From Amusing to Amazing

In case you missed it in the Jewish Standard, published in the May 2nd issue, here is a news item by editor Joanne Palmer on the recently published book by Adas Emuno President Lance Strate. The article is entitled From Amusing to Amazing, and you can click on the link to read it on the Jewish Standard's website, along with seeing the photos and any comments that were posted there (and if you are so moved, add your own). Or read it here.

Here's how the article begins:

Was Neil Postman right nearly 30 years ago, when he said that television had trivialized nearly everything about our lives? That our ability to apply reason to make sense of the world had begun to atrophy in the overwhelmingly visual, no-delayed-gratification-necessary world we saw by its blue-flickering light?

And if he was right, what have the technological advances that make TV seem so very old-school done to us since then?

One of Dr. Postman’s disciples, Dr. Lance Strate of Palisades Park, has undertaken the challenge of examining both Dr. Postman’s life and worldview and the accuracy of his predictions.

In his new book, “Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman’s Brave New World Revisited,” Dr. Strate, who was Dr. Postman’s student at NYU and now is a professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University in the Bronx, continues his teacher’s analysis. His book follows up on Dr. Postman’s best-known work, “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business,” which first was published in 1985. (Dr. Postman died in 2003.)

We will interrupt at this point to remind you that you can always order books and other material from Amazon through our site, and a percentage will be donated to our temple. You can find the general order box on the left, but here are some links for the two books being discussed:

And now to continue with the rest of the article:

Dr. Strate, who is president of his synagogue, Congregation Adas Emuno in Leonia, thinks that both Dr. Postman and his arguments are profoundly influenced by the Jewish world in which he grew up.

Dr. Postman, who was born in 1931 to parents who grew up on the Lower East Side, spent his own formative years in Flatbush. “One of the things that we kind of have a leg up on when we grow up in a Jewish neighborhood in New York is that it is multicultural and multilingual,” Dr. Strate said. “When you go to Hebrew school, you learn a different alphabet. When you go to shul, you are exposed to a different kind of book—a scroll. You really learn to be sensitive to the differences between different media, different modes of communication.”

That sensitivity, Dr. Strate continued, is at the heart of a discipline called media ecology, which Dr. Postman pioneered and he now champions.

Dr. Strate knows about such sensitivities firsthand. The son of Holocaust survivors, he is from Kew Gardens in Queens, another heavily Jewish neighborhood.

“The idea is that different media or forms of communication influence the way we feel, we perceive the world, and we behave, and on a larger scale the ways in which we organize ourselves as a society and as a culture.

“Something very profound that Dr. Postman pointed out is that the second commandment doesn’t just say there should be images of God. It says no images.”

That, Dr. Strate said, is because “with words, we can think much more abstractly.” Images are emotional and evocative, but “you can’t make an argument with images.

“Reasoning by analogy is very much at the heart of Jewish learning, and it involves a balance between the spoken and the written word,” he continued. “You can look at ancient Israel as the first great culture to come out of the alphabet. The Semitic alphabet first was introduced in around 1850 B.C.E.

“We are not clear on the history, of course, but within a few centuries we have the Exodus and the law. You can’t have written or codified law without writing. Judaism was the first religion to be based on a sacred written text, the first to venerate the book.

“Monotheism itself—the idea of one God—requires an abstract kind of thinking. God is a God of words—d’varim—not of images, and images are what we see in other religions all the time.”

Once the Semitic inheritance of abstract thought met with Greek philosophy—which itself needed the Semitic alphabet it got through the Israelites’ cousins, the Phoenicians—“that trajectory takes us through Western civilization,” Dr. Strate said. “It was amplified by the printing press, which brought on the modern world.

“The American republic was very much printing, particularly on pamphlets and broadsides. It was the first nation ever to be argued into existence. And one of the places that the Founding Fathers turned to for inspiration was the Torah.”

So what does this have to do with his argument about television, the Internet, and beyond?

“Postman, like many New York Jews, came down on the liberal side of things,” Dr. Strate said. “He was a defender of the potential of American democracy, and he came to the conclusion that television was completely undermining it.

“Building on that, and looking at the expansion of television through cable and satellite, and with the addition of the Internet—we know that there are great benefits that these technologies bring, but the problem is that all we tend to talk about are those benefits.

“Nobody talks at all about what they are costing us, and it is foolish not to look at the price tag. That’s what Postman wanted us to do—to ask, ‘Well, what is all this going to cost?’”

In his own book, Dr. Strate looks at four areas that Dr. Postman tackled first—with the new technology, what happens to journalism? To politics? To religion? And to education? Those four pillars of our culture all were built on words. “All have been damaged by the electronic media,” he said.

Religion, for example, often is broadcast, but religious services need a sense of the sacred, and that sense is hard to come by when you watch it in the profane space of your own home. “When you have religion on television, it is the preacher who becomes the focal point, not God,” Dr. Strate said. “And most religious services look awful on television because they are designed for real spaces, so the most successful kinds of televised religious services use entertainment formats. And when you do that, you lose all sense of what religion is about, and it becomes entertainment.”

Similarly, “more television channels have not given us a more serious form of television. Instead, they have given us more outlets for entertainment.

“They used to argue that we couldn’t get news in depth because there was only 20 minutes for it each night. Today, we have 24-hour news channels—and they still don’t do extended stories. Instead, they concentrate on people yelling at each other, or on sensational stories, and there is a lot of repetition. So the format really hasn’t changed dramatically.

“Politics has not improved much with the electronic media, even with blogs, YouTube videos, and news aggregators. All they have given us is more verbiage.

“And there is a lot of attention paid now to online education, to massive open online courses, but I think the best way to understand what makes for a good education is to look at what rich people do.” People who can afford just about anything “opt for very low teacher/student ratios and real face-to-face contact,” he said.

He explained the subtitle of his book by talking about the difference between the two dystopias imagined by two British writers more or less midway through the last century—George Orwell’s “1984” in 1949 and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” in 1931.

One more interruption, in case you would like to get a hold of copies of either of these novels, here are the Amazon links:

“Orwell was not as prescient as Huxley,” Dr. Strate said. “Orwell’s future was totalitarian. Huxley’s was about complete control by technology. We have allowed technology to be a kind of governing force. It is about doing things as efficiently as possible, so other human values get pushed away as a result.

“The reason for the decadence in ‘Brave New World’ is to keep everyone happy and functioning, so they will continue to be productive, and society will continue to roll on.

“That’s one side of the coin now. The other is that we are drowning in information. We don’t know how to say no to any new technology.” Not all new products catch on, he added, but the technologies behind them do.

“At the end, the question that the book raises is whether there is a future for us,” Dr. Strate said. “Is there a way for us to take control of things?”

Judaism had that idea long ago. Jews have known since the beginning that once a week, it is necessary to take a break. Some secular Jews have adopted the idea of “technology Shabbat” from more observant ones; it is a time for them to disconnect from all their devices and interact with the world directly.

Despite the many virtues of our electronics, that occasional and regular disconnection is necessary if we are to continue to advance, Dr. Strate suggests.

If you are interested in another point of view, here is a link to a book review published in an online Christian journal.

The Deprivations of Privacy

I write an occasional guest post for the blog run by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, and I have shared some of them here on our congregational blog in the past (see Hannah Arendt, Jewish Philosopher, Hannah Arendt and Charlie Chaplin, and History and Freedom). And I thought it might be worthwhile to share my latest post here as well, even though there is very little in the way of Jewish references in this one. 

But in our Saturday morning Torah study sessions that have focused on the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides for the past few months (see previous posts such as The Less Than Perfect God of Hebrew Scripture, Stroke of Insight, Thoughts on Torah Study, Religious Freedom in America, Scientific Vs. Theological Justifications), the subject of privacy has come up in relation to the strong sense of community that existed in antiquity and the medieval period. And Arendt herself is very much a Hellenistic philosopher, although her sensibility is necessarily grounded in Jewish experience, thought, ethics, and culture. And some of you may recognize the influence of an old Yiddish proverb on the final point I make in this post. So, I think that all constitutes sufficient grounds for including this post here.

You can also see the post over on the Hannah Arendt Center site under the same title (which I've linked to their site for your convenience), The Deprivations of Privacy, where it was posted over on December 3rd. And you might find it interesting to learn that the post went up on their blog on that Monday, and 2 days later, on that Wednesday morning, I heard from the director of the Arendt Center, Roger Berkowitz, that the post brought 2600 people to their site, with many more hits continuing to come in after that.  And of course I'm happy about that, for my own sake sure, but also pleased to contribute in this way to center and the promotion of Arendt's work and thought.

So, lest you be deprived any further (and with thanks to the Arendt Center's Bridget Hollenback for providing the illustrations), here it is now, beginning with a quote from Hannah Arendt, as this was written for their blog's "Quote of the Week" feature:
 

"The emergence of society—the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices—from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and the citizen. Not only would we not agree with the Greeks that a life spent in the privacy of "one's own" (idion), outside the world of the common, is "idiotic" by definition, or with the Romans to whom privacy offered but a temporary refuge from the business of the res publica; we call private today a sphere of intimacy whose beginnings we may be able to trace back to late Roman, though hardly to any period of Greek antiquity, but whose peculiar manifoldness and variety were certainly unknown to any period prior to the modern age. "

-Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Here are the titles of some recent posts on the Deeplinks Blog, which is published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, America's leading organization advocating for citizens' digital rights:

• Who's Tracking Your Reading Habits? An E-Book Buyer's Guide to Privacy, 2012 Edition
• Ninth Circuit Gives the A-OK for Warrantless Home Video Surveillance
• Attempt to Modernize Digital Privacy Law Passes the Senate Judiciary Committee
• NASA's Data Valdez: Thousands of Employees' Personal Information Compromised in Embarrassing Data Breach
• Don't Be a Petraeus: A Tutorial on Anonymous E-Mail Accounts
• ECPA and the Mire of DC Politics: We Shouldn't Have to Trade Video Privacy to Get Common Sense Protections of Our Email
• EFF to Supreme Court: Limit Release of Driver Info
• Do Not Track Update:  Professor Peter Swire to Co-Chair W3C Tracking Protection Working Group
• Reform to Require Warrant for Private Online Messages Up for Vote, but Down on Privacy
• Jones Meant What It Said: EFF Urges Court to Stop Warrantless GPS Tracking

Privacy is far from the only issue addressed by the EFF, but this list does account for 10 out of 16 posts appearing on the Deeplinks Blog between November 21st and 29th of this year.  And concerns about invasions of privacy surface repeatedly in regard to Facebook's data mining of user profiles and updates, Google tracking and analysis of search queries (not to mention their indiscriminate street view photography, monitoring of wifi signals, and use of gmail address books), and Apple's tracking of the whereabouts and movements of iPhone users (also done by Android and other mobile systems).  Companies are known to monitor their employee's internet use, email, and some even demand access to their social media accounts.  Law enforcement and other government agencies (foreign and domestic) seek access to citizens' email and text messages and records of websites visited and documents downloaded.  Personal messages, photos, and videos are forwarded and distributed without permission.  Sites like Wikileaks publish secret government and corporate documents.  Hackers break into databases, steal information, take credit card numbers and banking information, and in the ultimate invasion of privacy, engage in identity theft.

As much as the modern understanding of privacy seems to be under assault on account of new media and digital technologies, it's also true that many of us readily reveal personal information via online profiles and posts, post our personal photographs and video recordings, divulge our location through Foursquare and social media status updates, enable GPS tracking on our mobile devices in order to take better advantage of various apps and services, enter credit and debit card numbers on websites assuming that they are secure, and treat email, instant messaging, and SMS as if they were absolutely inviolable channels of communication.

Privacy is being consumed.  Online, our privacy is consumed by the advertising, marketing, and public relations industries, while we in turn are encouraged to serve ourselves up as personal brands (as befits cattle).  But through social media, we ourselves also consume other people's private lives, perusing their profiles, attending to their status updates, looking through their photographs, listening to their podcasts, watching their uploaded videos.  Online we participate in a great orgy of consumption, as personal and intimate details are freely exchanged. On television, we consume the privacy of a select few, but in the age of the internet, paralleling our online devotion to following the lives of ordinary people just like ourselves, we have the relatively new genre of reality TV, which serves us up real housewives and biggest losers, bachelors and bachelorettes, apprentices and survivors, amazing racers and American idols. We are cast in the role of Big Brother, but not in the Orwellian mode of surveillance in the service of social control, but rather in a trivialized form of peeping tom titillation, spying for its own sake, the pure pleasure of voyeurism as another instance of the consumption of privacy.  It's a short step from ogling others to googling them.



There is nothing new about our consumption of private lives.  What is new is the extent to which it is being carried out.  We are in the process of fulfilling Andy Warhol's prophecy that in the future everyone will be famous, but only for fifteen minutes, or was it only for fifteen people?  Without a doubt, fame and fandom are being leveled and democratized as never before, as the erosion of privacy that has long been the price of fame for celebrities has now been extended to everyone who has an online presence.  We have long grown accustomed to consuming the privacy of famous individuals in the form of celebrity gossip distributed through online services such as TMZ, through television programming such as Entertainment Tonight, and through print media such as the supermarket tabloids and People magazine (not to mention the fact that all too often this type of content is featured by legitimate news media).  Celebrity is a phenomenon that's older than television, but television's emphasis on the up-close and personal, the way that the small screen favors the close-up, lends itself to unveiling of intimate detail and expression.  As much as he was an icon of hardcore broadcast journalism, Edward R. Murrow pioneered the format of bringing television cameras into the homes of celebrities in Person to Person, a program he hosted from 1953 to 1959.  As television came to dominate the media environment of the late 20th century, the proliferating presence of cameras and microphones made private life all but impossible for celebrities. It is no accident that the term paparazzi traces its origins back to the same year that the Kennedy-Nixon debates signaled the beginning of image politics, 1960 (the term is derived from a character named Papparzo, a news photographer, from Federico Fellini's famous film, La Dolce Vita).  Is it any accident that the synonym for television set is monitor, as television's basic function is the monitoring or surveillance of the environment?

But to be fair, while television, and before it radio, allowed audiences to view the outside world while remaining themselves unobserved, providing a kind of two-way mirror (aka a one-way window) on events, they also have constituted an intrusion of the outside world into private homes, and thereby contributed to the erosion of the private sphere.  And long before the internet, the adoption of the telephone allowed strangers as well as friends and relatives to invade our privacy at any hour of the day or night, interrupting even the most intimate of activities (before the widespread use of answering machines, some referred to this phenomenon as telephonus interruptus).

Over the course of the 20th century, the increasing presence of cameras and microphones have subjected private life to increasingly greater public exposure, but more generally the wiring of the environment (the environment in effect wearing a wire) and the unimpeded flow of wireless transmissions permeating the very air that we breathe has placed privacy under increasing assault. In the aftermath of Watergate, Marshall McLuhan noted that on account of the electronic media, "the entire planet has become a whispering gallery, with a large portion of mankind engaged in making its living by keeping the rest of mankind under surveillance."  McLuhan held Arendt in high esteem, and he incorporated Arendt's observation that the ancient Greeks viewed the private individual as an idiot, noting that modern ideas about privacy are an aberration, rather than a natural and universal human understanding about how we should live our lives.

It often comes as a revelation to individuals not familiar with the Constitution of the United States to learn that there is no specific articulation of a right to privacy in the Bill of Rights or elsewhere, and that privacy rights are the product of judicial interpretation of, for example, the Fourth Amendment protection against "unreasonable searches and seizures."



This absence is not an oversight on the part of the founders of the American republic, but rather a reflection of the fact that the modern concept of privacy was a novelty in the late 18th century.  And as surprising as this may be, the ancient Greek understanding of private life typically comes as a shock.  As Arendt goes on to explain:

In ancient feeling the privative trait of privacy, indicated in the word itself, was all-important; it meant literally a state of being deprived of something, and even of the highest and most human of man's capacities. A man who lived only a private life, who like the slave was not permitted to enter the public realm, or like the barbarian had chosen not to establish such a realm, was not fully human. We no longer think primarily of deprivation when we use the word "privacy," and this is partly due to the enormous enrichment of the private sphere through modern individualism.

The root meaning of privacy is the same as privative and deprived, as lacking a role in or access to the public arena.  For Arendt, privacy provides the space for the individual's thoughtful contemplation, but must serve as a backstage region, to use Erving Goffman's dramaturgical metaphor, for the staging of public action, political activity involving collective deliberation and cooperation.

Underlying this is the essential point that the public and the private are interdependent, which is why "the barbarian," or member of a tribal society, has neither.  Conceptions of both the public and the private are tied to the nascent notion of the individual, of identity separate from the group, which only began to form following the introduction of writing and the advent of literacy. Writing, as Eric Havelock put it, "separates the knower from the known," allowing for objective distance from one's tradition and tribe, and from one's own thoughts.  This inward turn opens the door to the idea of the private individual, while the act of reading and writing itself require a degree of isolation.  Readers read alone and apart from one another, even if they read the exact same text at the exact same time.  Listeners constitute a group, a collectivity, as an audience (which is a singular noun, whereas readers are plural).  A public then is dependent on the existence of the private individual, as the public is composed of individuals who govern themselves because they can think for themselves, speak their own minds, and deliberate as equals. Equality too is linked to writing, as it is with the introduction of codified law made possible by writing that we gain the idea that we are all equal in relation to the same set of rules and commandments.  Public and private then have their roots in antiquity, but do not become fully formed until the modern era, following the introduction of the printing press, which also opened the door for the modern ideology of individualism.

As public and private have a common origin, so too are they commonly at risk due to the same forces.  Politically, totalitarianism seeks to remove all of the barriers that make private life possible, at the same time that the public sphere is dismantled to create a single homogenous field of power through surveillance.  Economically, in ancient Greece, the center of public life was the agora, which also served as the marketplace, but only a few years before Arendt published The Human Condition, the modern marketplace began to be referred to as the private sector, as corporations usurped the human invention of private identity, and have systemically undermined the last vestiges of the public sphere as they seek to create a single homogenous field of consumption through the manufacture of desire.  We might well wonder why corporate executives for the most part have been allowed to escape the heavy media scrutiny that political leaders and other celebrities are subjected to?  Why are they allowed to hold on to the privilege of privacy where other prominent (and not so prominent) members of society are not?  Wouldn't we all be better off if they were held to the same standards of transparency now required of politicians and government officials?



Underlying the general blurring and dissolution of the private and the public that we have been experiencing is the electronic media environment, which has undermined, superseded, and shortcircuited the media environment associated with literacy and print.  In place of individualism, which was based on the compartmentalization of private life kept separate from the public sphere, we have personalization, which involves providing open access to personal data, history, and activity, and the persona itself.  In the absence of boundaries, honesty becomes of the highest value, but it's typically the honesty of self-disclosure, narcissistic self-revelation in the interests of self-promotion, as when celebrities go on talk shows to confess to personal problems as part of what is, or seems to be, an image revitalization strategy.  Openness in communication is treasured, even though indiscriminate openness can be damaging rather than healing depending on the context and manner in which it is approached.  Transparency is put forth as a basic principle for internet activity, and while awareness that we are being observed generally results in more ethical behavior than would otherwise occur, there are times when some amount of secrecy in politics is needed for successful negotiation.

Arendt teaches us that the modern concept of private and public is not immutable, and having changed before can and is changing again.  And having been born the year before Arendt published The Human Condition, I am not entirely comfortable with the increasing loss of the distinction between the public and private, nor can I completely relate to the post-individualism of younger generations.  But given our current trajectory, our options may be limited to living with surveillance carried out by powerful entities such as governments and corporations, or meeting surveillance with sousveillance, to use the term popularized by University of Toronto political scientist Ronald Deibert, with citizens pointing their cameras back at the cameras pointing at them.  Or more generally, our best option may be to work for a transparent society, to use author David Brin's notion, where our personal sacrifice of privacy is compensated for by transparency on the part of the rich and powerful. If we must be deprived of the boundary between private life and public activity, and instead live and work in glass houses, let's make sure no one gets to gets to mirror theirs, just because they have a great deal of silver.
 

The Less Than Perfect God of Hebrew Scripture

This year in our Saturday morning Torah study led by Rabbi Schwartz here at Congregation Adas Emuno, we have been reading the Mishneh Torah of Moses Maimonides, the 12th century Jewish philosopher and theologian, and discussing his attempt to integrate Aristotelian logic into Talmudic scholarship, and provide an accessible summary of Rabbinic Judaism's interpretation of the Torah.

As a supplement to our studies, and a matter of general interest, a recent post on the New York Times Opinionator Blog, entitled An Imperfect God, seems worthy of our attention.  The author is Yoram Hazony, president of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and the author of, most recently, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture:

Here now is Hazony's commentary, posted on November 25th:

Is God perfect? You often hear philosophers describe "theism" as the belief in a perfect being - a being whose attributes are said to include being all-powerful, all-knowing, immutable, perfectly good, perfectly simple, and necessarily existent (among others). And today, something like this view is common among lay people as well. 

There are two famous problems with this view of God. The first is that it appears to be impossible to make it coherent. For example, it seems unlikely that God can be both perfectly powerful and perfectly good if the world is filled (as it obviously is) with instances of terrible injustice. Similarly, it's hard to see how God can wield his infinite power to instigate alteration and change in all things if he is flat-out immutable. And there are more such contradictions where these came from.

The second problem is that while this "theist" view of God is supposed to be a description of the God of the Bible, it's hard to find any evidence that the prophets and scholars who wrote the Hebrew Bible (or "Old Testament") thought of God in this way at all. The God of Hebrew Scripture is not depicted as immutable, but repeatedly changes his mind about things (for example, he regrets having made man). He is not all-knowing, since he's repeatedly surprised by things (like the Israelites abandoning him for a statue of a cow). He is not perfectly powerful either, in that he famously cannot control Israel and get its people to do what he wants. And so on.

At this point, an interjection seems appropriate, to note that Hazony is raising the famous problem of free will, one that Maimonides among many others have taken up.

Philosophers have spent many centuries trying to get God's supposed perfections to fit together in a coherent conception, and then trying to get that to fit with the Bible. By now it's reasonably clear that this can't be done. In fact, part of the reason God-bashers like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are so influential (apart from the fact they write so well) is their insistence that the doctrine of God's perfections makes no sense, and that the idealized "being" it tells us about doesn't resemble the biblical God at all.
So is that it, then? Have the atheists won? I don't think so. But it does look like the time has come for some rethinking in the theist camp.

I'd start with this: Is it really necessary to say that God is a "perfect being," or perfect at all, for that matter? As far as I can tell, the biblical authors avoid asserting any such thing. And with good reason. Normally, when we say that something is "perfect," we mean it has attained the best possible balance among the principles involved in making it the kind of thing it is. For example, if we say that a bottle is perfect, we mean it can contain a significant quantity of liquid in its body; that its neck is long enough to be grasped comfortably and firmly; that the bore is wide enough to permit a rapid flow of liquid; and so on. Of course, you can always manufacture a bottle that will hold more liquid, but only by making the body too broad (so the bottle doesn't handle well) or the neck too short (so it's hard to hold). There's an inevitable trade-off among the principles, and perfection lies in the balance among them. And this is so whether what's being judged is a bottle or a horse, a wine or a gymnastics routine or natural human beauty.

What would we say if some philosopher told us that a perfect bottle would be one that can contain a perfectly great amount of liquid, while being perfectly easy to pour from at the same time? Or that a perfect horse would bear an infinitely heavy rider, while at the same time being able to run with perfectly great speed? I should think we'd say he's made a fundamental mistake here: You can't perfect something by maximizing all its constituent principles simultaneously. All this will get you is contradictions and absurdities. This is not less true of God than it is of anything else.

The attempt to think of God as a perfect being is misguided for another reason as well. We can speak of the perfection of a bottle or a horse because these are things that can be encompassed (at least in some sense) by our senses and understanding. Having the whole bottle before us, we feel we can judge how close it is to being a perfect instance of its type. But if asked to judge the perfection of a bottle poking out of a paper bag, or of a horse that's partly hidden in the stable, we'd surely protest: How am I supposed to know? I can only see part of it.

Yet the biblical accounts of our encounters with God emphasize that all human views of God are partial and fragmentary in just this way. Even Moses, the greatest of the prophets, is told that he can't see God's face, but can only catch a glimpse of God's back as he passes by. At another point, God responds to Moses' request to know his name (that is, his nature) by telling him "ehi'eh asher ehi'eh" -"I will be what I will be." In most English-language Bibles this is translated "I am that I am," following the Septuagint, which sought to bring the biblical text into line with the Greek tradition (descended from Xenophanes, Parmenides and Plato's "Timaeus") of identifying God with perfect being. But in the Hebrew original, the text says almost exactly the opposite of this: The Hebrew "I will be what I will be" is in the imperfect tense, suggesting to us a God who is incomplete and changing. In their run-ins with God, human beings can glimpse a corner or an edge of something too immense to be encompassed, a "coming-into-being" as God approaches, and no more. The belief that any human mind can grasp enough of God to begin recognizing perfections in him would have struck the biblical authors as a pagan conceit.

One more interjection seems called for here, just to note that the translation of the Holy Scriptures from Hebrew to Greek was not just a matter of linguistic substitution, but actually a translation of worldviews and philosophies. That this is inherent in the act of translation is a point made long ago by the linguistic anthropologist, Edward Sapir.

So if it's not a bundle of "perfections" that the prophets and scholars who wrote the Hebrew Bible referred to in speaking of God, what was it they were talking about? As Donald Harman Akenson writes, the God of Hebrew Scripture is meant to be an "embodiment of what is, of reality" as we experience it. God's abrupt shifts from action to seeming indifference and back, his changing demands from the human beings standing before him, his at-times devastating responses to mankind's deeds and misdeeds - all these reflect the hardship so often present in the lives of most human beings. To be sure, the biblical God can appear with sudden and stunning generosity as well, as he did to Israel at the Red Sea. And he is portrayed, ultimately, as faithful and just. But these are not the "perfections" of a God known to be a perfect being. They don't exist in his character "necessarily," or anything remotely similar to this. On the contrary, it is the hope that God is faithful and just that is the subject of ancient Israel's faith: We hope that despite the frequently harsh reality of our daily experience, there is nonetheless a faithfulness and justice that rules in our world in the end.

The ancient Israelites, in other words, discovered a more realistic God than that descended from the tradition of Greek thought. But philosophers have tended to steer clear of such a view, no doubt out of fear that an imperfect God would not attract mankind's allegiance. Instead, they have preferred to speak to us of a God consisting of a series of sweeping idealizations - idealizations whose relation to the world in which we actually live is scarcely imaginable. Today, with theism rapidly losing ground across Europe and among Americans as well, we could stand to reconsider this point. Surely a more plausible conception of God couldn't hurt.

To this conclusion can be added the point that this may well be part of the attraction of Kabbalah in recent years, as Jewish mysticism incorporates a concept of God that is quite different from the absolute perfection of Hellenized theology. And if nothing else, Hazony helps us to better understand how the worldviews of Athens and Jerusalem are difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile.

Remembering Meir Ribalow

I wanted to include a post here on the congregational blog of Adas Emuno about my friend and colleague, Meir Ribalow, who recently passed away.  Although he was not a member of our congregation, he did make the trip out to Leonia once, back on April 14, 2007, as our first ever Havadallah Talk speaker. This was long before I set up our congregational blog, in fact, I was only in the second month of my own blog, and I included a post about the event entitled  Sports Spiel. And if you want to read it in its entirety, just click on the title and head on over, but I'll provide some relevant protions here.

The following is an excerpt from my 2007 post:


So, this past Saturday we held our first Havdallah-Talk. It featured my colleague at Fordham University (where he's an Artist-in-Residence), Meir Ribalow. And the topic of his talk was "Jews in Sports." Here's the write-up as it appeared in our temple newsletter: 

Renowned Author to Speak on “Jews in Sports”

Author and scholar Meir Z. Ribalow will give a talk on “Jews in Sports” at Adas Emuno on Saturday, April 14 at 7 PM., in the first “Havdallah-Talk”, presented by the Adult Education Committee. 

Mr. Ribalow is co-author (with the late Harold U. Ribalow) of The Jew in American Sports, Jewish Baseball Stars, and The Great Jewish Chess Champions. He is Director of Jewsinsports.org, a prize-winning web site, and has written about Jewish athletes in the book Take Me Out to the Ballgame, as well as for various periodicals, including Princeton Alumni Weekly. The award-winning author also has extensive writing credits in fiction, poetry, musical lyrics, children’s literature, film and travel. Perhaps best known as a playwright, Mr. Ribalow has had 22 plays receive some 160 productions worldwide, and has extensive directing credits to his name.  

Currently, Mr. Ribalow is Artistic Director of New River Dramatists in North Carolina and full-time Artist-in-Residence at Fordham University, where he has taught screenwriting, film and writing courses for the last decade.  

“Havdallah-Talk”, a new program for adult members of the Congregation, will be held at Adas Emuno on selected Saturday evenings at 7 PM. (Mr. Ribalow’s talk on April 14 is also appropriate and open to pre-teens and teens interested in sports). A short Havdallah service will be followed by guest speakers on a variety of topics. 

The program is open to non-members as well. Admission is free and light refreshments will be served. 

Virginia Gitter, a past president of the congregation and all around dynamo, not to mention the person who puts out the newsletter, wrote this up based on information I provided, and helped to publicize the event, for which I am very grateful. And as the first event of its kind, being a complete unknown, and ours being a small congregation, I had figured that it would be a success if a dozen people showed up. We had twenty in attendance, so it exceeded expectations. Meir normally gets paid a great deal to do these kinds of gigs elsewhere, so I am very grateful to him for donating his time and energy. I should add that he could have spoken on a number of different topics, including film, and literature, but we chose to start things off with sports because of the broad appeal of the topic. 

As mentioned in the newsletter article, Meir has a chapter in the anthology Take Me Out to the Ballgame (edited by Gary Gumpert and Susan Drucker), and so do I. His was on Jewish baseball stars in relation to the Jewish experience in America...  

Anyway, much of Meir's talk and the ensuing Q&A revolved around specific sports stars, one of the most interesting being Mo Berg, who played Major League Baseball for 16 years, but also was an undeniable genius, speaking something on the order of 16 languages, and serving as a spy for the US during WWII, even in Japan. One story has it that he spoke German so well he was sent into Germany to check on how Heisenberg was making out with the Nazi effort to develop the A-bomb. While there were regular spies who could pass as German just as well as Berg, none of them were smart enough to make a good assessment of the state of Nazi nuclear physics. Meir says that a documentary about Mo Berg is due out soon, in which he is one of the scholars interviewed. 

But I digress. What I find blogworthy in all this is the point Meir made at the beginning of his talk, that sports served to counter prejudice and antisemitism, especially among those people who were unimpressed with intellectual achievement. Simply put, there is no way to argue with Benny Leonard's boxing championships, with Hank Greenberg's home runs, Sandy Koufax's strikeouts, etc. Sports provide an objective standard of excellence that is unavailable even to an Einstein.


Some of the books mentioned above are out of print, but can be purchased through independent booksellers:

Meir also published a baseball novel last year:

And another novel just a few months ago:

And in the past two years, he also published two books of poetry:

The second one is a collection of sonnets.  And in conjunction with his work with the New River Dramatists, he edited two collections of plays, each one containing one of his own along with two by other authors:

It's not possible to list all of his publications here, but here are a few more items available via Amazon (and just a reminder that when you order through our links, a portion of the profits goes to our congregation):

Meir's father, Harold Ribalow, was an editor who dealt with just about every major Jewish-American fiction writer of the mid-20th century, and every year, Hadassah Magazine gives out a prize in his name, as they explain:

Hadassah Magazine's annual literary award for outstanding Jewish fiction was established in 1983 by the friends and family of the late Harold U. Ribalow, an editor and writer known for his passion for Jewish literature and his interest in promoting the work of many now-famous writers. Ribalow was inducted posthumously into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 2009 for his contributions to society through Jewish sports writing.

Meir was very much his father's son, very much dedicated to helping others, in addition to being very talented in his own right.  His enthusiasm and encyclopedic knowledge of movies, sports, and literature made him a delightful conversationalist, and his good humor and generosity of spirit was a blessing and an inspiration.  I think his New York Times obituary is worth sharing here as well:

RIBALOW--Meir Zvi, Internationally renowned playwright, poet, novelist, critic, and activist, died on August 23rd after battling prostate cancer. He was 63. Mr. Ribalow had 24 of his plays receive some 180 productions worldwide, winning awards in London, New York, and regionally. He won national awards for fiction, his widely published poetry, and musical lyrics; co-wrote ten children's books; and published articles on sports, music, theatre, literature, film, travel and chess. 

He was co-author, with his father, Harold Ribalow, of three books on sports, and was Director of an award-winning sports website. Mr. Ribalow's poems have recently been collected in two volumes, "Chasing Ghosts" and "The Time We Have Misspent" and two novels, "Peanuts and Crackerjacks" and "Redheaded Blues" -- along with a new play, "Masterpiece" -- have all been published in the past eighteen months during a typically furious burst of creativity that his illness did little to slow. 

He wrote articles for publications as diverse as The New York Times, The Sciences, Hadassah, and the program for the 1990 Kasparov-Karpov World Chess Championship, commented on films for the Discovery Channel, and hosted the online radio program "New River Radio" on ARTonAIR.org. His scholarly film commentary appears on a number of special edition classic DVD's, including High Noon and Sergeant York. A popular and widely respected educator, he served for almost three decades as Artist-in-Residence in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. 

Mr. Ribalow was born into a family of writers and scholars -- his grandfather, Menachem Ribalow, edited the only weekly newspaper published in Hebrew in the United States, and his father, Harold, was an internationally renowned author and anthologist of Anglo-American Jewish literature--and was supported and encouraged by his passionately engaged music educator mother, Shoshana, and sister, Reena Ribalow Ben Ephraim (also an award-winning poet and fiction writer). 

Mr. Ribalow graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1966 and was a University Scholar and Class Poet at Princeton, class of 1970. He was a co-founder and Vice President of the Creative Coalition, a group of entertainment professionals devoted to social and environmental advocacy, working alongside fellow board-members Alec Baldwin, Christopher Reeve, Ron Silver, and Stephen Collins. He was also International Arts Coordinator of The Global Forum, where he worked with the Dalai Lama, Robert Redford and Mikhail Gorbachev. 

Mr. Ribalow was the Founding Artistic Director of New River Dramatists, the dream child of indefatigable producer Mark Woods, which offers playwrights week-long residencies in the mountains of North Carolina and has developed some 400 new plays and screenplays, almost half of which have already been produced or optioned worldwide. Mr. Ribalow attracted and mixed established, high profile playwrights such as the late James McLure, Wendy Hammond, Richard Dresser and Lee Blessing, with lesser-known, often young, but always deserving writing talents such as inaugural McLure Fellowship and 2012 O'Neill Residency winner Hilary Bettis. 

Mr. Ribalow directed numerous plays in London and New York, was Joseph Papp's Production Associate at the New York Shakespeare Festival for several years, and founded the American Repertory Company of London. A Broadway Gala Theater Benefit reading of his play Nature of the Universe with Blythe Danner and Brian Dennehy raised funds for The ALS Association of New York. 

Mr. Ribalow is survived by his mother, sister, nephew Shaiel Ben Ephraim and niece Riora Kerr, and by a grateful and still-expanding community of artists, writers, actors, performers, and philanthropists who learned much of craft and even more of care through his vision and by his example.

Meir never bragged about all of his connections, he was a modest and down-to-earth individual who always had a twinkle in his eye, a smile on his face, a good word for everyone he came into contact with, and a helping hand for those who needed one. It was a privilege to know him, and a pleasure to be able to share him with Congregation Adas Emuno.

A Review for the Rabbi

Faithful readers of our congregational blog certainly know by now that we are quite proud of our Rabbi's recently published book, Judaism’s Great Debates: Timeless Controversies from Abraham to Herzl.  So, I thought I would share the fact that I wrote a review of the book over on Amazon that you can find on the book's page, and here's a nice link to it for your convenience:

By the way, if you order the book through the above link, or order anything through the Amazon search box over on the left, Adas Emuno will get a share of the profits. So if you're going to order anything from Amazon, why not do it through us and help to support our congregation?

As for the Amazon review, I'll share it here on our blog as well:

No Debating the Value of this Book

Rabbi Schwartz's latest book, Judaism's Great Debates, is a well-written and accessible guide to some of the major disputes in Jewish history, and as such, serves as a great introduction to this essential element within the world's oldest monotheistic tradition.

The book presents us with 10 debates in all, stretching all the way from Abraham's argument with God to spare the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah, to the differing views on Zionism of Theodor Herzl and Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise at the turn of the 20th century. Each debate is presented in a concise form, with emphasis on the dialogue, whether real or virtual, between the disputants. And most importantly, each debate is presented with an eye towards the continuing relevance of the issues under consideration for contemporary life. The debates are a part of a living tradition, and are in their own way reflective of the contradictions inherent in the human condition.

Each of the 10 debates is thought-provoking, and provides an excellent opportunity for discussion and self-examination.  But I do have my favorites.  The 3rd debate, between Moses and the daughters of Zelophehad is remarkable for its relation to women's rights, the fact that it implies flexibility in regard to Mosaic Law, and its connection to the question of intermarriage.  Chapter 4's debate between King David and the prophet Nathan is a sobering case of the abuse of authority and the need to speak truth to power, and the essential ideal that no one is above the law.  The debate between Hillel and Shammai in Chapter 6 is a classic in Jewish tradition, encapsulating the conflict over lenient and strict interpretations of the Law, between liberal and conservative, progressive and fundamentalist.  Chapter 7's dispute between the Vilna Gaon and the Baal Shem Tov similarly speaks to the conflict between head and heart, between intellect and emotion, between study and prayer, and offers two sides of Judaism that are each in their own ways worthy of celebration.  The debate between Spinoza and the Amsterdam Rabbis in Chapter 8 regards in unblinking manner a dark moment in Jewish history, where one of the greatest of modern philosophers, and one of the founders of the Enlightenment movement, was excommunicated for his views--this chapter alone is worth the price of the book!


Barry Schwartz explains that he took part in tournament debate as a high school student, and his love of the form is present throughout the volume.  Despite the sometimes tragic consequences of the conflicts that took place, Rabbi Schwartz makes it clear that "debate is more than a valued intellectual exercise in Judaism.  In echoing the divine process of creation, it is a holy act."  His introduction and overview of the tradition of "arguing for the sake of heaven" would serve as an excellent text for religious studies courses, adult education, and is an absolute must for anyone interested in moral theology or a dialogical approach to religious experience.

In case you're wondering, anyone signed in to Amazon can rate this book and any other product, and can post a review as well. And while we're at it, here's a link for the young person's version of the book:

And while we're at it, a link for the Teacher's Guide:

And finally, you might also want to add Rabbi Schwartz's book on Jewish Heroes, Jewish Values to your collection, or to give as a gift:

In future posts, we will feature other items that you might be interested in, that can be purchased online, and please feel free to share with us a review that you have written, or write one for us to share here of books, music, movies, or any other type of Judaica.