I think, more than anything, I reject God on phallogocentric grounds; our old notions of God as a single, supreme male, deconstruct (and if we can make a value judgment, this is "good"), and the discourse then opens to a more expansive and inclusive (Spinozan?) realm.
Atheism, for me, is an intellectual exercise. Perhaps I've killed God. I don't know.
But the issue isn't cut and dry, and that is why I reject Humanistic Judaism, even though I embrace and cherish human intelligence and emotion above all else. There is too much hubris within atheist thought. Science will explain the physical laws of the Universe, but it will never explain all the intricacies of human experience and everything it entails-- that, I believe, is more expansive than the all the galaxies. That is "spirituality" and religion, and the reason that being a Jew (being a person) is a fluid continuum of belief and practice.
3/4/11
3/2/11
Scholarship as Spirituality
The question is: am I filling a lack by being in school? By which I mean to imply that perhaps I'm also "making up" for being raised without a totally encompassing Jewish education or whatever? From here on, will I have to reach for successively higher plateaus of some kind of Jewishness?
2/11/11
Gay, frum Jews
"From my perspective the notion of "a life built on cognitive dissonance" is neither religiously viable nor traditionally Jewish. It seems to me that Orthodoxy (modern to ultra) simply doesn't have the tools to provide the kind of open minded, halakhically observant, passionately Jewish communities that LGBTQ Jews need. Good thing there is something called "Conservative Judaism" which provides all of those things and luckily (at least for those Jews living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan) it is right down the block."
Me: Let's see: can't get married, can't be a rabbi. Sounds as great as being a gay republican. Obviously no one's identity is an oxymoron, but what's the point of joining a club that doesn't want you? You can join another branch and retain your frumness. And why would God forbid us to do something that harms no one? Continuing to take the Torah as the divine word is a whole other can of worms. Grow up, my fellow queers. You guys are late to the party anyways; legitimate critiques were lodged against orthodoxy over 100 years ago.
The sheer irrationality that people come up with just to stay part of a group (a hateful one, at that) is infuriating.
Me: Let's see: can't get married, can't be a rabbi. Sounds as great as being a gay republican. Obviously no one's identity is an oxymoron, but what's the point of joining a club that doesn't want you? You can join another branch and retain your frumness. And why would God forbid us to do something that harms no one? Continuing to take the Torah as the divine word is a whole other can of worms. Grow up, my fellow queers. You guys are late to the party anyways; legitimate critiques were lodged against orthodoxy over 100 years ago.
The sheer irrationality that people come up with just to stay part of a group (a hateful one, at that) is infuriating.
2/5/11
Washington is kinda like Hitler, right?
Person B: If we so discriminated our historical figures, then we should never celebrate history. That Martin Luther King cheated on his wife many a times. We should not have a day for people who do not keep their vows. Gandhi beat his wife, we should not celebrate domestic violence. Yet since history is a constant series of oversimplifications, we simply try to remember what is admirable and move on from there.
Me: Yeah, shit. The more I think about this, it's actually kind of ignorant and offensive. We don't worship Thomas Jefferson qua slaveholder--we readily admit his faults and those of our other "founding fathers"; and we (should) recognize the term as sexist, too. Seeing Jefferson as nothing other than a slaveholder is just as bad as seeing him as nothing other than a "founding father". So, this statement is ignorant AND hypocritical: it is overly reductive.
---
I have read parts of , love Studs Terkel, and think ethnographic research carries a lot of value; however, we need to recognize the lack of credibility the "on-the-street" style interview also has. Peoples' feelings are valid, but sometimes their opinions aren't. Obviously we should try to tell the whole truth about figures as significant as Washington and Hitler. This, everyone can agree on.
2/2/11
Jakov Lind
"What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make use feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like suicide."--Kafka
A book has done that. It is Jakov Lind's Soul of Wood.
Perhaps it was Lind's extraordinary past that produced such extraordinary work: the boy was separated from his parents who emigrated to Palestine after the Nazis annexed Austria, and he went into hiding in Holland. He took on many identities throughout his life, and even worked for the SS. He moved to London, befriended Canetti, and then wrote in English, lamenting his loss of German and European culture. Stefan Zweig's suicide, which forever separated him from his homeland, comes to mind.
I cannot put into words, at least not ones that rival Kafka's above, about how Lind's stories have touched me. They do, to be sure, affect me in a similar way as those of Kafka's absurdist works; I see Lind as a post-war Kafka, someone fully familiar with the chaos of the world and the ability to render it into almost perfect representational art. Lind's symbols, even ones as insane as a paralytic Jewish boy hidden from the Nazis at the top of an Austrian mountain with the help of a crippled WWI veteran (this is the background of the title story), will hopefully remain as prevalent as Kafka's human-turned-creature Gregor Samsa.
A book has done that. It is Jakov Lind's Soul of Wood.
Perhaps it was Lind's extraordinary past that produced such extraordinary work: the boy was separated from his parents who emigrated to Palestine after the Nazis annexed Austria, and he went into hiding in Holland. He took on many identities throughout his life, and even worked for the SS. He moved to London, befriended Canetti, and then wrote in English, lamenting his loss of German and European culture. Stefan Zweig's suicide, which forever separated him from his homeland, comes to mind.
I cannot put into words, at least not ones that rival Kafka's above, about how Lind's stories have touched me. They do, to be sure, affect me in a similar way as those of Kafka's absurdist works; I see Lind as a post-war Kafka, someone fully familiar with the chaos of the world and the ability to render it into almost perfect representational art. Lind's symbols, even ones as insane as a paralytic Jewish boy hidden from the Nazis at the top of an Austrian mountain with the help of a crippled WWI veteran (this is the background of the title story), will hopefully remain as prevalent as Kafka's human-turned-creature Gregor Samsa.
1/12/11
Guns
and for as much proletarian Yiddish literature as I read (or bell hooks, who, like Rage Against the Machine, is so angry she could kill a man), I somehow don't feel like busting any caps in anyone's ass, or sparking a revolution any time soon.
i enjoy guns, have fired, assembled and cleaned them, but i still don't feel the need to own one.
and one can argue that yes, firing weapons is a skill, but the point of that skill is ultimately to hurt other people. i'm not saying that p...eople who like guns want to hurt others, just that you can't avoid saying guns are for anything else besides killing and violence.
BJ: "just that you can't avoid saying guns are for anything else besides killing and violence." I agree. The very act of firing a gun (even at a target) is a violent one, meant to destroy the target and put the bullet close to the "heart" or the "brain."
me:
and one can argue that yes, firing weapons is a skill, but the point of that skill is ultimately to hurt other people. i'm not saying that p...eople who like guns want to hurt others, just that you can't avoid saying guns are for anything else besides killing and violence.
BJ: "just that you can't avoid saying guns are for anything else besides killing and violence." I agree. The very act of firing a gun (even at a target) is a violent one, meant to destroy the target and put the bullet close to the "heart" or the "brain."
me:
I aim for the knees. this is a tough conversation--i have to admit to myself that, to an extent, i am violent. it's my opinion that playing video games and perpetuating that culture indicts me in some way.
but yeah. i enjoy the argument...s that are like, "cars kill people, too!" Uhh, cars are for GOING PLACES. if you modify cars to kill people, ya got problems; no one has to modify a gun to kill a person.
but yeah. i enjoy the argument...s that are like, "cars kill people, too!" Uhh, cars are for GOING PLACES. if you modify cars to kill people, ya got problems; no one has to modify a gun to kill a person.
1/6/11
Another Writing
"Latin! Dirty from the lips of idolators"-Edelshtein
Recently got in a debate with a conservative critic, and orthodox Jew, about theory. It didn't go so well. I finally realized I should not have been there: the rhetoric of the other side was so rooted in phallogocentrism that they could not conceive of another writing. Their judgments for literature are evaluations that I never consider. My relation to them is the same as Edelshtein's to Latin: not only do Others speak a different language, but it has a history of repressing minorities. So initially I am disgusted, and enter into debate; finally, thank God, I realize they do not inhabit the same universe of thought that I do.
Another thing:
I solved the conundrum to Conservative Judaism's identity crisis. Everyone got all crazed asking the movement to define itself, and to my knowledge no response from rabbis was issued. Good. There need not be a response. No form of Judaism needs to give a reason for its existence (There: I essentially summarized Mordecai Kaplan's entire corpus of thought!).
*Also if take the initiative to ask what the Conservative movement stands for in the first place, you could at least go on wikipedia before whining about it.
Recently got in a debate with a conservative critic, and orthodox Jew, about theory. It didn't go so well. I finally realized I should not have been there: the rhetoric of the other side was so rooted in phallogocentrism that they could not conceive of another writing. Their judgments for literature are evaluations that I never consider. My relation to them is the same as Edelshtein's to Latin: not only do Others speak a different language, but it has a history of repressing minorities. So initially I am disgusted, and enter into debate; finally, thank God, I realize they do not inhabit the same universe of thought that I do.
Another thing:
I solved the conundrum to Conservative Judaism's identity crisis. Everyone got all crazed asking the movement to define itself, and to my knowledge no response from rabbis was issued. Good. There need not be a response. No form of Judaism needs to give a reason for its existence (There: I essentially summarized Mordecai Kaplan's entire corpus of thought!).
*Also if take the initiative to ask what the Conservative movement stands for in the first place, you could at least go on wikipedia before whining about it.
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