Man As Anti-Creator

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Haim Watzman

In the creation story we will read from the Torah in synagogue this Shabbat, God creates the world, and man, and woman. Adam and Eve sin and are ejected from Eden.

In her poem “Eve to Her Daughters”, the late Australian feminist, environmentalist, and poet Judith Wright offers an alternative version of the story from Eve’s point of view.

Wright plays off both the biblical story and Milton’s Paradise Lost. In both those versions of the story, Adam is God’s junior partner in the creation; he names the animals, tends the garden, and is the raw material from which Eve is created. In both stories, man is ruined by his urge to know more–but the sin begins with Eve’s curiosity.

In Wright’s poem, it is Adam’s need to understand, to “unravel everything/because he believed that mechanism /was the whole secret” that is the original sin. As soon as he comes into being, Adam begins the process of uncreation. Having the power to uncreate gives him power, and power creates hubris: “And now that I know how it works, why, I must have invented it.” Adam’s surging powers of analysis lead him to the conclusion that he cannot demonstrate God’s existence–so God must not exist.

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Not Getting Married Today–When Should Young Modern Orthodox Jews Get Hitched?

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Haim Watzman

One of the problems with the liberal Orthodox Jewish Zionism that we live by here on this blog is that it delays young people’s entry into adulthood and marriage. When I graduated from a public high school in the U.S. in the 1970s, the path before me was four years of college and the real world. My son graduated high school, then studied at a yeshiva for a year and a half, and is now performing military service in a unit that will require him to serve at least one year beyond the already long mandatory term of three years. Add the de rigueur year of travel after the army, and he won’t even begin college until he’s 25. If he goes for an advanced degree, he may not reach the real world until he’s well into his thirties.

It would be absurd to pretend that the expectation that our sons and daughters will pursue high-level religious and secular studies, as well as serve extended terms of military or national service, doesn’t clash with the family values we also espouse as religious Jews. Understandably, many young modern Orthodox men and women have chosen to delay marriage and spend extended periods as singles, a phenomenon almost unheard of previously in the religious community and now the subject of a popular new television series, Serugim.

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The Nicest Spot in Jerusalem

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When tourists come to Jerusalem, they go to the Old City. They don’t go to the zoo. For a zoo, you go to San Diego. San Diego doesn’t have 3,000 years of history. It doesn’t have holy places. It has giant pandas.

Maybe I shouldn’t let the tourists know they’ve goofed. On holidays, the Jerusalem zoo is already crowded enough with locals who know that it’s absolutely the most enjoyable place in town. I really shouldn’t send more people there.

All right, the Jerusalem zoo doesn’t have giant pandas. It does, however, have red pandas. Red PadaUnfortunately, this picture from the zoo’s website doesn’t show the big fluffy red and white striped tail that makes the creature look like it was designed by Dr. Seuss. Unless you are a Jerusalemite, I bet you’ve never seen a red panda.

When my kids were younger and I took them to the San Diego zoo, they wanted to see the penguins. There weren’t any. San Diego is too warm, someone in a zoo uniform told us. As far as I can tell from the San Diego Zoo’s online catalog of beasts and birds, penguins are still absent.

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Friends III: “Soldiers of Conscience”

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Gary Weimberg, the guy with whom I had endless conversations about what everything in the world means when we were both very young, grew up to be a producer of documentaries. He and his partner Catherine Ryan have produced a film called Soldiers of Conscience, about American soldiers who went to Iraq to fight for a cause they thought was right – and reached the difficult conclusion that no cause justified killing. The film is showing tonight in America on PBS. If you are in the land where PBS broadcasts, you can click here to find out when the show will air where you live. There will be a chat on the PBS site tomorrow.

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Friends II: Judaism Isn’t About Spirituality

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I’ve waited too long to recommend “The Brisket King,” an essay by my friend Andrew Gow on Jews who dismiss Judaism and go looking for “spirituality”:

We go shopping, literally, for new ‘spiritual’ experiences, as though one could isolate and purchase ‘spirituality’ via retreats, healing sessions, etc. – as a commodity. New Age, Wicca and Buddhism are major alternative destinations for disaffected middle-class Jews, followed by Christianity-though ‘secularism’ is admittedly the default destination for the vast majority, with assimilation coming close behind, probably in the generation following those who see themselves only as ‘secular’ or ‘cultural’ Jews.

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Friends I: Collective v. Individual Ownership

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My friend Samuel Fleischacker is writing a wonderful series on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sam is a professor of philosophy. To a subject normally discussed in the tones used by two overheated and underdressed young men standing next to the cars they’ve banged into each other, Sam brings a philosophical coolheadedness. He analyzes what people are really talking about, and explains where they use one word to describe several different things, thereby confusing matters.

His latest post, for instance, is about what it means when people talk about Jews or Arabs “owning” the land between the sea and the river. The question itself, he explains,

…brings us to a simple fact about the conflict over Israel/Palestine that often gets overlooked: it’s about collective rights, not individual ones… When Jews say that the land is inherently ‘Jewish’, they mean that the Jewish people collectively owns the land, that the political units on it should represent and foster Jewish culture. And when Palestinians say that the land is ‘Arab’, or ‘Palestinian’, they likewise mean to make a claim about its proper political and cultural character, not about individual rights.

But individual ownership and political rule are nothing alike:

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The Secret of Low Expectations–“Necessary Stories” Column, The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman I remember a high wind and driving rain. Night is darker here, I thought, as the bus’s engine expired in a series of knocks that sounded like the final beats of a broken heart. We pulled our duffel bags and backpacks from the luggage compartment and dragged them in the direction of the … Read more

Zionists of the World Unite! (Around Me)

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Haim Watzman

Beware of Israelis who call for unity. More often than not, what they really mean is “everyone should unite around my political program.”

In yesterday’s Ha’aretz, Moshe Arens calls for unity with an invocation of American revolutionary rhetoric (”Divided We Fall”). Yet his bottom line is that unity means acceding to the agenda of Israel’s right-wing religious extremists.

Arens is a right-winger I like to disagree with. He writes well, argues cogently and logically, and sincerely believes both in Zionism and democracy. Like me, he grew up in the United States and absorbed the principles of liberal democracy. While he’s a territorial maximalist and a hawk to end all hawks, not to mention a talented political maneuverer in his Byzantine Likud party, he has devoted much effort to promoting minority rights in Israel, in particular serving an advocate for the Bedouin.

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Sorry, Nir Barkat Will Not Save Jerusalem

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A lot of my friends in Jerusalem think that mayoral candidate Nir Barkat will save the city. There are generally two arguments they offer: First, he’s a former high-tech entrepreneur, and the business world produces better managers than the political arena does.

Second, and much more important, Barkat is secular. Among secular, traditional, and modern-leaning Orthodox Jewish residents of Jerusalem there’s a backlash against ultra-Orthodox hegemony at City Hall. There’s a pervading sense that ultra-Orthodox rule is responsible for the city’s economic decline, and for the exodus of young people. The conventional wisdom is that the ultra-Orthodox are on the demographic march toward turning Jerusalem into a giant neo-shtetl, big sister to Bnei Brak. Barkat is supposed to be the solution.

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Khaled Hosseini on the Republicans’ Anti-Muslim Incitement

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The author of The Kite Runner has the courage and confidence to raise a necessary issue: The anti-Muslim incitement that has become part of the Republican campaign against Obama:

Twice last week alone, speakers at McCain-Palin rallies have referred to Sen. Barack Obama, with unveiled scorn, as Barack Hussein Obama.

…Never mind that such jeers are deeply offensive to millions of peaceful, law-abiding Muslim Americans who must bear the unveiled charge, made by some supporters of Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin, that Obama’s middle name makes him someone to distrust — and, judging by some of the crowd reactions at these rallies, someone to persecute or even kill. As a secular Muslim, I too was offended. Obama’s middle name differs from my last name by only two vowels. Does the McCain-Palin campaign view me as a pariah too? Do McCain and Palin think there’s something wrong with my name?

To the extent that they are the product of cynical calculation, the attacks on Obama as Muslim are meant to put him in a double bind:

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