The Dignity of Difference by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

The Dignity of Difference was written in 2002, but I only became aware of Rabbi Sacks about a year ago. Now I’m a regular reader of his weekly drash at his website, and I own a few other of his books. One of my professors highly recommended this book in particular, and the copy I got from the HUC library is personally inscribed “To Gene Boworitz – in admiration of your outstanding work – wishing you a New Year of blessing, healthy and fulfillment.” Dr. Eugene Borowitz is alive and well, thank God, (and still teaching at HUC) in New York, so I’m not sure why he went ahead and gave away this copy to the HUC library. Ah well, glad I got my hands on it, at any rate.

            The book was written mainly as a response to 9/11 and the problem of a “clash of civilizations.” Rabbi Sacks argues that, globally, the gap is growing between the haves and have-nots, that we do not properly accept and understand other cultures. These problems are what lead to fundamentalism and terror. These arguments have been made elsewhere, and seem to end up placing the blame for jihad terror attacks on us – and I don’t agree. Poverty does not cause terrorism, and Western pluralism surely surpasses anything in the Muslim world, anyway. When I read these premises in the first chapter, I actually put the book down because I thought it was going to be a boring rehash of leftist idealism. A rash of snow days combined with a lack of new reading material led me to pick it up again, and I’m very glad I did. Rabbi Sacks definitely does not do the usual lefty-liberal routine, once you get past the introduction.

I found that Rabbi Sacks includes an amazing variety of writers and thinkers. Not every author would use quotes from George Soros and Roger Scruton within just a few paragraphs of each other, and both to support the author’s point about free markets and tzedakah. Sacks does, and very smoothly. Sacks’ familiarity with an incredible number and variety of thinkers and writers - and his ability to incorporate them into his own arguments – is a major part of his appeal for me.

            I also enjoy when Sacks compares Greek/traditional philosophy to Jewish thought. This is something that Leon Kass frequently does in his commentary on Genesis, too. p. 51 “Against Plato and his followers, the Bible argues that universalism is the first, not the last, phase in the growth of the moral imagination….” This is part of Sacks’ discussion on how universalism can only be understood or apprehended through particularism. Another noteworthy quote from this part of the discussion is this: “Judaism has a structural peculiarity so perplexing and profound that though its two daughter monotheisms, Christianity and Islam, took much else from it, they did not adopt this: it is a particularist monotheism. It believes in one God but not in one exclusive path to salvation. The God of the Israelites is the God of all mankind, but the demands made of the Israelites are not asked of all mankind.” (52)  I thought this was a wonderfully succinct statement about a complicated idea.

            Rabbi Sacks discusses the value of particularity and diversity because he seems to think that we (his readers) aren’t quite tolerant enough of cultural differences. Not long after the above mentioned quote on Israelite particularist monotheism, Sacks describes how we might be if we were more tolerant: “What would faith be like? It would be like being secure in one’s home, yet moved by the beauty of foreign places…it would be like being fluent in English, yet thrilled by the rhythms and resonances of an Italian sonnet one only partially understands…” (65) Except that Rabbi Sacks doesn’t get much deeper than those differences, and the unfortunate reality is that one of the main religious differences between my culture and that of fundamentalist Islam is not about food or music preferences but over my right to exist. Tolerance has to work both ways and that doesn’t seem to be the case these days.

            But Rabbi Sacks himself is one of the most bi-partisan, pluralistic writers I’ve seen, and he walks the inclusive talk. He even seems to contradict himself across parts of the book. Here’s an example: In his chapter on “environmental sustainability” (yes, I dreaded getting through this one – but there was nary a mention of global warming in it!) he writes, “Most significant of all is the pressure on he environment by the growth of the human population…” and proceeds to quote Jared Diamond on the subject. So he buys into Jared Diamond on this theory of overpopulation. But earlier in the book, he seems to refute what I thought was a major premise of Jared Diamond’s main book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. Sacks writes: ““One of the questions he [David Landes] raises, for example, is why the industrial revolution took place in Europe, not China…Landes answer’ is broadly this: that culture, not natural resources, climate or other material factors, makes the difference. Europe had what China did not: a Judeo-Christian ethic…” If I remember correctly, Diamond was of the opinion that culture didn’t play so much as a part as did the presence of a few certain microbes or the fecundity of the soil here versus there. There isn’t anything wrong in disagreeing with some things that an author writes and agreeing with others – but it is interesting to see it played out in so subtle a manner.

            In describing that “Judeo-Christian ethic” that played such a part in the rise of Western civilization, Rabbi Sacks addresses civics: “First is the biblical respect for property rights…The brief answer is that the Hebrew Bible is an extended critique of what we would today call big government. At one extreme is the biblical portrait of ancient Egypt, a nation which builds extraordinary buildings at the cost of turning human beings into slaves. At the opposite extreme we have the justly famous eighth chapter of I Samuel…Even constitutional monarchy, in other words, will involve a sacrifice of rights of property and person…

…Long before Hobbes, Locke and Jefferson, biblical Judaism is a theory of limited government…God, in the Hebrew Bible, seeks the free worship of free human beings, and two of the most powerful defences of freedom are private property and economic independence.”

            But before you put Rabbi Sacks on the invite list to your next Tea Party, you might wonder at this statement which comes in a different chapter on tzedakah: “Tzedakah is a concept for our time. The retreat, set in motion by Reagonomics and Thatcherism, from a welfare state, together with the deregulation of financial markets throughout the world, has led to increased and increasing inequalities both in developed countries and the developing world.” Rabbi Sacks certainly defies easy categorization.

            This reminds me of another author I wrote about recently – Lionel Trilling. I thought it intriguing how Sacks and Trilling both identified the Victorian Age as one of “confidence.” Sacks mentions the Victorians in a discussion about the rapid changes that our society has witnessed:  “The nineteenth century was also a time of immense change…Writers from Dickens to Disraeli spoke of child labour, poverty, the bleak urban landscape, and new forms of social division (Disraeli’s ‘two nations’_. Urban crime was so widespread that it was unsafe to walk city streets at night. Yet these problems, though they gave rise to social criticism and political activism, did not generate the kind of uncertainty we feel today…It was, in ways that seem remote to us now, an age of confidence.”

And here’s Michael Kimmage, on Trilling’s thesis: ““To the despair of modernist literature, Trilling preferred Jewish humanism, an elevated ideal for assimilating into America, or he preferred the self-confidence and vigor of the Victorians.”

            Rabbi Sack’s insight into actual biblical analysis, and comparisons to Greek philosophy or other Western secular ideas, is always brilliant. I was disappointed that Rabbi Sacks doesn’t get into more profound differences of the “clash of civilizations” than preferences for worship styles or opinions on birth control, but the diversity of various writers and thinkers that he includes is inspiring and makes for a very good read.

 

 

 

Wave Sensing of Complexity

By chance, I picked up a collection of scientific essays today collected as a tribute to Leopold Felsen, a physicist, electrical-engineer, and theorist involved in numerical modeling of electromagnetic waves and fields. The book was published on the occasion of his being bestowed with an honorary degree from the Technical University of Munich. As a Jew growing up in Germany in 1924, he claims that the degree has a special significance for him. (His acceptance speech is included as a preface to the collection.) He emigrated to the US in 1940 and eventually served in the US Navy from 1943-1946. Quite a remarkable story.

What makes the preface truly stand out are the poems included. From "Wave Sensing of Complexity" :

When waves meet with complexity,
The modelers feel perplexity.
The options one can choose abound,
But how can those that work be found?

Statistically irregular,
Or smoothly scatters specular?
A blend of both? If not, why not?
We ponder, and then chuck the lot.

The Conservative Turn

Thoughts on The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism

-for reference - check out http://www.tnr.com/book/review/the-illiberal-imagination

The book reviews that I’ve read on Michael Kimmage’s book, The Conservative Turn, have mostly focused on Kimmage’s premise itself: that Whittaker Chambers and Lionel Trilling, despite their different backgrounds, had similarities in their political journeys, and that both of them were fundamental (though neither one consciously) in the development of neoconservatism. That’s not really what I thought was most interesting about the book, and it wasn’t my initial reason for picking it up in the first place. I just wanted to learn more about Lionel Trilling.  Kimmage wrote about Trilling in very admiring terms, and I enjoyed that.

Trilling was an ex-Communist, and Kimmage describes in detail how both Trilling and Chambers each had their “Kronstadt” moment, when they saw that Stalinism, the Soviet Union, and Communism itself were all inextricably tied together by horrific violence, and suddenly and definitely turned away from the movement. Both Trilling and Chambers then, of course, subsequently wrote a great deal attacking the American left over its affinity or neutrality toward Communism.

            What is always striking to me is how sympathy for Communism is still treated as something benign, amusing, or even “interesting” by my classmates and professors. It is disquieting how prescient and relevant Trilling’s declarations against progressive leftism (whether that’s specifically how he identified it or not) are today. The quotes that Kimmage provides seemed directly relevant to my experience so far with the progressive leftism that is too often identifiable with liberal Jewish leadership – that is, Reform and Conservative clergy who use a very elastic definition of tikkun olam to encompass any current agenda of the Democratic party. In response to more than a few sermons or emails from the RAC that I’ve gotten over the past few years, exhorting us to raise the minimum wage or vote for universal health care coverage or “do the Jewish thing” and promote gay rights, I wish I’d been able to quote Trilling:

 •”…liberals serve no good end at all when they cease to look for truth and, in the name of ‘action…’ substitute wish-thinking and rationalization for the functions of the critical intellect.” (1937) (82)

 •“Trilling concentrated on the psychological roots of the Popular Front, eschewing any simple equation of progressivism with a longing for social justice: ‘the ‘social consciousness’ of the Thirties which flowered in Hemingway and Steinbeck, in Odets and Irwin Shaw, which millions found so right, proper and noble, did indeed have a kind of passion, and perhaps it had the virtue of being better than nothing. But how abstract and without fiber of resistance it was, how much too apt it was for the drawing-room, how essentially it was a pity which wonderfully served the needs of the pitier.’”

  Or in response to the endless classes I’ve had to taken on “learning styles” and educational theory:

• “if the Victorians too much disregarded Rousseau and Wordsworth and thought of children as adults manques, we today are perhaps too often tempted to think of adults as children manques.”

  Trilling seemed to identify with a liberalism that invited open, serious critique, in which the questions were posed without assuming the answers beforehand. He valued tradition, morals, manners (which he linked with morality), and evaluation of art and writing according to aesthetics and morality. Already he was worried that the liberalism of his time was embodying not the open-minded serious critique but rather an orthodox adherence to predetermined assumptions. This was making liberalism, once the dynamic and engaging intellectual front, into something stagnant and prone to blindness of various types.  I feel like I’ve seen this in liberal Jewish leaders who not only confuse their Jewish liberalism with political and cultural leftism, but also simply assume that all the principles of the Democratic Party/contemporary leftism are correct and obvious, without further consideration. This is not a helpful method of thinking – and it could lead to a real decline in many ways: in affiliation, relevancy, moral and intellectual engagement, etc.

 In a sentence reminiscent of the patter song from Patience – ‘If you want a receipt” - Trilling himself described his liberalism: ”you take the best ideas of [Jeremy]Bentham – I mean Bentham as he really is, not Bentham as most people represent him – and John Stuart Mill, and [John] Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold, and William Morris, and involve them with the temperament of the English romantic poets, and connect them with Montaigne…and much of Rousseau, and much of Stendhal, you will get some notion of the intellectual constellation to which I refer.” (186) I certainly haven’t read all of those guys. Nevertheless, Trilling and his work have been inspiring to me as a model of an “old-school liberalism.”

I favor Trilling’s approach instead when discussing contemporary issues of liberal Judaism (though maybe I’d leave out the T.S. Eliot): “Trilling ushered in conservative ideas into his essays and books with the aim of expanding the liberal imagination and widening the parameters of American intellectual culture…he wrote appreciatively about the (reactionary) politics of T.S. Eliot, about the moral vision of the Victorians, about the merit of hierarchy, and of stable ethical values.”

What if, instead of simply assuming that all Reform Jews somehow instinctively know that the moral thing is to be pro-choice and pro-gay (in every respect), we had serious discussions in which the pros and cons of each position were critically evaluated? What if opinions about being pro-life and against gay religious marriage were actually considered or allowed discussion in an open atmosphere?

  Trilling consistently resisted being identified with either the conservative movement as it was being formulated under Buckley et al or the official Republican party. I found it disappointing that Kimmage didn’t go into much detail of why this was so, other than Trilling was just so committed to his ideal of liberalism – though it seems Trilling allowed his definition of liberalism to fit many ideas labeled as “conservative” today. Perhaps it was also that Trilling saw that the solid identification with one party or another, or with one defined set or another, defied his true commitment, which was to liberalism.

I am personally intrigued by Trilling’s desire to remain flexible in his political and social affiliations. Orthodox Jews may have an easier time of identifying with contemporary cultural/political conservatism and being accepted by fellow Orthodox Jews for affiliation with the Republican Party. But I am committed to becoming a rabbi, and to the liberal Judaism that has developed uniquely in America. Furthermore, I don’t believe that Orthodox Judaism has all the easy answers or is problem-free, either. I think that there are plenty of opportunities in that lifestyle to fall into just the kind of unthinking adherence that defies Trilling’s liberalism. I certainly disagree with the mantra of “progressivism” that all change is progress, and good. But I also disagree that simply because something is new and different that it must not be good. I don’t think that the practices of liberal Judaism necessitate its being linked with the political left; at the same time, I think that orthodox Judaism might do well to acknowledge that it has changed much (and for the better, in this American environment) since an older style of Judaism that resisted secular studies, Zionism, or careers for women.

            So, perhaps like Trilling, I can maintain the freedom to maintain my flexibility, resisting blind acceptance of the doctrines spouted by either party or camp. This freedom can be invigorating and, maybe someday, even an ‘intellectual catalyst:’

 • “To the despair of modernist literature, Trilling preferred Jewish humanism, an elevated ideal for assimilating into America, or he preferred the self-confidence and vigor of the Victorians, who had tasted Arnold’s despair without succumbing to it. For both Trilling and Chambers, despair was a powerful intellectual catalyst and not simply a mood to be indulged.” (18)

 

I think Rabbi Levi Olan, a longtime spiritual leader of the synagogue where I grew up in Dallas (although he was a good bit before my time) was an old-school, Trilling-style liberal. Here’s what he wrote in 1969:

 “In biblical times the Prophets were certain liberals. They called for a change in the social order; they denounced the rich and championed the poor. But they were also conservatives who bid the people to ‘remember when they came out of Egypt.’….It is not an either/or situation, either conservative or liberal. Both are essential in any healthy existence, whether personal or social…The clash between the liberal position and that of the conservative resounds noisily and at times without charity. It would appear at the outset that these positions can never be reconciled. In all probability they cannot. What is important is that religion needs the best of both if it is to be alive and vital for man. The conservative becomes the guardian of the great truths which the tradition has preserved – the accumulated experience of the race and a resource for wisdom and hope…The fact is that even the conservative changes, for not even he brings sacrificies as the Bible commands. The liberal gives the old a chance to live by clearing out the accretions which stop up the well of living water. His danger is that he may in the end totally forsake the well of his father and wander aimlessly after new water which he cannot discover…The liberal has not found an answer to the authority for his faith. The conservative is doing no better. He formally acknowledges the revelation of God but he does not really live by the word…Wisdom in this hour would dictate the recognition that there are virtues and weaknesses in both positions. What is needed most is a concerted and united effort against the secularism which threatens our very existence today.”

Rabbi Olan is also connected to Trilling (in my view) in that he consistently quoted from great literature – Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Coleridge – in his sermons. Trilling was obviously committed to the idea that classics of literature help us see and appreciate the complex variety of life. Olan apparently agreed. I haven’t seen a single sermon of his in which he quotes Bob Dylan.

 And this is an interesting postscript that didn’t fit anywhere else:

•“Chambers does not write [in a 1957 National Review essay] about Islam as a political factor, except as it might alienate Arabs from the Soviet Union, which was ruling over millions of Muslims, suppressing their religious freedoms just as it suppressed those of Christians and Jews. Chambers wonders whether ‘those wretched Arabs heard, too, that in Soviet Siberia several million of their co-religionists exist in a misery not much different from their own?” p. 287

 

The End of Everything, by David Bergelson

About a week ago on the new website Jewish Ideas Daily, there was a blurb on a new translation of a book by Yiddish writer David Bergelson:

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2010/1/21/on-books/1/the-end-of-everything

I read the blurb while sitting in the amazing HUC Klau Library, so I just had to walk a few steps to find a brand new copy of this very translation on the shelf. 

Like the few other Russian novels I've read, this one had plenty of depression and general misery to go around. In an essay Lionel Trilling once wrote, "every situation in Dostoevsky, no matter how spiritual, starts with a point of social pride and a certain number of rubles..." and that is exactly how Bergelson's novel begins, too. Mirel, the daughter of Reb Gedalye, goes through a series of successive engagements to different men. She continually feels pressure to get engaged because 1) what else is there to do and 2) it would really help her father out financially. But each time she gets engaged - and there is never really any real passion or feeling on her part toward any of the men, just a sort of resignation - she almost immediately begins to work on how to break the engagement. 
Here are some of my favorite quotes that I think are pretty representative of the book: 

"For some time now she'd feld the slow, painful demise of her vapid, commonplace, self-absorbed life."

"With cold, vaguely formed resolution she neared her father's house, and with the same icily unemotional determinaton she went inside...she lingered at the door, and it occured to her that she didn't live as other people lived but wandered all alone along the periphery of life, that from childhood on shed been stumbling about there in a long restless dream that had no beginning and no end: Now, it seemed, she'd come to some decision and would take some action, yet perhaps she'd come to no decision and would take no action. All alone she'd merely continue to stumble about as in an eternal dream of chaos and would never arrive at any destionation..."

"While she was lying here alone on the margins of life, other people were living fully. From a distance she saw the way they lived..."

You can probably get the gist of Mirel's character from those. There are other female characters in the book who go to university, and I don't know if Bergelson intended for his readers to want to yell at Mirel to follow their example, or something, at least. The back cover of the book describes it as the "Yiddish Emma Bovary." I didn't go back and check a copy of M. Bovary, but this section from Bergelson's book struck me as similar to what I remember of Flaubert:
"...his remark still echoed in her ears: 'A provincial tragedy.' She couldn't tell where the barb of this insult, and the resentment she felt at it, really lay: whether in the fact that Herz couldn't be bothered to remember her name or in the phrase itself that he'd coined about her: 'A provincial tragedy.'"

That Herz character is interesting. He's a poet who writes Hebrew poetry. In another scene, some of the characters name-drop about "Ahad Ha'am" in order to show their political/cultural affiliations. Either Joseph Sherman, the translator, or the New Yiddish Library publishers, did a nice job with lots of historical and cultural footnotes throughout the book. Bergelson probably has more than a few characters who represent people from his own circle:

"A little farther on, in the middle of the large room, stood the master's youngest brother, Sholem Zaydenovsky, a perpetually discontented young man with the appearance of an overgrown yeshiva student...after the death of his fanatically observant parents not long before, he'd found himself to be nothing more than a partially agnostic, venemous freethinker...toward money he now felt a deep antipathy coupled with a shopkeeper's pathological love for it that was his genetic inheritance, believed that no one was as capable of making it as he was, and for this reason held an uncommonly negative opinion of Jewish youth: - our people are quite incapable of producing any healthy types." 

Lest I sounded like I was being too hard on Mirel earlier, I do understand that she had limiting social conditions. I think Bergelson also makes sure his readers are aware of that point in describing a startling dream that Mirel has:
"She found herself walking alone across an open field somewhere, toward a church where a great many yelling people had congregated, demanding to know: Is a woman a human being or not?"

I suppose Bergelson is also presenting Mirel as a metaphor for all Jews in modernity. If so, then the question from Mirel's dream echoes Shylock's speech from The Merchant of Venice: "Hath not a Jew eyes..." and so on - showing that not much had changed on that front. But then one would also wonder whether, like Mirel, Bergelson really saw all other modern Jews as provincial tragedies. I don't know what Bergelson thought of Zionism, and it doesn't seem to appear in his novel at all. 

So, yes, a slightly depressing read - but artful and interesting. A relevant quote from different book I've started reading:

"Rather than appealing to 'socialism' of some not-yet-existing kind to calm the fever of the despairing intellectual, Dos Passos is simply despairing and for this he earned [Lionel] Trilling's admiration. 'I can think of no more useful political job for the literary man today,' Trilling wrote in praise of Dos Passos, 'than, by representation of despair, to cauterize the exposed soft-tissue of too easy hope.'  

All the Goodes

I think that one of the small joys of going to hear a great performer is to discover what it is they choose to play. While I may think I have listened to a large sampling of classical music, it is always a delight to hear a piece of music I have never heard before, and played exquisitely. I have to admit, Richard Goode did precisely that this evening.

I rushed in a few minutes late and missed the first few minutes of one of Bach's Prelude and Fugues from the second book of the Well Tempered Clavier. And finding that someone had decided to make my seat theirs, I had to wait a while longer before finding a seat I could occupy. Such was a small trifle, simply listening to Mr. Goode play, wherever I was, was good enough. Mr. Goode then played a set of three Haydn Sonatas. I could look up the numbers if you want. Following a brief intermission, he returned with Schumann's Kreisleriana. All were excellently played, with keen attention to detail. Furthermore, the acoustics of the hall, the Herbst Theater, were stunning in my opinion. I haven't been to many solo piano concerts, but often the tone of the piano can get muddied in the middle registers due to no fault of the performer per se, but the poor acoustics of the hall. Not so here at the Herbst theater. The piano was very clear and vibrant. I look forward to hearing Brad Mehldau there tomorrow night.

As Mr. Goode played the Haydn sonatas, I could not help but thinking of how delicately these works were put together. The counterpoint and delicate balance between the voices, the modulation from one key center to another. It takes a deep appreciation of the intricacy of the composition to play these with as much elan as Mr. Goode did; I thought he did a remarkable job of elucidating these details from the composition itself. It reminded me of what I have read about Berrocal sculptures (as in Martin Gardiner's essay From Burrs to Berrocal). The work as a whole is not understood nor fully realized until each piece has put in its proper place in the proper order.

The Schumann was very nice as well. Not as rigorous in form as the Haydn, but harmonically richer, Mr. Goode was able to play it in its full romantic glory. Hearing it reminds me of a whole set of piano compositions of the romantic period, the Fantasies and Songs without Words, that I really have not investigated, probably because I've been somewhat traumatized by solo piano music for a while. I'll have to re investigate that pocket of rich romantic music.

Playing a short second set is not necessarily grounds for playing three encores, but whatever. I couldn't really complain at hearing a Chopin Nocturne and the Sarabande from Bach's Partita no.1. There was something else, but I didn't recognize it.

Blue Skies

Let in a little sunshine
Everything is in balance

Terry Teachout's new biography of Louis Armstrong has received much praise from those who have reviewed it, and I really have little to add to the insightful reviews that have been written. The two clips above are inspired by one of the anecdotes near the end of the book. "Richard Brookhiser tells of how, when doing battle with cancer, he was unable to listen to any music other than the Goldberg Variations and Louis Armstrong: 'Bach said everything is in its place; Armstrong said the sun comes shining through.'" Funny how I listened to primarily the Goldberg Variations and Louis Armstrong the few weeks before my big exam. I'm glad that I didn't have to reach such life threatening circumstances in order to see the profundity of these two bodies of music.

Pops, however, remains a very clear, precisely written, and seemingly unbiased account of Armstrong and his career as one of the most influential jazz musicians. While much has been written about Louis Armstrong's early career in the slums of New Orleans at the beginning of the twentieth century, Pops does an excellent job of filling in the rest of the narrative. Louis Armstrong's first big break with the recordings of the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens was not the only big event for his career. Those recordings arguably changed the face of Jazz in the 1920's, propelling it to high popularity, Louis with them, but Louis also had a remarkable break in the 1950's with the inception of Louis Armstrong and his All Stars, a recording of which is posted.

One of the key aspects that Pops brings out about Louis Armstrong is his unfaltering dedication to the music he played. Until the last years of his life, Louis was almost continuously on the road moving from performance to performance. Near the end of his career, Louis was told by the doctors to take eight weeks off to rest and recover. After three weeks, Louis called the rest of his band in to go back on the road. He simply could not stand to take so long off.

In all ways, he personifies the career path laid out by Caleb in Middlemarch: "'That depends,' said Caleb, turning his head on one side and lowering his voice, with the air of a man who felt himself to be saying something deeply religious. 'You must be sure of two things; you must love your work, and not always be looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honourable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying There's this and there's that - if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. no matter what a man is - I wouldn't give two pence for him' - here Caleb's mouth looked better, and he snapped his fingers - ' whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn't do well what he undertook to do.'"

We should all strive to be as dedicated to our work as that.

In contrast, I went to a lecture this evening on "The Electric Louis Armstrong" This was supposed to be a lecture about how advances in recording technology played a significant role in Armstrong's career. Unfortunately, Loren Schoenberg only made passing reference to the intended topic of the lecture. Fortunately, he and a few other musicians played a few numbers to ease the bitter pill of the lecture itself. In essence, Loren spend the entire time relating Abe Lincoln to B. Obama, with a passing reference to how Louis is kind of like them too. The lecture was full of cliche phrases about the importance of jazz and how, at a jazz performance, "Something is Created." Oh, he also asked the bass player and drummer accompanying him to improvise while he read the Gettysburg Address, which, by the way, is on the same level of importance as Senator Obama's speech on race relations in the US. Hungadunga and a colon.

Abducted

The other evening, I went to see "The Abduction from the Seraglio" with the parents.

The opera performance was excellent. You know, Jay Nordlinger and recently David Pryce-Jones have all complained about directors "reworking" old productions, staging them in times where they don't belong, politicizing works of art that need no additional political baggage. Fortuantely, none of these attributes reared their head for this performance. This was Mozart as close to what Mozart probably intended as you could possibly get in this day and age. The costumes were traditional, the noble man from Italy was wearing garb suitable for a noble man in Mozart's day, you know jacket and pantaloons, a pony-tail with a tie in the back. The ladies were wearing the big ornate dresses and even wigs. The Pasha was wearing, well, Pasha clothing. There were no Nazi uniforms or nude women or orgy scenes. Excellent.

And the music itself was even good. I have to admit, however, that the orchestra had a bit of a muted sound throughout the first act, and the singing was good, but nothing absolutely exceptional. I'd say that in some of the arias, they perhaps took more of the repeats than were absolutely necessary. You don't realize it the recording I have, but they have pared it down from what must have been written originally. I guess Mozart needed filler so he just put in that extra repeat symbol a few extra times.

However, in the second act, things picked up dramatically after Constanze's big aria, "Tutte le torture." I am personally not sure if there was some change in the orchestra, the conducting, or if it is simply the score itself, but the opera became immensely more exciting and engaging at that point. Perhaps it takes the threat of death and torture to bring out the really best. (For those with my music collection, there's a recording of Maria Callas performing this very aria at the Dallas Opera house as part of her rehearsal to her US premier, in Dallas.) The singing was great. Sure, no one was Maria Callas, but still excellent. Ok, so maybe Constanze had a few bobbles in the Queen-of-the-Night style sections, but I wouldn't say it greatly detracted from the experience.

Oh, and one last thing, they chose to do all of the singspiel in English. This was perhaps the largest change that they made, but I thought it was appropriate. I mean, they are just blabbering in German in the original, why not put it in English for everyone to understand. It's much better than following along with subtitles.



On another note completely, did I mention that I was in Colorado just over two weeks ago? Sorry. I think that my receiver was in quite a happy place here in the Front Range, just outside Denver.



Does it get much better than that?

Shabbat Reading

I completely agree with Spengler on this point. 

My thoughts on this week's parsha. Hope the link works. 

I like Barbecue

so I appreciate this. Found on the First Things website. 

...and we're back.

This is the kind of feminism that I support. 

Taking responsibility for your own education. I've been trying to do this, and that is why Amazon is its own section in my personal budget plan. 

I used to think I was in good snooty company in my enjoyment of Brideshead, but it turns out there's an even snootier circle looking down on us in our relatively poor taste.  Don't know if I'm currently ascending or descending in literary snootiness with this discovery.

Is every single "issue" going to be seen through the prism of Heschel's work with MLK? One of the rabbi's on the Obama conference call quoted Heschel, as well. In my time at HUC, I don't think I've ever heard a sermon in which the rabbi quoted any major Reform theologian besides Heschel - one never hears a quote from, say, Emil Fackenheim. How about a little diversity? 

Ok, let's discuss. 

•But some, I suspect are critical of any discussion on such issues as being "political," defining anything political as being outside the religious concerns of the Jewish community and/or the concerns Jews have on the High Holy Days. At the root of many of these criticisms is the question of whether we, as Jews, should engage in social justice advocacy work in the first place." 

Ok, define what exactly you mean by "social justice advocacy work" and then we can go from there. Are the politics of third-party based health insurance companies really about social justice? Thomas Sowell, in one of his books, has pointed about the inherent meaninglessness of the term "social justice." All justice is social. Can one have justice if one is stranded on a deserted island? 

•"Doing God's work in making a better, more just, more compassionate world for all - including the poor, the weak, the sick, the children, the elderly, the widow and the orphan - has been a profoundly religious obligation for the Jewish people for 3,000 years." I agree, and that's why people should be upset about Obama putting a cap on the amount that one can get a tax deduction for charitable donations. 

•"Each of the factual errors reported about the call is minor, but in the aggregate they reflect an antagonism toward the President that seems unrelated to the issues we face collectively, both as Jews and as Americans. " Actually, some of my antagonism toward the President IS directly related to the issues we face collectively - especially as a Jew. Re: Mary Robinson, pronouncements on the settlements, etc. 

•"Finally, Mr. Troy offered a confusing criticism of the President's quoting from the U'netana Tokefprayer, a central liturgical prayer of the High Holy Days. Again, the President used it authentically and effectively, correctly noting that during these holidays and in this prayer, Jews acknowledge that, in matters of life and death, God is the ultimate judge. Yet the President noted that Jewish tradition teaches we are God's partners in preserving life and delaying death. " Gee I wish that's what the President said  - "Partners in preserving life and delaying death." But it's just not. Now might one wish there was a better public recording of what was said on that call? 

•"As is always the case with our annual High Holy Days calls, this call was meant to be off the record, exclusively for rabbis. Regrettably, a few critics drew from the limited "tweets" on rabbis' personal Twitter accounts." 'Regrettably?' Who regrets it? Saperstein? How can he regret something that other people did? Do the critics regret drawing on those tweets? I doubt that. Also, there is a difference between the terms "off the record" and "exclusive," but here he implies that they are somehow synonymous. In any case, the only word I heard was "private" which has no clear legal meaning.

•" The bottom line is that the President spoke in strong moral terms, referencing Jewish themes and ideas in a manner that showed deep knowledge, respect, interest and understanding of our tradition and our values. It was a moving experience for me - and I suspect for almost every rabbi on the call." So, if someone uses Jewish and "moral terms" (whatever those are?) then it's okay, whatever the argument? Hope my professors go for that one too - just stick all the right vocab words in the essay and I'm good to go. Er...good call on that "almost" there in the last sentence. 

Parental Units invade Cincinnati!

Here we have documentation of:

1. Mom and me in front of the historic Plum Street Temple. 

2. Dad and me enjoying the beautiful gardens of Cincinnati's Ault Park.

3. Dad and me in my kitchen after services and before Friday night dinner. Notice the gorgeous challah that Mom brought from her own kitchen, and Dad's outstanding patriotic bow tie.

We all had a great visit. The parentals got a tour of HUC, we enjoyed walking to the local UDF (United Dairy Farmers - like the socialist version of the monarchial Dairy Queen, I guess); and Dad got blessed with all the other "August birthday kids" at Friday night services. 

Nothing Like the Desert

I returned to the San Xavier Mine this past week for more measurements. Most things went well.
One of the antennas setup on the surface.

Antenna 150 feet down.

Phil, mine manager, operating the hoist with all our stuff on it.

We finished with a little time to spare so we went for a hike in the nearby Santa Catalina mountains.

•What's that place you are going, HAARP? Just like
HAART. This is where I'm headed this afternoon.

•I did finish reading Bing West's account of the War in Iraq, The Strongest Tribe. Excellent account of the the war through 2008. I was struck by a few things, namely the strong difference between administrative goals of the White House and the military goals, procedures and achievements at the beginning of the war. Furthermore, it is impressive to hear how the US armed forces were able to turn around their entire tactic in a short amount of time, and that has made all the difference in their success with defeating insurgents. Well done, well worth reading.

Weaponized Hurricanes!

What Dave does, and where he's headed tomorrow, actually -apparently along with "throngs" of other physics students each summer? I asked him about this (a quote from the article) and he said, "Yeah, all ten of us..." Posted it for ya, dude. 

I've been reading another Leon Kass book. This one, Toward a More Natural Science, was written quite a while ago, 1985. He mainly addresses issues of bioethics - genetic manipulation and research, in vitro and test-tube babies, how long to prolong life, etc. His overall approach is probably summed up here: "I wish to suggest that before deciding what to do, one should try to understand the implications of doing or not doing. The first task, it seems to me, is not to ask 'moral or immoral' or 'right or wrong?" but to try to understand fully the meaning and significance of the proposed actions." Agreed. Several other times he indicates that his feeling about much scientific research (especially the bio-medical field) is that it is racing ahead without any direction or reflection. So, like any good Jewish discussion, this book gives the reader many more questions than answers - but they are very good and instructive questions. Maybe there's something in all of these book for my High holiday sermons. Hah!

"And now for something completely different" I'm going to try to read Julia Child's My Life in France - while I wait for Elie Wiesel's book on Rashi to come, and before Mom comes to visit and I pass the JC to her. 

Links, of varied topics:

Dave is further ahead in West's book, and apparently it's a page-turner. 

Morocco acknowledges the Holocaust?

The Israel Test.  "Do you admire and emulate excellence and accomplishment, even if it excels your own? Or do you envy and resent it? And try to tear it down?"

Onion News!

Remember my buffet of books? 

Over the weekend I finished Leon Kass's The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfection of our Nature. I'd highly recommend this as a first Kass book to read because - 1) it's his shortest 2) food is almost always a naturally enjoyable topic 3) it gives a sampling of the way Kass does philosophy without getting too far into the weeds, as happens in the book of his that I'm now reading - Toward a More Natural Science. 

The way that humans eat is, indeed, pretty striking when compared with any other member of the animal kingdom. And Kass proposes that the way we eat - our customs, taste preferences, manners, preparation, etc - can tell us much about our humanity. We enjoy good conversation with our food. We take time to prepare it (bread, for example, which is often synonymous with food). We bring the food to our mouths, rather than bringing our faces down to it. All of these things were fascinating as Kass brought them to my attention. 

I also like how he hits hard on the necessity and benefit of good manners and conversation skills. "Far from being an escape from the serious demands of life, witty and convivial dining - a species of high play - pays tribute to the meaningfulness of human life and its possibilities for community, freedom, and nobility - all in the act of sustaining life through nourishment. Further, the detachment needed for wit and laughter is akin to that needed for seeking truth, and the free play of the mind in conversation often provides food for deeper thought."

And: "Not surprisingly, incivility, insensitivity, and ingratitude learned at the family table can infect all other aspects of one's life. Conversely, good habits and thoughtful attitudes regarding food and eating will have far-reaching benefits. Self-restraint and self-command, consideration for others, politeness, fairness, and the art of friendly conversation, enrich and ennoble all of human life...A blessing offered over the meal still fosters a fitting attitude toward the world, who gracious bounty is available to us and not because we merit it..."

Food for thought. Har. Well, someone was going to say it at some point, anyway. Dr. Kass makes great points. 

Dr. Kass does delve briefly into "sanctified eating," that is, laws of kashrut. There is not much in that chapter that was new or surprising to me (though, again, I didn't disagree with any of it). That's probably because I had read these two articles at some point, and there is much in between the three discussions that is very similar. The second one even quotes Kass's book extensively, and approvingly. 

Robert Alter on kashrut. 

Meir Soloveitchik on kashrut. 

More links? Okay. 

Terry Teachout wrote an opera? Who's going to write the review? 

The Folk Song Army has got a turncoat. 

Jews and Christians. Very interesting. 

A perfect morning: Finally the sun came out (where be my summer? Newport doesn't exactly have my version of Beach Weather, eithe) and I got in a beautiful walk, then got to sit on my balcony and pick from a veritable buffet of excellent books: Leon Kass's The Hungry Soul, Robert Altar's The David Story, and maybe some of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism that I have been perusing over dinner lately. 

No summaries yet, but I do highly recommend the Kass book already. Especially the chapter on table manners and conversation. People. You know who you are. 

And in the Fascism last night, I came across this: "Utopia clearly reflected the influence of Georges Sorel's syndicalism on Mussolini's thinking...Sorel was deeply influenced by the Pragmatism of William James, who pioneered the notion that all one needs is the 'will to believe.' It was James' benign hope to make room for religion in a burgeoning age of science simply by arguing that any religion that worked for the believer was not merely valid but 'true'...

Aaaah! Dad, you were right. William James was the intellectual starting point for some pretty bad progressivism. Well, at least I wasn't totally won over, either. 

Some inspiring links:

Israel.

More Israel. 

Vatican City. 

Shabbat Shalom. 

A few morning work-ups....

Sorry, Dave, no idea how to categorize this one, except maybe under fantastic headline. 

Unsurprising about the URJ and the ZOA, but disheartening/depressing all the same. 

Probably of random interest to most, but helpful for me - at my chaplain training course, I expressed my own dumb surprise when one candidate identified himself as Anglican. I asked my buddy - aren't those called Episcopalians over here? Guess not. 

More to follow later - have a blessed day, all. Pictures! You want pictures? 

Links

I've got a lot of different books on the reading table right now and some waiting to be picked up from the library. I just finished Embedded by Wesley Gray and have started on The Strongest Tribe by Bing West - looking forward to comparing the two, and getting Dave's take as well (Dave, I hear, has the distinction of being the very first person to check out Bing West's book from the Stanford Library). 

So far it seems that Gray and West do have some similar take away lessons: it was a big mistake to disband the Iraqi Army, Iraqis do things very differently than Americans, and bureaucratic miscommunication at the top levels of the military has disastrous effects. 

I thought Bing's book would be a lot drier than Gray's more colorful "sea story" style of writing, but so far I'm wrong. 

One might ask: you're going to be a rabbi. Allright, probably one who is indeed in the military, but why would any rabbi need or want to read all these books about OIF? Shouldn't I put em all down and read some Rashi?

I've got a couple of reasons: One is that because so many other Reform rabbis have taken it upon themselves to preach politics from the pulpit, I feel an extra incentive to be truly informed about those topics. Second, OIF and Afghanistan are the major wars of my life so far. It would be pretty silly to find someone who lived through, say WWII and all that person could say was "Yeah, something to do with the Germans...and the Japanese, but I don't really know how they fit in exactly, and um...." I figure, I have a college education and am in graduate school - if I'm going to be considered an educated person I should at least make an attempt to be reasonably informed about what's happening in the world. And ten minutes of network morning news while drinking my coffee does not count for anything. That's like eating a Flintstones gummy vitamin and saying you have a balanced diet. 

But, anyway, I DO have some links that could fall under the topic heading "Jewish." (Dave has advised that I try to label my posts, to give some sort of context for the following links). 

The book comes out mid-August and I've ordered it. 

Great question, Mr. P! 352 pages, eh? No pithy Hillel-style on-one-foot answer? Well, looking forward to it, nonetheless.  I'm sure quite a lifetime of research was involved. 

I did not know much about this organization before. I have to say, Ms. Chesler's association with it certainly raises my level of interest, because from what I've read, she is not your typical "feminist" - she tends to be concerned with extremely important and very real womens' issues, like stoning and such in Sharia-dominated countries. 

Hopefully more to follow as I once again have my internet access. It was pretty spotty at the "Chalet" aka bachelor officer quarters of Navsta Newport. 

ExPML->getVal(0, i, k, j +fsi)

Indexing in a three dimensional space leads to headaches, but when its done, it works. Glorious.

So what's all this squiggly stuff bouncing around the screen? More electromagnetic wave simulation using a finite difference time domain method (FDTD). What makes this so special? This modulated gaussian pulse is propagating in modeled free space, mostly, that is there are no absorbing or reflective materials in this small modeled domain. However, the modeled space is "coated" with a Perfectly Matched Layer (PML). This means that once the waves reach the boundary of the modeled space, there's extra stuff added to absorb the incident waves. It is much like making an anechoic chamber. There are a bunch of special constants that have to be set and accumulators that have to kept track of so as to just perfectly attenuate the incident waves.

If you read the title properly, you'll discover what has kept this simulation from running properly for the last few days.



Also interesting to note is that the dipole radiation pattern is clearly visible in this brief simulation.

Tour Season

We are well into this year's Tour De France. It started back on July 4. So far, the Americans are doing quite well. Lance, believe it or not, is in second in the GC, only milliseconds behind the current leader. Thanks to an impressive effort by Team Astana (Lance's Team), folks from Team Astana dominate the GC, like Contador, Leipheimer, and Kloden.

Interestingly they just rode through some of the small amount of territory I have ridden in Europe. How exciting. Here are the results of Stage 6, Girona to Barcelona. While I haven't done all of this particular ride, I have done bits and pieces of it, probably more of the climbing out near Girona. There's a very pretty road up there that snakes along the cliffed-out coast overlooking the Mediterranean.

Outside Girona, Jesse discovers that Powerbar + CamelBak != Crepe + brandy.

Tomorrow, they race all the way out of Spain, through Andorra. There will be some climbing involved to get up to the Pyrenees.

Here's another race, that sounds like oodles of fun: Breckenridge Epic. While I'm perhaps glad to not have to ride at 10,000+ft, it is undoubtedly beautiful up there.

Happy Fourth!

So, ten-hour days of instruction (oh, and then there's PT before that....) at the chaplains school in Navsta Newport have left precious little time for reading anything. Wait, that's untrue. I have been reviewing SECNAVINST 1730 in all its beautiful iterations for a few hours each day. And if I tire of that, I can always turn to the Marine Corps or Coast Guard instructions as well. Or the MILPERSMAN. Sound off if you LMA. (love military acronyms). 

BUT we do get three day liberty this week so I've been sleeping and eating lots of fresh fish and catching up on some reading. 

I liked this piece on the sacred nature of marriage. 

Gardening Moms. Gave me a whole new appreciation of my own mom's masterful artwork in the yard. 

This review was pretty informative just on its own. It also stands in contrast to this. The latter, I thought, was not very well done at all - far too anecdotal, for one, without any real data to back it up. Because of that, it comes across as some cranky old guy who doesn't understand "young people today." Well, how is that anything new and/or interesting? 

I mentioned Kirsch's review here because I find it odd that Myers (the author of the second link) didn't seem to do very much extensive research. If he did, he might have mentioned Tablet's website. Are they all irreverent hipsters? 

And a saved round: Myers' mention of Matisyahu in the hipster context shows Myers' own ignorance. Matisyahu identifies himself as some sort of neo-Hasid and refrains from performing on the Sabbath. If Heeb magazine publishes borderline porn, they are not exactly the same sort. 

And I have to say I wasn't much impressed by this article, either. Just seemed sort of same old-same old. Furthermore, the trend that she examines has been going on for quite a while and has been described in the same way by many other publications. 

And maybe Roger Simon is just hanging with the wrong crowd? I agree that things look fantastically hopeless in the world of politics, but dude, spend some time on a military base. I hope (and think it's not entirely implausible) that the next generation of strong political leaders will be the set of young men and women who fought in Operation Iraqi Freedom. For example, I'd vote for these guys. If you can make even a semi-functioning municipal government system work in Iraq, I have no doubts that you could repair whatever mess we get into in the next four years in Washington. 

Take some time to pray for all our troops. Pray especially hard. 

Definitely time to watch some of We Were Soldiers on the base tv channel before heading out to watch da booms, drink local brews, and look at fancy boats down in Newport! Happy Fourth of July!