Siyyum

Siyyum represents one of my favorite concepts in Judiasm, one of the things that, I think, really sets us apart and reminds me why I am still Jewish as opposed to, say, another religion more in keeping with some of my other...interests.

According to JewishEncyclopedia.com, siyyum is:

The formal ceremonial act of completing the writing of a scroll of the Law, or the formal conclusion of the study of a division ("massekta") of the Mishnah or Talmud. In the former case the ceremony is called siyyum ha-Sefer; in the latter, siyyum massekta.

Either way, it's the celebration of the completion of a book. What a marvelous concept, especially for a people that highly value education and language, and claim to be of the book!

Now obviously not just any book is grounds for celebration; stopping for a party every time I finished a comic book on a Sunday afternoon would get exhausting, and some books I have celebrated completing only because it meant I didn't have to read them anymore (I'm looking at you, Wide Sargasso Sea!). The concept originates in the Talmud and clearly carries the implication that one has been reading sacred books (and really, what else would one want to read?). I believe, however, it is allowable and proper to expand the concept to include any well-loved book or rigorous course of intellectual development. I would not look askance (much) at a friend that had a siyyum upon completing the Harry Potter series, especially, at this point, if the point of the celebration was finally catching up on the past 15 years. Likewise, a friend that had just finished working through a MCAT prep book would be well justified in throwing a siyyum.

A more interesting question would seem to be, in our increasingly multimedia age, does it have to be a literal book or will any similarly challenging academic pursuit qualify? If one has a siyyum for the Potter books, what about for the Potter movie? For completing a difficult post-graduate course? I am torn on this. On the one hand, the siyyum is celebrating learning, which would suggest the medium is unimportant; on the other - and this might be because I am a sentimentalist - it seems to lose much when divorced from the concept of a book. I therefore have somewhat of a compromise position: I would personally only hold a siyyum for a book, but would not begrudge a friend that wanted to celebrate something else.

I also see value in embracing the siyyum as a national practice, regardless of religion. The siyyum could make reading cool again. I referred to the Potter books because when they first came out many people were thrilled that they were getting kids to read again. Rather than wait for the next mega-popular book series to come along, the siyyum heightens the concept of reading itself, regardless of what one reads. I can see teachers using this in school; would students be more willing and eager to read the classics if there was a class party waiting at the end?

The modern book club could be seen as a form of siyyum. In theory, most book clubs select works of some academic or social importance (it's debatable which of these Oprah's imprimatur would be). The group then comes back together to celebrate and discuss; that seems to be exactly what the sages were describing.

Perspective

I'm reading Karen Armstrong's A History of God and it's got  me thinking about perspective. More specifically, about how the meaning of a story changes depending on whether you're at the beginning, watching its writing, or at the end, listening to it being told and retold.

My answer to the question of Free Will vs Predetermination used to be, "When are you asking me?" I irritated a couple of teachers by trying to explain my theory that when I woke up this morning I had complete freedom of will to wear whichever shirt I wanted to, but now that choice is set and immutable. Perspective. This morning I had free will, now it is a fixed decision. It sidesteps the question of whether I always was going to choose this shirt, but from a practical standpoint, from the perspective of the one making the choice, the difference between actual freedom and the illusion of freedom is minuscule.

This led me to miracles. The word "miracle" gets pretty abused, from all sides. We identify as "miraculous" things that are really fairly commonplace and easy to explain, and discount as "trivial" things that, even as we learn more about how they work, are truly amazing. That's what I love about biology; life isn't miraculous because it's inexplicable, it's miraculous because it works at all. And the more we learn about the hows and whys of it, the more awestruck I am by the complexity and simplicity of it all.

So perspective. A lot of the debate around miracles focuses on whether God (or other supernatural force of your choice) could commit some action which violates or supersedes the laws of nature. For me, though, this is a matter of our perspective, looking at things from the end of the story. If nature is God's creation, then the natural laws are also of God's making. The question of whether God could break these laws, then, is moot because these are God's laws, either self-imposed or the working conditions under which God created the universe. It's less like asking the umpire to cheat on your behalf, in other words, and more like asking the inventor of baseball why it's 3 strikes instead of 7. The game could have been designed that way, but it wasn't; the game we're playing only gives you 3 strikes per plate appearance, gravity is (mostly) a constant, and living things age in one direction only.

From our perspective as characters in the story, looking backwards, these natural laws seem fixed and ordinary. If we could have seen creation over God's metaphorical shoulder, we would see their miraculousness.

There's a parable that certain key objects were formed at the time of creation, and held waiting for the moments they would be needed. Jonah's giant fish and the ram Abraham sacrifices in Issac's place, for example. I like this "Bill & Ted" -esque explanation of miracles. It's the same trick good writers do in an extended series (in any medium): toss a ball in an apparently arbitrary direction early on, ignore it for several chapters, then turn and catch it, seemingly out of nowhere, right when it's needed most.

In real life, though, we can't tell, from our perspective, whether the ball was thrown deliberately by someone trying to help us, or if we were just fortunate that it was there when we needed it. The difference, as with free will, is minuscule - from our perspective. The miracle is not that the thing occurred - we can explain that easily enough - it's that it happened at all, and at just the right time.

The only reasonable response, then, is gratitude. Not necessarily to anyone or anything, but simply gratitude that it happened at all. There is a continually growing body of research showing many emotional benefits to expressing gratitude: our ability to empathize improves, dependence on material items decreases, negative emotions effect us less severely, and, most of all, positive emotions are experienced more strongly. The decision is ours, whether or not to be grateful or just write things off as the vagaries of fortune.

It's all a matter of perspective.

Admission Essay: Personal Statement

I want to be a rabbi because to me the title of “rabbi” is equivalent to the Japanese “sensei”; both are “my master” and “honored teacher”. As a life-long martial artist, working on my second decade as a classical fencer, I have often been called upon to assist the instructor. I have consistently found that I get more out of the experience when I am helping others find their way, rather than just practicing on my own. One of the first lessons in fencing is that it is more important to train your mind and your eyes than your hand and body; the eyes to see from the right perspective, and the mind to understand and respond. This experience exemplifies what I hope to offer as a rabbi: to help people learn to see Reform Judaism from their own perspective, to understand and love religion and community, and to respond in a Jewish way to their daily lives.

Too many people view religion from only a single perspective. They seem afraid that learning to see more than one perspective will completely fracture their worldview. That mindset reminds me of one Calvin & Hobbes strip, in which Calvin starts seeing everything in a neo-cubist style. We learn that,

"It all started when Calvin engaged his dad in a minor debate! Soon Calvin could see both sides of the issue! Then poor Calvin began to see both sides of everything! The traditional single viewpoint has been abandoned! Perspective has been fractured! The multiple views provide too much information! It's impossible to move! Calvin quickly tries to eliminate all but one perspective!”

He successfully regains his single-perspective viewpoint, then informs his dad, "You're still wrong, Dad."

I never understood this mindset. It is much easier to navigate any terrain using multiple viewpoints to triangulate, and in every field I have studied I have likewise found that multiple intellectual viewpoints further learning and understanding. Today religion in our country is at the center of several major ideological debates, most predominately “Science vs. Religion” and “Secular vs. Traditional”. I never saw the inherent dichotomy in these debates, preferring to study on both sides to gain a better understanding. Granted, the large difference between these extremes creates intellectual pressure, but physics teaches us that pressure generates energy, which can be used to do useful work.

I saw such pressure lead to beneficial results when I lived in Oklahoma. I lived there from age three to thirteen, give or take a few months. My major Jewish memory from this time is a general theme of conflict and isolation; in a Junior High of 1,600, I was the only Jewish kid, just to give a sense of scope. There were two shuls in town, one Reform and one Conservative, and both fairly active, but all my friends there lived far enough away that I usually only saw them on Friday nights and Sunday mornings. I had the teachers that yelled at me - in front of the class - for not wanting to write a letter to Santa, and no one was surprised when major tests were scheduled for Yom Kippur.

There were good Jewish memories too. There was celebration, and learning, and family, and camp, and life that I look back on fondly; when viewed from that perspective it is unsurprising I want to be a Rabbi. But I knew my non-Jewish friends had those things too. What I had that they missed was conflict. Ironically, the community was homogeneous enough that racism and homophobia were entirely off my radar, so it was a long time before I learned I was not alone in my isolation.

I thought the lessons gained from this were strength and confidence in my beliefs, the ability to teach and explain my religion to my friends, the skill to debate religion on multiple fronts, and the desire to merge "being American" with "being Jewish". And I did get those things, but recently I realized something new.

This summer I read Jew vs. Jew, Samuel G. Freedman's exploration of the conflict between secular and religious Judaism in America, and, unsurprisingly, found myself firmly in the middle. As I dug deeper, I realized that I grew up without a real sense of Orthodox Judaism; it was as foreign to me as it was to my Christian friends. Like I said, there was the Reform temple and the Conservative synagogue and that was it, in my limited world view. I knew what Reform was; that's where we went, where I was consecrated, where the Rabbi gave my sister her Hebrew name. I knew what Conservative was; that's where the other Rabbi was, where they used a different book, and spent two days on Rosh Hashanah.

Reform was home.

Conservative was my friend's house.

I went to a Reform summer camp - Young Judea in Texas. A couple times per summer the kids from Camp Ramah came over; they were The Enemy, to be defeated whenever met on basketball court or kickball field. But after that they were Our Friends; we were all Jewish after all. They were just a little more...intense about it, and I couldn't follow their prayers. But my mom is a music teacher; I understood that some people use different melodies for the same songs, so that wasn't a problem.

A couple years before we moved away the congregations merged their Sunday Schools, so I got to learn more about what Conservative meant: the girls were bat mitzvahed at 12 instead of 13. Sometimes we went to services at one place, sometimes the other. I had friends at each, and friends at both. One Sunday I was recruited before class started to help round out a minyan; this was before my bar mitzvah, so I was handed a chumash with the explanation that it added two years to my age. It was an awesome experience; I was so proud to help out.

The point is, we were all Jewish. I knew there were differences, but I figured they just weren't important. Oh, sure, some were important, but even those didn’t really matter. You just remembered who would or wouldn't eat cheeseburgers, and everything was ok. This is where my sense of Jewish peoplehood developed, in a place where the difference between denominations mattered less than the friendly rivalry over which local football team you supported.

It's the irony of living in a low-diversity area. There just were not enough of us to get really fractious. Then I moved to Chicago, and first encountered the idea that there were so many Jews we could sit around arguing about who is or is not Jewish. That idea is a myth, though. Jews make up about 0.2% of the world population, a number smaller than the margin of error on the last global census. Put differently, that means it is possible the existence of Jews is just a statistical error.

I was struck by this realization because I always thought growing up Jewish in Oklahoma was an unpleasant "character building" experience that, all things equal, I would just as soon do without. Now I see there was a true benefit to learning Judaism in that environment. The small space we lived in stripped away even the possibility of the idea of Jewish factionalism; we were pressed together to form a single community. It was the kind of pressure that breeds diamonds.

This idea really hit home while I was watching the movie The Prince of Egypt. It was released when I was a sophomore in college, and I went to see it with a Catholic friend when we were home on break. We wound up the only people in the theater (gotta love early afternoon mid-week showings!) and had fun mocking the previews, yelling at the screen, and providing…”helpful insights” to the characters throughout the movie. Let’s just say it wasn’t a kid’s movie anymore when we were done with it.

Then halfway through the movie something happened. I don’t know what, or which scene, or why that moment, but like a comet it hit me; if I was there, they would have done that to me. They wanted to do that to me. The only reason they didn’t do it to me was I wasn’t there. They did this to me.

Suddenly I was crying. Quietly – I’m not sure my friend even noticed, or if he did he made no mention. Everything quickly followed from there. The Holocaust, the Spanish Inquisition, the Pogroms; every time and place Jews were attacked, enslaved, and destroyed, those responsible also wanted to do it to me and only the fact I was born hundreds of years and thousands of miles away saved me.

Do you realize how embarrassing this was? I’d heard the Passover story countless times. I’d seen more Holocaust movies than I care to think about. Schindler’s List? Completely unimpressed and unmoved. Sure, what happened was terrible but no worse than the mini-series I watched with my family when I was eight. I picked up Maus once in our Temple’s library one week during Sunday School, expecting to read a funny comic book. The story inside was excellently written and drawn, but there was no emotional space left inside me for outrage about Jews being killed; it had already all been used. And now this, this…children’s movie reduced me to tears.

I came to realize that maybe this is why we tell the story every year. Maybe this is why we tell the story in so many different ways; eventually one will connect. The first time I heard the story of the Exodus it was like some scary campfire story, complete with evil kings, magical events, and food to eat while we listened. We gasped when Pharaoh was cruel, laughed when Moses was tricky, and cheered when the Jews reached freedom. Then it was hunt for the affikomen, eat dessert, check Elijah’s cup, and go to bed.

This movie-moment has stayed with me through the years. Now whenever I see Jews being attacked for being Jews, in fiction or in life, I hear that voice again reminding me they did this to me. Even now, in writing this, I am choked up with tears remembering that I was a slave and oppressed until HaShem freed me. And on the other side of the coin, every great Torah scholar, every prophet, every Israeli hero, well, they did that for me too. This too is part of peoplehood.

Thank God we have children’s movies.

There were other moments on my spiritual path – climbing the steps to Masada, my grandfather’s funeral, tutoring my first bar mitzvah student among them – but that moment in the theater was the first identifiable one. Then one day in Kalamazoo, Michigan my then-rabbi, Rabbi Stephen Forstein, asked a simple question: “What is your relationship with God?” I babbled on for several moments before my brain finally caught up and I fell silent. I realized no one had ever asked me that question before, and finding the answer would require me to explore entirely new worlds of thought. It was that moment, as much as I can point to any single moment, that decided me. As with fencing, if I truly wanted to understand, I would have to be the guide for others. I wanted to be a rabbi.

This experience reawakened and enflamed my passion for the Jewish people. Having identified so strongly with K’lal Yisrael, I cannot ignore it. I am driven to immerse myself within it, to help it – to help us – grow and thrive. And so here I find myself, trying not to “deviate to the right or to the left” [Deut. 28:14]. We cannot reject tradition, but we also cannot be ruled by what it says. We cannot ignore science, but we also cannot be limited by what it has proven. We cannot reject modernity, but we also cannot lose our identity within it. There is a path here, down the middle, that we can safely walk. We will need good guides to help blaze the trail, and I put myself forth to be one of them.

Including Men in Engendered Judaism

Just started Jonathan Kirsch's "The Woman Who Laughed At God", and I'm already enjoying it greatly. He also wrote "The Harlot By The Side Of The Road", another favorite of mine, so I am not too surprised.

Despite the title, the book is not about women in Judaism - neither of them are, actually - but an exploration of "Who is a Jew?" using the famous story of Sarah as a launching point. Sarah's laughter at God's prediction of a child does not incur the wrath that other seemingly lesser infractions do elsewhere; Kirsch leads from that into the multiple authors of the Torah, to multiple interpretations of the material, multiple theologies underlying the variants, and the evolution of Judaisms rather than Judaism. Having said that, he actually does spend a lot of time discussing women in traditional Judaism, starting with the hinted-at existence of Hebrew goddesses and moving through rabbinic Judaism to the modern era.

As he discusses the raw deal women tend to get from the Old Testament and its most fervent followers, I am coming back to one of my personal hot topics; where do the men fit? The single-issue focus of feminism destroyed (mostly) the old definition of what it means to be a woman, replacing it with something new and vibrant. The old definition of what it means to be a man was just destroyed. Nothing new was put in its place. Traditionally male traits are now "bad", and the only thing most men have left to define their identity is, ironically, their relationships with women. I recall a retreat a few years ago where the group split along gender lines to define "male" and "female". Everything the men came up with was some variation of "we are here to support and love you"; they were not able to define themselves independently.

The same issue arises with engendered Judaism; we have created new rituals and opportunities for women, and the men...keep the same archaic stuff we always had? If the old way was flawed and didn't work for women, why do we assume it will work for men?

I especially see this as an issue in Reform Judaism, largely because of the large number of very active, highly talented women at all levels of the movement that are transforming the religion into something more accepting - no, not just accepting; enthusiastic about women. This is good, and as it should and needs to be, but what works better for women does not always work well for men. This has become a problem for our children in the schools, young adults in colleges, and now I see it in religion.

This is a somewhat incoherent rant, I realize. It's late and I'm tired. But Kirsch stirred me, and, as I said, this is a hot topic of mine. More later.

Science Good; Logic Bad!

Just started reading “God is Not Great”, by Christopher Hitchens, because, as my girlfriend pointed out, I haven’t been angry enough lately. Only on chapter 1 so I’m withholding judgment, but he’s already made several logical errors like the ones Dawkins made and I’m overdue in responding to my friends about their responses to that post so I’ll take this opportunity.

To paraphrase, not only is god stranger than we imagine, god is stranger than we can imagine. The mere fact that we are capable of picturing the oft maligned “white-beard, long-robe” image of god almost certainly means it is wrong. But a faulty definition of god is not the same as the absence of god. Bohrs’ conception of the atomic nucleus was completely wrong but atoms and their nuclei still exist – and I’m fairly confident that a few centuries from now people will look back at our current models and laugh at their shortcomings.

Several of the major atheistic fallacies stem from the idea that proving part of the definition of god wrong disproves god – which, by the way, is the same behavior atheists complain about when fundamentalists use any gap in scientific knowledge as proof of god’s existence. Yes, there is much in religion that stems from a specific definition of god (and most of the differences between churches and religions occur on this definitional level) so changing the definition may prove part or all of some religions wrong, but does not disprove god or religion as a whole.

The second major type of fallacy is:

“If A then B
Not B
Therefore not A”

In this case “God [A] created the world, designed according to god’s plan [B]”; “The current state of the world is due to evolution and other natural phenomenon [Not B] therefore god does not exist [Not A]”. Logically, this is the same as saying, “The Egyptians believed the heart was the source of all emotion and thought; now we know most of this comes from the brain, therefore the heart must not exist.”

Let the flames begin.

On to Hitchens. Starting with the cover, where we find the word “god” is not capitalized. In fact, the only word that is capitalized is “Great”. This is a measured insult; not an auspicious beginning to a book that claims to examine religion rationally and logically.
One of the legs of Hitchens’ argument is the idea that, “If you will devote a little time to studying the staggering photographs taken by the Hubble telescope, you will be scrutinizing things that are far more awesome and mysterious and beautiful – and more chaotic and overwhelming and forbidding – than any creation or “end of days” story.” (p. 8) This isn’t even an argument; it’s opinion! “More awesome” is a comparative statement, qualitative not quantitative. No one ever conducted an experiment that demonstrated Hubble telescope pictures are 53.7% more awesome than St. Paul’s apocalypse. Which comes back to one of the fundamental issues dividing my stripe of theists from atheists: when Hitchens sees those awesome photos of distant stars and nebulae he thinks about the wondrous natural forces that produced them; I do the same and thank god that such forces exist.

He continues with a discussion of Hawking on black holes’ event horizons: “the theoretical lip…over which one could…plunge and see the past and the future (except that one would, regrettably and by definition, not have enough “time”)…” Let me get this straight; he’s describing a wondrous place where one sees incredible things, seeing through time itself, but no living person has seen it. Yet he believes it to be true – has faith in its wonder and beauty – because a Great Teacher told him it is so. Hitchens describes his experience of a black hole in exactly the same way as a religious person describes the experience of their own faith.

---

One of my friends quoted Einstein in his response to me: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.” He was using the first half to argue the god hypothesis fails because it is too complex, but I’m looking at the second part. The simpler theory is preferred as long as it is an accurate and complete explanation. A godless universe might be simpler, but if god does exist it becomes too simple.

What is it, exactly, these atheistic writers are trying to prove?

That religion has done bad things? True, so has every other human institution; the ability of powerful people and propaganda to take advantage of base human tendencies does not stem from religion.

That a god such as we commonly conceive cannot – most likely – exist? True; as I said at the beginning, the mere fact that we can imagine such a god almost certainly means we are wrong in our understanding. But we, as humans, tend to anthropomorphize things, to assume they are similar to us so we can try to understand them. Having a conversation with god as if god were a corporeal being such as myself is easier for my mind to deal with, if not more correct.

That religion is a human creation? True, and pointless. Sweaters are human creations, but wool is not. A pearl is a created thing, but it is formed around something real. Proving humans created religion does not disprove god.

That moral behavior is possible without religion? True; so what?

Darwin but not Jesus; hypotheses but not miracles; to believe one book is right but not another, to cling to the teachings of your leader and dogmatically refuse to admit the “other side” might be right…these things are not the hallmarks of scientific thought; they are religious.

"The GOD Delusion"

I'm looking through my list of posts and seeing I have a lot of half completed stubs waiting for publication; more disturbing there's several pieces I thought were posted still sitting there. So I'll try to clear out that backlog this week, and we'll look at it not as late for this year's holidays, but early for next.

Anyway.

Recently finished Richard Dawkins' book "The GOD Delusion". I will have to re-read the book with highlighters and a stack of Post-its to find exact quotations, pages, and arguments, but I want to capture the core of my thoughts while they are fresh. Here is my overview of the book:



Let me be clear: this is not a comment on Dawkins' intelligence - the Scarecrow was the smartest of Dorothy's little band - but rather a comment on his argument style which tends towards the straw man, ad hominem, reductio ad absurdum, and generally bad logic.

There are enough fallacies in the book to help an entire Freshman logic class earn A's, if they could find but half of them. We are informed that asking why god created the universe is the same as asking "Why are unicorns hollow?", and that belief in god is equivalent to belief in the tooth fairy. This is argument from absurdum and straw man at the least, bordering on ad hominem.

He spends a chapter attacking the "Unmoved Mover" theory of god on the premise that saying that tracing everything back to god merely begs the much more complex question of where god came from, then the next chapter talking about the wonders of the big bang since, well, it's just always been there. The much more complex question of "where did all this supercondensed matter come from" is ignored.

He carefully limits down the definition of religion to mean exclusively the Judaism/Christianity/Islam trio, and those only in the supernatural, ritual, non-naturalistic sense and then proceeds, working from this definition, to explain why all religion is crap.

You know, except maybe for some of those parts he ignored.

My favorite is his refutation of prayer's power to heal by comparing it to a Bob Newhart skit. Considering he dedicated the book to Douglas Adams, I am not certain if this was meant as an attack or support.

And that's the most upsetting aspect of this book; he casts the debate as a binary issue and puts all religion on one side. Dawkins' writings on evolutionary biology and the possible origins of morality, reputation, and even belief in gods was fascinating; I accept his explanations and am thrilled by the beauty and complexity of them. Simultaneously I cheer him on as he decries Creationists, er, "Intelligent Design Advocates", pro-lifers, and fundamentalists of all stripes. But this position does not exist in his world; it is impossible to genuinely pray for health and recovery as I'm wheeled to the MRI. I'm either with him or with them.

His position is downright religious in that regard.