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Questions for Noah Feldman?
By Joey Kurtzman / July 22, 2007
Ed. note: This request for questions is now closed. The interview with Noah Feldman has now been published, here.
Dearest Jewcers,
I'm in the middle of an e-mail interview with Noah Feldman, Harvard law professor and author of Orthodox Paradox, a first-person in today's NY Times Mag that is already ascending to the top of the Times's most e-mailed list and generating much online chatter, offended and otherwise.
I could ask Feldman questions endlessly, and am prepared to do so until his stamina gives out–however, if any of you have read the article and have a question you'd like him to answer, please post it in comments below and I'll try to get it in there.
Thanks!
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Dear Jewcy folk:
I am disappointed that I can’t read Professor Feldman’s complete article, not having last week’s NYTimes mag handy. But, from what I see:
Doesn’t anyone get it out there?
I also attended a reunion recently – my college reunion. Being the only person in my very-fine-college class with a kippa and tsitsit hanging out, I was very encouraged to find my classmates to be quite tolerant towards my ‘new look’. (Twenty-five years ago at my fine New England school, I wasn’t exactly Orthodox. It took a trip to Israel after college to change things. One of my yeshiva friends here in Israel took one look at me then, and said: ‘Razi – you’re a lifer’. He was right.)
Anyhow, I thought you might like to hear what I told at least thirty of my now middle-aged classmates. I informed them that from now on, I would make a concerted effort to pray for the future of America. Why? Because (pause for the irony) – we here in Israel have an explicate Promise that everything here will eventually work out for the best. To the best of my knowledge, no such promise is on record for the good ol’ US of A. It depends on what America does.
I then told those friends at the reunion who could stomach it that America is asleep, and if they think that the Twin Towers was an isolated incident, they were living in dreamland.
In summary: I view Professor Feldman’s article as one more step in a long process, which will result someday in t American Jewry (reform, orthodox, unaffiliated – all jews are equally jewish in the world’s eyes) finding itself on a one-way trip to Israel. This is also part of the aforementioned Promise.
I often wonder – will they have the sense to come on two legs, or will they find themselves crawling on all fours?
Best,
R.Y.
I think we can read “Orthodox Paradox” in combination with Stanley Fish’s recent post on “Bongs4Jesus”. If we step back and look out upon our existence on its most generalized level, we realize that first, religion has been a minor part of our evolutionary history and second, it is largely unnecessary to the perpetuation of that history. What existence is, at its most basic level, is a perpetual transfer of information — cells, genes . . . life. Civilization is properly the attempt to frame that information transfer as something higher or perhaps more informed. It’s a fundamental ethical interpretation of information, e.g. good information — the right to information — useful information — being informed — knowing — etc. These are ethical modes central to how we reflect upon our existence and are thus ripe for interpretive conflict. That conflict is perhaps the root of a form of human diversity — both intrinsic and discursive — and thus crucial to the adversity that spawns religion, culture, community, identity. There is a fundamental human tension between expanding the available information (e.g. the “stuff” that informs our ways of being in the world) and controling the quality of that information. We don’t like Stanley Fish’s article for the same reason we’re skeptical of religion: it often goes too far in controling our right to information — part of that right may emphasize the ability to express one’s ideas whereas another part might suggest that certain forms of expression impoverish other informational values. Orthodoxy ultimately seeks to protect a certain level of information — and indeed religion (quality control) ensures the accuracy and preservation of information, which is useful to those who wish to preserve an identity, because, well, they think such an environment is central to how they find stability in the world. But this is all a functional-reductionist view of existence and religion. Most would say that orthodoxy and its laws are designed to preserve a form of spiritual excellence: one that elevates the individual beyond the mere transfer of cellular information that constitutes life. Spiritual information, then, and the gatekeeping function of religion to preserve such information, is informed by a view that spirituality is perhaps the highest form of knowing, and that it’s value should be protected at all costs. The act of inter-marriage threatens both the inherent meaning of that ethical prescription regarding spiritual information as well as the functional approach to preserving and controlling that body of knowledge when individual after individual loses faith in the tools of quality control.
If Noah Feldman won the academy awards of pornography, would the Maimonides School be compelled to recognize his awards? Why can Noah Feldman reject Maimonides, but Maimonides cannot reject Feldman?
Eli, actually, I'm going to send all these to him, though I don't know if I'll get another reply.
I'm too late!
Tamar,
You write "That leaves Reform, or Renenwal or Reconstructionist, all of which seem to lack the serious intellectual struggle that Feldman clearly enjoys."
- I think serious Reform, Renewal or Reconstructionist Jews would strongly disagree with this. I think one could also make the case that it is easy to avoid all intellectual struggle within the confines of Modern Orthodoxy — as many of Noah Feldman's former classmates at Maimonides have made clear. Intellectual struggle is about the individual, regardless of whatever movement the individual is in.
Joey,
I'd ask:
1. What his wife is doing while he's at services with his kids
2. What denomination he currently adheres to (and if it's still MO, what his current peers, not his former peers, think of his life choices and whether they accept his spouse)
3. What brought him to make his choice in marriage and whether he considered, at the time, that this would close off many aspects of Orthodoxy to him — what struggle did he go through at the time?
4. Whether he believes in God
If the answer to the above is No, I'd ask whether he's always felt this way or if he underwent a change, and if so, when and why;
If the answer to the above is Yes, I'd ask whether he subscribes to Orthodox Judaism's belief in Divine revelation at Sinai, and whether he thinks God wants him to follow the Torah or not, and whether he feels or ever felt that he was doing the wrong thing in his marital choice.
(I'm pretty surprised that none of the above was covered in his essay)
5. Why he perpetuated the stereotype that non-Orthodox Jews are not capable of "belief" in the following sentence:
"Whatever concerns Lieberman’s Jewish identity may have raised in the heartland seem to have been moderated, rather than stoked, by the fact that his chosen Jewish denomination was Orthodox — that he seemed to really and truly believe in something."
Hi guys, thanks for suggestions, I sent them off to Feldman, but it looks like we may already have gotten all we're going to get out of him. Thirteen questions and answers, coming your way shortly.
The article does not discuss how Feldman’s own views progressed from Modern Orthodoxy to a personal acceptance of intermarriage.
Hi,
My question actually has to do with the intentionality behind the Times’ decision to run this piece; by that I mean, it’s likely many Times readers are Jews. It might be less likely that most of those Jews are Orthodox. In some ways, the decision to run this article feels like a way for irreligious Jews (and all the other Times readership) to read of Modern Orthodoxy and be affirmed in a bias that the Orthodox are backward or irrational or parochial, unlike the Jews who read the Times. There is something decidely uncomfortable about that subtext, for which I don’t ascribe blame to Feldman, but I do wonder if that concern crossed his mind, because even as he’s critical of the Maimonides School, he obviously has affection still for the community (read in his desire to be included in the newsletter, to want his achievements to be embraced and celebrated in it).
Thanks for your consideration.
My question to Professor Feldman is, “really”? And by that I mean, did he really only now just realize how fundamentalist, domineering, and separatist all forms of religious orthodoxy are? Did he think that Jews, especially religious Jews were more understanding of the breaking of religious/social taboos? Judaism is not the only religion to force such strict adherence to dogma and social separation, but it certainly still carries on these traditions in the more orthodox forms. I guess for Professor Feldman it took the personal experience of his negation as a human being in the form of a literal 1984 style erasure from photographic history for him to realize just how toxic religious fundamentalists are.
I'll be posting on Feldman in the morning, but my question for him has to do with what we end up with after leaving Modern Orthodoxy. Has he found a home in the Conservative community? In my experience Conservative Jews are just as virulently anti-intermarriage as MO Jews. That leaves Reform, or Renenwal or Reconstructionist, all of which seem to lack the serious intellectual struggle that Feldman clearly enjoys. So is there no place for people like him, or has he found a community where he feels welcome?
Something to consider asking – although I'd be a little surprised if it hadn't come up without outside suggestion. Professor Feldman's article isn't really a critique – it's poignant discussion of contradictions. There are a few points where his displeasure is clear – the excision of his and his now-wife's image from the reunion photograph, the massacre at the tomb of the patriarchs. But he never seems to lay responsibility at the feet of anything more than amorphous tradition and goals that are laudable when viewed only in isolation.
It's hard to suggest, particularly in the relatively rigid confines of modern orthodoxy, that something needs to change. But clearly there are situations occurring that are harmful and (I would argue) morally wrong. The parochialism that led to Baruch Goldstien. The tortured lives of men and women who wish to be orthodox but who are homosexual. My question is – who gets to explicitly criticize? Who gets to lay these problems at the feet of those figures with "authority" in a religious community? The moment venerable figures like Abe Foxman (or Noam Chomsky as a secular counterpart) have been criticized on this web-page, many of the writers have been dismissed as punk kids, goyim or quasi-goyim, lacking what someone taking the bar in 36 hours would call "standing." Can even a professor of Church and State Law at Harvard Law School not come out and explicitly criticize? How will we ever correct the ongoing mistakes of the past generation that clings to power and holds on monopoly on legitimacy?
My apologies for the lengthy exposition – and I'm sure you'll be able to trim this down to 20 words or so. It was an absolutely wonderful piece, and I look forward to reading your interview.
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