Hassagot השגות

Do we all not have one Father?

There is no god in the abstract.  God is G-d when one worships Him, when a community accepts Him as King.   

From the perspective of G-d, we all have one Father.   From our perspective, we have the G-d of our Fathers, that is, the G-d of our community.  We must come together as members of a community (that is, of communities) to greet G-d.   The community includes both those whom I can see, encounter, touch, and those who are no longer living.

In order to fully understand that G-d is G-d of all creation, one must first greet Him in the community.

-- H. A. Massig המשיג

Rabbinic Integrity

The website of the Rabbinical Council of America includes an important post on a matter of currency and moment in American Orthodoxy dated 29 December 2005.  A group calling itself "The Committee for Rabbinic Integrity" has recently opened a blog on the same matter featuring material from Orthodox sources to the right of the RCA.   For a perspective deeply critical of the RCA, see this piece (12/21/2005) from the Jewish Press.

-- H. A. Massig המשיג

To speak of G-d as father

This afternoon (Mon. 11/28/05) I heard a radio essay on NPR's "This I believe" by John W. Fountain entitled "The G-d who embraced me".  Rev.  Fountain delivered an inspiring account of his relationship with G-d as abba/daddy, a kind of substitute for his own, absent, father.

I believe in God, God the Father, embodied in his Son Jesus Christ. The God who allowed me to feel His presence -- whether by the warmth that filled my belly like hot chocolate on a cold afternoon, or that voice, whenever I found myself in the tempest of life's storms, telling me (even when I was told I was "nothing") that I was something, that I was His, and that even amid the desertion of the man who gave me his name and DNA and little else, I might find in Him sustenance.

I was struck by the reference to Jesus.  Why?  Rev. Fountain is a deeply committed Christian, and a reference to Jesus is surely to be expected.   Yet I was struck by the reference, and for two reasons.  One--it seemed to be a throwaway line in an essay that focused so strongly on G-d as father.  Second, because I understood that there is no access to "father" except through "son."

A father is father only by dint of having children.  For Christians, G-d is "father" as father of Jesus.   If it were not for Jesus, G-d would, so to speak, not be their father. 

How does this work for Jews?  G-d is our father because He has called us בני בכורי ישראל/beni bechori yisrael/Israel is my first born son (Exodus 4:22).  Jews relate to God as אבינו/avinu/our father because we are בני ישראל/benei yisrael/children of Israel [=Jacob].   [See also Deut. 14:1] In Rabbinic language this relationship is referred to as בנים למקום/banim lamakom/children of the Place [=G-d] (R' Akiva quotes Deut 14:1 in making this point, mAvot 3:17).

That is one reason why it is so essential for Jews to connect ourselves with the אבות/avot/[fore]fathers.  In the Tefilah/Prayer [=Shemoneh Esreh (18 blessings) or Amidah], we begin by presenting our credentials to G-d as א-להינו וא-לוהי אבותינו/elokeinu veilokei avoteinu/Our G-d and G-d of our fathers.

-- המשיג/H. A. Massig

What the Cathedral can learn from the Movies

A friend tells me that she and her friends have a Judaism without prayer.  I believe that they do not have a life without the movies.  I believe that movies feed them in a way that the Jewish prayer they know does not.

My advice to the houses of worship of their youth:  What Hollywood does unabashedly, you may too.  A century and more of cleansing Jewish life of ritual, of cultural material, has left so many Jews thirsty for transcendence.  Steven Spielberg obliges--he knows how to provide transcendence.  Here is a Jew who can teach rabbis something.

-- H. A. Massig המשיג

Only the Hardy Plants will Survive

In How Mainline Protestantism became sidelined, I suggest that a loss of common purpose led to the weakening of such Christian denominations as the Episcopal and Presbyterian.  I would like to make a stronger point in this post:  In our current theopolitical environment, only the hardy plants will survive.  In theological terms, only those religious expressions that are coherent and passionately held can last long in the environment of evangelical secularism that pertains in the West.  A theologically weak denomination cannot last against the waves of secularism and the countervailing waves of the theologically strong. 

Joshua Kurlantzick, writing in the December 2004 issue of Commentary magazine ("The Left and the Islamists"), lingers on the incongruity of leftists aligning themselves with Islamists who deny the validity of their positions.   Kurlantzick refers to the cozy embrace of the Presbyterians and Hizballah:

A delegation of the American Presbyterian Church met with Hizballah officials in Beirut and praised the terrorist organization. As one of its members helpfully explained on Hizballah television, “Relations and conversations with Islamic leaders are a lot easier than dealings and dialogue with Jewish leaders.”

(Compare my post, Do Presbyterians Talk Theology with Hezbollah?)

It strikes me that the Presbyterians who met with Hezbollah/Hizballah are like moths drown to a lightbulb.  The Presbyterians are no theological match for the much more dedicated, radical, and religious (!) Hezbollah.

My general point is that those forms of Christianity which have lost their faith and their nerve will naturally falter in the face of competing religious groups who retain their faith and nerve (whether Christian, Muslim, or other) on the one hand and secularism on the other.

--H. A. Massig המשיג

The Islamization of Europe? So what?

For the December 2004 issue of Commentary, David Pryce-Jones has contributed "The Islamization of Europe?". 

One may ask:  Is Pryce-Jones overreacting, or has he responsibly projected the growth of Islam in Europe?  And even if he is correct in his description, who cares if Europe [=western Europe]  becomes Islamic?

I believe that Pryce-Jones has got it right.  I also believe that it makes a great difference if Europe becomes a Muslim land:

1. Islam does not have a strong tradition of democracy.  Even granted that in Indonesia there are positive signs of democracy, the world of Islam is not comfortable with that form of government.  Islam in Europe is frequently associated with efforts to establish sharia as the law of the land.  If one believes that democracy, for all its attendant mediocrity (or because of it?), is worth preserving, an Islamic Europe is clearly a threat.
2. If Islam becomes predominant in Europe, it will not stop there.  I am not trying to be alarmist.  Efforts to Islamize North America and to further Islamize Africa would become much more pronounced.   Christianity, already weak in Europe, would wither precipitously.  The state of Israel would find itself in a much more tenuous position than it is currently. 

What is to be done?  I touch on that in another post.

--H. A. Massig המשיג

How Mainline Protestantism became sidelined

A colleague, having spent many years in the Episcopalian ministry, is retiring from his current position.

Speaking with a number of us at a farewell gathering, he described the transformation of Mainline Protestant denominations in the US since the 1960s.  He pointed out how special purpose groups have come to prominence in such churches (he mentioned particularly the Presbyterian Church).  Working within one denomination, different groups work on separate agenda: women's liberation, gay liberation, economic justice, racial justice, and so forth. 

As my colleague put it, a sense of common purpose was lost.  Funding choices reflected the particular interests of different groups within one church.

Speaking of his own denomination, my colleague pointed out the number of gray heads among priests.  A special group has formed for Episcopal clergy younger than 40.

Their loss of common purpose may go far to explain why it is that the Mainline churches have become sidelined.

--H. A. Massig המשיג

Do Presbyterians Talk Theology with Hezbollah?

The Associated Press reports from Damascus today that

The head of a visiting U.S. Presbyterian Church delegation called on Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories and said Monday that his church is studying the possibility of withholding investments to increase pressure on Israel.

The piece goes on to say that

The 24-member delegation traveled to Lebanon on Sunday and met with the south Lebanon commander of Hezbollah, a group Washington calls terrorist but Lebanon sees as a legitimate resistance movement against Israeli occupation of Arab lands.

Do the Presbyterians talk theology with Hezbollah? And if so, which theological points do they discuss? One may presume that they do not talk theology, but politics. The Presbyterians seem to have graduated from theology to a peace-making of the dangerously naive.

"The occupation by Israel in the West Bank and Gaza must end because it is oppressive and destructive for the Palestinian people," the Rev. Nile Harper [, Presbyterian, Ann Arbor, Michigan] said in an interview with The Associated Press.

If the Presbyterians feel that the occupation by Syria in Lebanon must end because it is oppressive and destructive for the Lebanese people, they are apparently saying so rather quietly. Or perhaps they will wait to say that from the safety of Israel.

-- H. A. Massig המשיג

See also my post, Agency and Non-Agency, of July 2004

Anti-Heresy as a Heretical Imperative

If we mean by Heresy (see the American Heritage Dictionary's yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entries/18/h0161800.html">web definition) the choice of doctrines that differ from church doctrine, particularly Roman Catholic doctrine, then we may say that our modern West is heretical for largely having left the doctrines of Catholicism behind. If we mean by Heresy a controversial or unorthodox doctrine, it is harder to speak of the West as heretical. The modern, highly educated West has its orthodox doctrines as does any other society and hence cannot be considered heretical in this second sense.

Having grown up in the highly educated West, and having decided as a young adult to live a traditionally Jewish life, I have come to appreciate that my return to Tradition was a heretical move in the second sense while being anti-heretical or de-heretical in the first (replacing "church doctrine" with "doctrine of the beit midrash/בית מדרש/traditional Jewish study hall").

My return to tradition fits into a broader cultural context. Western literature and art of the last several centuries convey time and again a heretical imperative. Protagonists feel impelled to free themselves from the constraints of tradition and doctrine in order to arrive at a personal realm of license. It matters not whether the escape is successful or brings joy in its train. The imperative is felt, lived, and expressed.

Where does someone like myself fit into the heretical imperative? At first blush, I do not fit: I am running away from running away. Yet, there is some commonality. I have chosen to move towards tradition (and heresy implies choice). I am one of thousands who have made similar journeys away from license and towards tradition. We constitute streams of some size impelled somehow to flow against a tide. Our anti-heresy is heretical.

This paradox is no less true for being so. It is worth recognizing it in order to begin to understand the place of neo-traditionalists in a world of license and the place of a world of license in the lives and imaginations of neo-traditionalists.

-- H. A. Massig המשיג

The Pursuit of (Im)Purity

A colleague wrote the following in 1999:

surely this is the vocation and destiny of Jews -- as individuals and as a people -- to insist that life is not either/or but rather both/and, to straddle incompatible categories. Jews carry 5000 years of memory into an uncharted future and bind together people of every background, language, culture, and heritage. It seems clear to me that we are not a faith community, not a religion, not an ethnicity, not a class, not a polity, not a school of thought - and yet we are all of these, at least sometimes.

This reminded me of some public comments by Robert Pinsky, Poet Laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2000, at a recent Jewish benefit dinner. Pinsky's words echoed the following comment he made in an interview in the Atlantic:

The identity of the Jewish-American poet, say, or of any American poet of any racial or ethnic stripe, it seems to me, adheres in the hyphen. My identity is quintessentially American because of its impurity, its mongrel status—the fact that it's pieced together from a wide variety of histories that are informed by an even wider and more heterogeneous variety of histories.

At the dinner, Pinsky made the point that Jewish life in America in general is and ought to be about impurity and mongrel status.

Pinsky and, to a lesser extent, my colleague speak with some authority. Their appeal to "mongrel status" and "straddl[ing] incompatible categories" is powerful and appealing.

Appealing, but worthy of inspection. Briefly, why is a pursuit of impurity to be valorized over against the pursuit of purity? One might argue that purity is an illusion and that its pursuit is a tilting after windmills. Or that purity eludes. In either case, the pursuit of purity neither eludes nor 'illudes.' One might also contend that the "mongrel" is not really impure, but actually the pursuit of a sort of American purity.

Be that as it may, we may observe that an association is made by my colleague and Mr. Pinsky between being Jewish (or "Jewish-American") and being impure. This is remarkable. Surely the opposite case could be made, namely, that being Jewish is wrapped up in concepts of purity. Historically, have not Jews sought to maintain the purity of their food (Kashruth), of their marital lives (Taharath haMishpachah), of their speech (the laws relating to Leshon haRa), of their lineage, etc.? The very notion of a holy day (Shabbath), a holy land (Eretz Yisrael), a holy city (Yerushalayim), and so forth, strengthens the point. A mongrel Jewishness has no room for the Biblical books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, or for the works of Maimonides or the Hassagot/השגות/strictures that inspire this blog, those of R. Avraham ben David (RaAVaD), for starters.

It is a wonder that one could argue in the face of such a literary record. But it is not a great wonder. I close with a quotation from one wiser than I, Kohelet/קהלת/Ecclesiastes:
מקום המשפט, שמה הרשע, ומקום הצדק, שמה הרשע Alongside justice there is wickedness, alongside righteousness there is wickedness (3:16).

I paraphrase: alongside the tradition of purity, there is an impulse towards impurity. And I extend the argument homiletically: It is precisely within a tradition of purity that one may look to see a counter-impulse. Could it be that our people has a special predilection towards undermining itself? The Sages appreciated such a paradox when they described how the impulse towards wickedness is greatest where righteousness is most highly prized (see the end of Talmud Kiddushin). Is it for us to show the world how to pursue the impure?

--H. A. Massig המשיג