Primrose Road

According to Oprahdoctor Michael Roizen (an MD who, like Mehmet Oz, seems a bit too friendly towards alternative medicine), my "RealAge" is 24.9, younger than my real age, because I take my medications as directed, wear my seatbelt, don't talk on my cell phone while driving, eat fruit, and ... because my parents are still married. While Roizen's test can be a useful tool for encouraging people to start exercising, eat better, and quit smoking, I am not pleased with the implications that the children of divorce, those who do not attend a place of worship at least once a week, and those who don't buy into the vitamin supplement business are somehow in worse health than others.

The site recommends that I manage my allergies better, get a larger car (!!!!!), take vitamin E and omega-3 supplements, and get a dog.

In the test-prep classes I teach during the summer, we advise students to avoid the "1/2 right, 1/2 wrong" answer trap ... I think we may also need to advise Internetters and TV-watchers against the "1/2 good medical advice, 1/2 woo" answer trap as well.

At yesterday's Nextbook Festival of Ideas: Jews and Power, Stephen Greenblatt shared a Shakespeare-authorship anecdote during a talk entitled "Culture, Taste, and Power." It involved one of the Earl of Oxford's descendants making his audience a bit uncomfortable when he labeled William Shakespeare of Stratford a "shyster." The talk should be posted on the Nextbook site within two weeks; I encourage all both of my readers to check it out.

I am already fifty pages into novelist / philosopher / academic Rebecca Goldstein's Betraying Spinoza, in which she holds Spinoza's life and work up against the account presented to her by a history teacher at a Bais Yaakov high school in the late 1960s. Yesterday, Goldstein and Shalom Auslander spoke about power relations within the Jewish community, how oppression today can happen from within, not just from outside, the community.

In-community Jewish intellectualism is definitely a breath of fresh air when Jewish-American culture among those in their 20s and 30s often seems (at least to me) dominated by twin philosophies of "any comment critical of / realistic evaluation of Israel means that you're an anti-Semite" and "Jews must necessarily believe in God, and this was always historically so" as well as justalittefascist ultra-Orthodox outreach organizations like Aish who serve up some ultra-right-wingnuttery with their Torah.

A favorite excerpt from Goldstein's book thus far, written in the voice of her Orthodox girls' school history teacher:

"It would be a Jew who would make philosophy into one long argument against the existence of God and against the difference between right and wrong, so that philosophy, girls, has been, ever since modernity, the most dangerous subject that you can possibly study."

Young Jewish people: A little bit of Benjamin, Adorno, Arendt, etc. will also do you some good. ;) Intellectualize!

JBooks.com has a page on secular culture worth checking out. The site includes articles written from both new-school-atheist humanist and older-generation Marxist points of view.

For me, the humanist/Enlightenment side's a bit problematic as usual. See, for example, a rewrite of Echad Mi Yodea -- "Who Knows One?":

"Q. Who knows One?
A. One? I know One. One is the Flame of Enlightenment, which gives light for people all over the world."

Which implies, though not overtly and most likely not intentionally, that those who developed philosophical enlightenment are the ones able to "give light" to "people all over the world." Therein lies the problem with the current wave of atheist thinking, I suppose. Smart in its complete rejection of the supernatural, but philosophically problematic.

But it's helpful in any case to offer young Jewish people ways of seeing their culture without the involvement of the supernatural.

Was thinking today about how contemporary Jewish atheists call themselves humanists, as do many of the (nonetheless brilliant) people involved in the "new" atheism and skeptical movements.

Humanism's too much of a throwback to Enlightenment for me. Not the "scientifically study the natural, reject the supernatural" Enlightenment, but the "only (certain privileged) humans can shed light on what's been kept in the dark" humanism.

"This breaks with the whole philosophical tradition which placed light on the side of spirit and made consciousness a beam of light which drew things out of their native darkness. Phenomenology was still squarely within this ancient tradition; but, instead of making light an internal light, it simply opened it on to the exterior, rather as if the intentionality of consciousness was the ray of an electric lamp ... Things are luminous by themselves without anything illuminating them: all consciousness is something, it is indistinguishable from the thing, that is from the image of light."

-- Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1

Or, enlightenment without human or supernatural involvement:

"Artworks participate in enlightenment because they do not lie: They do not feign the literalness of what speaks out of them."

-- Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

So "things" are always-already enlightened, minus God, minus anything supernatural, minus privileged human enlighteners.

Progress on the dissertation so far: Thinking = easier; Writing = hard. (Blogging = somewhere in between?)

Title of a lecture being given at a NYC synagogue: "God is Not Great But Neither are We (a Response to Christopher Hitchens)."

They're a very welcoming congregation, but the above title suggests that they may not understand atheism well enough not to drive away atheists who still want to participate in Jewish culture.

MySpace has again deleted (and then undeleted, but still) a group dedicated to atheism. Apparently, they have done so several times in response to complaints from those who do practice -- and feel strongly about -- religion and God.

So if a Christians on MySpace complained about a Jewish group because the Jewish group claims that Christ was not the messiah, MySpace would delete the Jewish group?

If practicing Jews complained about a Muslim group, MySpace would delete the Muslim group?

Somehow, I doubt that.

Here's the article from the Secular Student Alliance page. While I don't agree that deleting one's MySpace account is the best or most effective solution to the problem, MySpace's aversion to nonbelievers should be noted and publicized.

If I flip a coin fifty times, that coin could land heads-up fifty times in a row. The Law of Truly Large Numbers reminds us that events we perceive as unusual/impossible/miraculous are actually more commonplace, and more possible, than we might think. It would thus be rather narcissistic for me to ask why a coin has landed heads-up fifty times in a row, or to ask whether that series of events was a sign designed personally for me or anyone else.

Last night, I attended a Limmud salon (a Jewish learning event) that explored the ways in which we could "interpret" everyday life using the same methods that Torah scholars use to interpret the Torah. I go to these events even though I don't believe in anything supernatural; they're interesting cultural experiences and they allow me to play fun ideology-critiquing games in the grad student brain that I'm pretty sure I wear outside my head nowadays.

The teacher leading the session identified two views of uncanny repetitions in everyday life:
(1) the Biblical, which says that the spiritual is in everything from food to writing to toothpaste to coin-tosses, and that everything happens for a reason;
(2) the academic, which says "shit happens."

Here is what I did not say: "Those views both sound awfully complacent."

I also did not say that I don't know of many academic types who would shrug their shoulders, say "shit happens," and walk away. Instead, many might examine how and why we tell ourselves that everything happens for a reason as a way of keeping ourselves complacent. And if we seek to identify repetitions in life experiences for the purpose of interpreting those repetitions as though they were repeated words in a verse from the Torah, perhaps it's because we narcissistically dream of a personal god and a world that exists for us, a life that is meant to be read, interpreted, annotated like the Bible or a closet drama.

Let's talk Hamlet for a moment now (since, after all, all life experience and knowledge is contained in that play ... or not): After witnessing Ophelia's burial, which I suspect crushes him, our favorite Nice Danish Boy tells Horatio that he's sleepless, torn apart over what's happened. But then, he once again proves himself entirely self-absorbed: "There's a divinity that shapes our ends," he (famously) says, "Rough-hew them how we will" (5.2.10-11). Hamlet turns to God, Providence and destiny in order to absolve himself of the specific, fatal failures that lead to Polonius' and Ophelia's deaths. If there is a fatal flaw in the character of Hamlet, it is his willingness to attribute his failures to fate, suppressing what he knows in favor what what can all-too-easily be believed.

Last week, I attended a lecture given by a young rabbi at a club in Murray Hill. (Only in New York ...) He was an engaging speaker, describing many Jews' attraction to Hellenism in the days of the Maccabees (when the Chanukah story took place). Apparently -- at least according to his sources -- the story of Chanukah was about more than little children being put to death for refusing to bow down to Antiochus' favorite idols; many Jews at the time simply bought in to the majority culture, because they found it attractive. In recounting stories about Jews named Jason, he was obviously reminding us that it was important to hold fast to our Jewish identities.

But what he seemed to be trying to get across (being a rabbi and all) was that there's no practice without belief.

(I'm going to discuss atheism now. Don't look so shocked. Thanks.)

As reluctant as I am to link to My Students' Favorite Research Tool as a "primary source" of sorts, I must admit that the Wikipedia entry on Jewish Atheism offers a fairly good explanation of why the term "Jewish atheist" isn't self-contradictory. (The entry's main source seems to be the Society for Jewish Humanism. Humanism as a philosophy is not my glaz'l tea, but their organization does have plenty of positive things to say about being Jewish without believing in or submitting to "supernatural authority.")

Can we light the menorah, perform the Passover seder, party at Purim, fast on Yom Kippur, dance on Simchat Torah, learn and speak Hebrew and Yiddish, study Torah (yes, study Torah), walk the streets of Yerushalayim, dance in the streets of Tel Aviv (falafel in hand), study for and celebrate bar and bat mitzvahs, commemorate the members of our parents/grandparents/great-grandparents generation who died horrifically in the Holocaust, without belief? I think so.

This Chanukah, let's celebrate our mythology without believing in it. Let's rethink and critique some "ideology" (women's and men's roles, the anti-intermarriage attitude, destiny and bashert, the God who tests his chosen people). Let's love Israel without idealizing it. Let's honor and remember those who lived before us, those who made our lives possible, without praying to a clever ideological construct. Let's (try to) embrace culture and let go of God.

Anybody with me? Anybody?

An article in today's New York Times discusses "Synagogue 3000," an outreach group of sorts that, for the last twelve years, has adopted the Christian evangelical megachurch model to re-present Judaism to Jews. It is, supposedly, a way of transforming High Holy Days/Hebrew School/Passover Seder Jews into believers without going the Chabad route of transforming them into meticulous observers of Torah law.

What I've always appreciated about Judaism is its cultural element, how a person can say "I am a Jew" because he or she was raised in a Jewish family, had a large, sweet Rosh Hashana meal, ate Matzah on Passover week, sang Yiddish songs and danced Yiddish dances, whined about going to Hebrew school every week but many years later was grateful to have learned to read in another alphabet, listened to and shared Eastern European folktales, preserved the cultural elements of Judaism in honor of our grandparents and great-grandparents, many of whom were Holocaust victims and survivors. I can logically say "I am a Jew, but I don't believe in God."

The Workmen's Circle (Arbeter Ring) holds cultural events and secular "services" for Rosh Hashanah, Chanukah, and Passover. The Center for Cultural Judaism celebrates and teaches the "history, culture, civilization, ethical values and shared experiences of the Jewish people" apart from belief. There are also a few secular "Jewish humanist" groups out there; personally, I think their brand of humanism is a bit of a step back to the Enlightenment and 1776, but I admire their work in reminding atheists that they do not have to avoid the non-belief-based aspects of cultural Judaism.

Ikh bin a yid, ober ikh gloybe nisht an gott. If the evangelical movement creeps in, it's going to drive the cultural/secular Jews away from, not towards, Judaism.

I was finally able to sit down and read a few chapters of Christopher Hitchens' god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything earlier this week. The book had been staring at me for much of the summer, but with sixty-one students and two qualifying exams this term, I didn't have the chance to crack it open.

While Hitchens' discussion of how humans kill each other over myths of the supernatural is often spot-on, I am quite sure (as someone who once upon a time assumed that there was a higher power) that the phrase "religion poisons everything" will make many believers' skin crawl. (Of course, Hitchens clearly explains what he means by "religion poisons everything," but the phrase itself may unsettle those believers who might have otherwise approached the book with somewhat of an open mind.) It seems to me that -- unfortunately -- one can be no more than an agnostic when it comes to empirical proof of the existence of God. If I tell you that there's an invisible pink elephant in my kitchen, you can't exactly prove me wrong, even though it is near-impossible that there is an invisible pink elephant in my kitchen.

I'm an atheist in terms of belief, an agnostic in terms of empirical knowledge of god.

Back to Hitchens' book: in the first chapters, he hints at one of the most unsettling aspects of monotheistic religion -- if there's a God, then that God's a tyrant who expects us to praise him constantly for what he's supposed to do for us. He'll strike us down if we don't worship him; in fact, he can strike us down or simply mess with our lives for no reason at all. (Incidentally, I once wrote a paper about the absurdity of God in Troilus and Cressida; a reader at the first journal to which I submitted the paper commented that while they weren't going to accept the paper for publication, but that my "Absurd God" sounded like a fascinating deity who danced at parties with a lampshade on his head. I <3 peer review.) This petty tyrant God was a brilliant ideological construct: we're supposed to pray to and praise God when he hurts us, or takes people/possibilities/whatever away from us because, no matter what happens, he has a plan, just as we're supposed to praise the tyrannical king or dictator because he knows what's best for us? It seems that this "God" was constructed and belief in him encouraged and upheld in order to keep the powerful in power.

Even though revolutionaries have sometimes claimed that God was on their side, belief and revolution are incompatible. I'll take the literary road here and point to Paradise Lost, the English epic written by a radically republican (not an oxymoron when you've got a parliament overthrowing the king) Christian. John Milton, though categorized as a Puritan because of his association with Cromwell & friends, nevertheless must have struggled with the idea that as he was working to destroy absolute monarchy, his work described a group of rebels against God who fail and are cast down to hell. Rebellion, in the cases of Lucifer and later Adam and Eve, is quashed by the all-powerful God. Belief in God and the overthrow of tyrants cannot be thought together; Paradise Lost rests on the tragic paradox of the story of a monarch who can't be overthrown composed by a Christian rebel who understood the importance of disabling absolute rule.