.  By talking to the magi secretly, he can find out for himself, and only for himself, how old this “king of the Jews” is, and how realistic the political threat is.  If word gets out that the Messiah is here now, maybe a grown man already anointed by a priest somewhere, then there is a serious issue on Herod’s hands.  There is a very good possibility that an armed revolt will take place.  Several, in fact, already had.

Herod finds out from the magi that this “king of the Jews” is likely just a baby.  This is alright.  No one who is ready now  to pick up their sword and try to fight Rome is going to follow a baby into battle.  There’s time.  So Herod sends the magi on and says, hey, once you find this king of the Jews, come back at tell me exactly where he is so I can go pay him homage too.  And the magi go off.

And they find the house, and the baby and Mary his mother, and they fall down and pay homage.  This, by the way, is an old fashioned word which means to reverence and declare loyalty to a king.  And after the magi have acknowledged the baby as a king, they give him gifts worthy of a king. 

Especially at this Christmas season, we like to think about “the baby Jesus.”  As the song “away in a manger” says, “The little Lord Jesus, asleep on the hay.”  We have a cute manger scene with the adoring parents, shepherds, and the magi of today’s story, all crowded around the perfect little baby Jesus. 

But this story of Matthew does not depict a peaceful manger scene.  The birth of this baby excites the paranoia of a violent tyrant.  The “little Lord Jesus” is a threat to the most powerful man in the land.  It does not take much imagination to guess that Mary was startled by the appearance of these foreign astrologers who declared that her son was a king and gave him gifts, but I wonder, was she afraid too?  Herod’s reputation was known.  If her baby was a king, then he was also a danger, a threat to the established power order.  Mary might have seen the armed revolt coming the same as Herod did.  

We should not forget that “the little Lord Jesus” is the Lord Jesus.  He is king, he is ruler.  He is threatening and carries with him shadows of violence.  Herod, the representative king of Rome is threatened by his birth, and it will be Rome that eventually orders Jesus’ death and executes him.

I once worked with a pastor named Rob who was given the topic “God is all-powerful” to preach on in December, during Advent.  He focused his sermon on Jesus on the cross, because he felt that there was the place that God’s power was really shown.  You should have seen the comment cards that were dropped in the offering after that morning.  People complained that Rob had ruined their Christmas by preaching about Jesus’ death.  They said how horrible to bring up death when we want to hear about the baby Jesus!

You know what?  These people were all good, sincere Christians, but they had missed the last place of the epiphany of the magi.  The epiphany was complete in the presence of Jesus himself: the magi declared that he was a king, that he was worthy of ruling and of having power and wealth.  You cannot talk about Jesus’s birth without talking about his kingship.  Luke’s narrative is just as political, if not even more so, than Matthew’s. 

And you cannot really talk about Jesus being a king without talking about his death.  This story of the magi is the last time Jesus is ever treated like a king until the Roman soldiers mock him with a purple cloak and a crown of thorns and cry “Hail, king of the Jews!”  Some scholars believe that this birth narrative in the gospel of Matthew is purposely foreshadowing Jesus’ death.  Jesus was not a king who lived in luxury and who dripped gold like Herod, nor was he a king who had incense burned in his honor, like Caesar.  He was not a king who even had somewhere to lay his head. 

And if anything, that makes Jesus more threatening.  Because he insists that this is what a king looks like.  It looks like a man beaten raw, mocked, spit on, and nailed to a cross. 

Matthew’s gospel contains the Sermon on the Mount, which I once heard summarized as “you’re dead, and you don’t count, and everyone else is more important than you.”

Can you live like that? 

I don’t know about you, but I can’t. 

This is the amazing epiphany: that Jesus is a king and that his way of being king is one of self-emptying and service.  The epiphany of Jesus tears down our own self-importance and our own power-hungry selfishness.  And it forces us to look for the magi in our world; for the ones who are doing everything wrong and yet, against all our expectations, they find the king, and maybe they lead us to him. 

I do challenge you today, and I challenge me too: who is getting it all wrong?  Who is threatening our self-importance?  Who is threatening the careful balance of power we have collected for ourselves?

On this day, the feast of the Epiphany of our Lord, first and foremost, Jesus is.  But Jesus may have sent magi into your life and into my life who are offering us epiphanies as well.  May we see the epiphany of the Lord Jesus wherever he may appear: in his presence, in scripture, and in the one who is getting everything wrong.

Amen.