By Schwartzie, a contributor to my blog 

I remember the day in ninth grade when my rebbe was faced with the awkward task of explaining the concept of anal sex.  "Ah, boys," he told us, "lets say you have some thieves, and they want to rob a house. Biah she'lo c'darka, or, relations that occur not in the normal way, is an important concept when considering the finer points of the acquisition of a woman through intercourse- you know, the transaction.

"Now normally," he continued, "the thieves would go in the front door and in that case they would have access to all the rooms in the house. But if the thieves had occasion to use the back door of the house- for whatever reason- they would only have access to several rooms.  Would you say that the house was partially robbed, or is it considered a complete robbing?"

Indeed, is it considered a complete robbing? I don't remember the maskana, but I can tell you one thing- the lock on that back door is certainly a little harder to crack than the one on the front door.

Explaining this sort of thing, I suppose, is one of the hazards of teaching the mesechta on marriage to a bunch of heretofore sheltered yeshiva boys, some of whom had never heard the particulars of how sexual intercourse is supposed to go (my cousin Yaakov told me when I was seven and he was ten and my parents being reformed hippies and avid Doctor Spock readers had no qualms about filling me in on the details- which, by the way, scared the shit out of me. "What if it gets stuck?" I remember crying as I imagined some sort of zipper between a girl's legs).

I always wondered what my rebbe, obviously a talmid chacham, was thinking when he chose to teach us the most explicit of all the mesechtos of the gemara (though I hear that Gittin is pretty heavy, too. Go figure). "A woman can be acquired in three ways," the mishna says, "through money, a written document, or sexual intercourse." And contrary to popular belief, Chazal are no prudes.

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If we are to believe Solomon Maimon--and there are admittedly more than a few good reasons not to--he was a Talmudic genius, an accomplished and recognized illui at a tender age. Yet later in his life, having moved from Poland to Berlin and fallen in (in his own idiosyncratic way) with Moses Mendelssohn and his circle of Enlightenment thinkers, he had nothing but disdain for the Talmud:

Take the subject of the Talmud...in which the oddest rabbinical conceits are elaborated through many volumes with the finest dialectic, and the most absurd questions are discussed with the highest efforts of intellectual power; for example, how many white hairs may a red cow have, and yet remain a red cow; what sorts of scabs require this or that sort of purification; whether a louse or a flea may be killed on the Sabbath, the first being allowed, while the second is a deadly sin.... Compare these glorious disputations, which are served up to young people and forced on them even to disgust, with history, in which natural events are related in an instructive and agreeable manner, with knowledge of the word's structure, by which the outlook into nature is widened, and the vast whole is brought into a well-ordered system...[i]

For Maimon, Talmudic reasoning is atomistic. Its concern with the minute details of specific cases, each in isolation from each other, stands in contrast to the discipline of history with its ordered systems. In an age of Enlightenment, the Talmud appeared to be a dead relic.

But not to everyone. If Maimon's evaluation of the Talmud stands on one end of a spectrum, at the other end was that of his near contemporary, Rabbi Hayyim Soloveichik (1853-1918). Soloveitchik was born in Volozhin, and spent most of his life associated with the famed yeshivah there, studying and then teaching Talmud. When Volozhin was closed in 1892, he moved to Brisk, where he served as the rabbi (and was thus is commonly known as R. Hayyim Brisker). It was at Brisk that he developed and popularized what would become known as the Brisker method for the study of Talmud.

The key difference between the Brisker method and most earlier approaches to the Talmud is the former's emphasis on concepts. The Talmud, of course, contains scores of disagreements that emerge primarily in the treatment of discrete and specific cases. These disagreements in turn generated among the Talmud's medieval commentators--known as the Rishonim--an enormous literature filled with further interpretive controversies. Prior to the spread of the Brisker method, Talmudic scholars would most commonly elevate the interpretive solution of one of these medieval commentators as superior to the other possibilities.

Soloveitchik insisted that to properly understand the Talmud one must recover the often implicit legal (halakhic) concepts underlying each of these disagreements. These concepts, which are drawn from other theoretical discussions within the Talmud, create an analytical structure through which one can understand disagreements both within the Talmud itself as well as among the Rishonim. The Brisker method is founded on the assumption that in truth there are no real contradictions in the vast and seemingly messy corpus of the Talmud and the literature of the early commentators. Halakhah is understood as a perfect, seamless, system that exists in a "pure" metaphysical form. To study Talmud analytically is to approach and enter into God's revelation, eternally true and entirely consistent. Halakhah thus relates only to itself; it does not grow from nor is it directed to addressing specific, historically contingent, human needs. The Talmud is seen as a perfect record of this perfect halakhah.

At the center of both Maimon's critique and Soloveitchik's defense stands the same book, the Babylonian Talmud. According to most modern scholars, the materials that ended up in the Talmud were produced by a loose network of rabbis who lived in ancient Palestine and Babylonia in the first through fifth centuries, CE. Over the next few centuries Jewish scholars in Babylonia redacted these materials into the Talmud. Weighing in at 63 tractates and comprising some 5,894 folios pages in the most common modern printed edition, the Babylonian Talmud provides a lens through which to read and understand Scripture; lore (aggadah); theological reflections; legal analysis; and a potpourri of cooking and medicinal recipes, magic, and other odds and ends. A distinctive dialectical, or argumentative, "voice" frequently connects these disparate materials.

Despite its importance, age, and the intensity with which it has been studied for about 1,300 years, the Babylonian Talmud remains an enigma. We do not really know when, how, or why it was produced. Who was supposed to read it, and how? And how are we today to read this complex document?

I have wrestled with this question for most of my adult life. My interest is in part professional. I am a scholar of the Jews in antiquity, and I am constantly mining the Babylonian Talmud for data. It is embarrassing to admit that although I have long taught classes on the Babylonian Talmud to undergraduate and graduate students in a secular university, as well as to students in more parochial settings, I continue to struggle with the question that sits like a white elephant in the middle of every class: What is this text?

At the same time, I have a personal stake in this question. I am a relatively traditional Jew, and I turn to the Talmud also for religious edification. I continue to believe that despite its glorious weirdness, the Talmud has much to offer, and I treasure those moments of satisfaction that sometimes result from the simple act of study lishmah, for its own sake. Maimon too easily ignores the beauty and profundity of this text, but Soloveitchik's understanding strains my modern and rational sensibilities. The answer, then, to my own and my students' struggle with the meaning of this text must lie somewhere between Maimon and Soloveitchik. But where?

******

A few years ago I had the opportunity to present a conference paper in Russia. I was in Russia for only a week, and I saw nothing outside of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Yet I returned from that business trip just a little bit changed. I began to drink dark tea with sugar. I bought a cord of wood and used our fireplace more regularly that winter. I tried a variety of fruit infused vodkas and served my version of zakuski, a plate of Russian appetizers. I became interested in collecting wild mushrooms. And I read War and Peace.

Tolstoy is up to many things in this novel, but the one that especially caught my attention was his attention to the nature of history, and its relationship to fiction. Might a novel, he asks, better capture history than the traditional "factual" narratives?

It is this intriguing aspect of War and Peace that Isaiah Berlin takes up in his brilliant essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox. Berlin begins his essay with a heuristic distinction between the fox and the hedgehog, citing Archilochus's maxim, "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This maxim can taken figuratively, to apply to personalities:

For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel--a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance--and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle.... The first kind of intellectual and artistic personalities belong to hedgehogs, the second to the foxes...[ii]

Was Tolstoy, Berlin asks, a fox or hedgehog? Did Tolstoy believe that history was a disjointed affair, or that it proceeded according to some single organizing principle?
It turns out, Berlin argues, that this simple dichotomy cannot fully capture Tolstoy's view of history. Tolstoy sees history as the total of the free-actions of human beings, and thus must believe that if someone in the past had acted differently, that history too would change. Tolstoy is thus stuck. History, created from an unimaginable number of choices and interactions, must seem disjointed; it can never be understood or described.

Here, then, is Berlin's insight: Tolstoy's view of history "is a passionate desire for a monistic vision of life on the part of a fox bitterly intent upon seeing in the manner of a hedgehog."[iii] Tolstoy, in effect, cannot accept the implications of his own convictions. War and Peace presents a struggle rather than a solution, a searing attempt to reconcile an incomprehensibly complex world with a belief that somehow, somewhere, there must be some sense within it. Tolstoy is a fox who wants to be hedgehog.

*****

To Solomon Maimon, the Talmud is a fox. To Hayyim Soloveitchik, it is a hedgehog. They can come to such dichotomous conclusions because the Babylonian Talmud is a fox that wants to be a hedgehog.

By this I mean that the Babylonian Talmud is made from materials that are "fox-like"; they deal with diverse matters in a disjointed fashion. We do not, and probably cannot, know if these earlier rabbis and their students had some overarching, hedgehog-like vision. What we do know is that the materials that they produced and that were transmitted over space and time to those who would ultimately redact them dealt with individual laws and scriptural verses. I think that it is likely that most of these earlier rabbis were foxes, dealing with matters of Jewish law and scriptural interpretation one by one, with little interest in or concern for the larger principles that might hold them all together.

The redactors, though, were hedgehogs. They believed that the materials that they received were not as disparate as they seemed. The Babylonian Talmud represents the attempt by hedgehogs to make foxes more like them. It reflects their belief, or maybe just desire, that the world was not as fragmented as the foxes might think.

The Talmud's literary texture makes its editors' penchant for hedgehog-like thinking most clear. Despite the enormous variety of literary forms that it contains, the Talmud nevertheless manages to have, as Jacob Neusner felicitously put it, a "unique voice." Almost every sugya--a logical unit--of the Talmud draws from a tightly limited set of technical terms, usually in Aramaic, that structure its flow and unite the disparate materials of the sugya into a more or less coherent whole. Such structuring, occurring again and again throughout the Talmud, provides the Talmud with it unique voice, a sense that each part belongs to the same whole.

It is not just that the Talmud speaks with a consistent voice, but the voice is itself that of a hedgehog. The Talmud relentlessly pursues relationships and consistency, in matters big and small. The Talmud's editors, probably following the practice of some later rabbis (Amoraim), frequently hunt down the scriptural support that "must" underlie earlier received traditions. Traditions and Scripture, even when in apparent tension, really cohere as part of the larger truth of Torah. Rabbis are themselves made to be internally consistent. The Talmud juxtaposes not only the statements made by a single rabbi on a diverse variety of topics to test for consistency, but often goes a step further, extracting the principles that a rabbi "must have" used to arrive at each position, and then massaging these principles so that they too do not conflict. Similarly, the Talmud adjusts traditions that make its editors uncomfortable.

This drive toward cohesion goes beyond the Talmud's literary characteristics. The Talmud devotes much of its energy to generating legal principles, and then working out how these principles interact with each other. The impulse to move from individual legal pronouncements to abstract general legal principles and categories is present already in the Mishnah, but the Babylonian Talmud's concern with abstract categories and their interrelationships goes far beyond anything found in earlier literature, or even in the Palestinian Talmud.

Even aggadah, the non-legal portions of the Talmud that never enjoyed normative status among the rabbis, did not escape the hedgehog. The Talmud's editors work through theological contradictions in the aggadah, predictably finding that none exist. Contrary theological positions that other rabbinic documents put side by side, the Talmud attempts to resolve. Contradictions often--although not always--vanish.

***

The Talmud, like Tolstoy, demands that we ponder the very nature of truth. What does it really mean to be a fox who wants to be a hedgehog?

The deep, implicit message of the Talmud is that we, as finite and fallible human beings, can only be foxes. We can never know the truth, but only small truths. The rabbis were convinced that there was a big truth--a hedgehog-like truth--that made sense of things. This, though, was God's truth; a thing of heaven that we mortals could never fully grasp. To be foxes is the best that we can hope for, but it is precisely these small truths that further convince us that somewhere out there, there really is a plan that makes sense of it all.

Whether or not this is a historically accurate reconstruction of what the rabbis really thought, it is a powerful and useful vision. The Talmud is not teaching us, as Maimon would have it, that there is nothing beyond hair-splitting dialectics on trivial matters. Nor, though, is it teaching us, as Soloveitchik understands it, that there is a single, totalizing truth to which we have access. The Talmud instead gives us hope even as it forces us into a stance of humility. Avoid the hubris of certainty and the false belief that we understand God's truth, but never give up the conviction that it really is there.

The Talmud thus gives us something far more than either a collection of disparate laws relevant only to observant Jews or the source of a single, exclusive, ideology: it provides a stance for living, to Jews and gentiles, religious and secular, ancient and modern. It teaches us that we can be humble about our ability to know the truth without falling into nihilistic despair, and that we must always be open to the possibility of our fallibility. To be neither a fox nor a hedgehog, but a fox who wants to be hedgehog, might be just what is called for today as we navigate our way between relativism and totalizing ideologies.

---

[i] Solomon Maimon, An Autobiography, trans. J. Clark Murray (rpt. 2001), pp. 27-28

[ii] Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, Ivan R. Dee, 1993), p. 3.

[iii] Ibid., p. 75.

Between the Jewish establishment's imposition of silence and the loosely coupled throng of Jew-hater's who zealously proclaim conspiracy, the discourse over Jews and money is pure zealotry on either side.  The result is a vacuum of alternative perspectives and the absence of any shred of an enlightened public discussion, which only provides fertile soil for a perpetual harvest of rhetorical hate.

That's why Jewcy feels it's critical to highlight voices like Brackman and Jaffe, as we are doing all week, and it's also  why we're very happy that Time magazine just published an article highlighting two Jewish scholars that are publicly filling the vacuum by putting forth an alternative discourse -- one that cites Jewish law as a basis for criticizing the behavior that led to the current financial crisis. The scholars are Yeshiva University economics professor Aaron Levine and Rabbi Eliezer Diamond, a professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at New York's Jewish Theological Seminary. 

The article draws on Jewish scripture (the Torah, the Talmud, and the Mishna) as well as various rabbinical opinions to extrapolate ancient principles relevant to our current economic times:

•Bamboozling the "Blind"
Much Jewish ethical thought flows out of Leviticus 19:14, which reads "Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling-block before the blind." From an early date, rabbis expanded this into a general prohibition on bad advice. In time, it became part of the language specifically regarding loans, mostly regarding the need for witnesses. But Diamond says it now applies to the whole loan debacle and "any expert who tells someone who probably shouldn't take out a mortgage 'you'll be able to do it, no problem.'" There are a lot of financially "blind" people out there, and a lot of people mis-advised them.

•Hidden Flaws and the "Reasonable Man"
Medieval jurists like Maimonides identified a more specific kind of bad advice. They tackled the idea of the "hidden flaw," which, Levine points out, leads directly to a demand for fiscal disclosure. "If you sell an animal, you had to disclose to the buyer what the hidden flaw is," he explains. Not only that: "the disclosure has to be made so that a 'reasonable,' or average man can decide" whether to buy. Once again, almost the entire chain of transactors in the mortgage crisis is guilty: predatory brokers for not alerting working-class borrowers to the fine print; middle-men selling mortgage debt to investment banks sliced and diced into "tranches" that obscure their riskiness; bankers who used hard-to-fathom financial instruments that leave ultimate responsibility for a loan a mystery even to experts. Like many observers, Levine is particularly exercized about credit default swaps, a largely unregulated field since 2000.) And anyone who willfully ignored the fact that real estate prices must eventually come down.

•The Bath House Rule
An extension of the disclosure concern, Diamond reports, was explored by Jews through the unexpected vehicle of marriage law. The tractate Ketubot in the Mishna dictates that a betrothal is valid only if the bride-to-be has no hidden blemishes that would have disqualified the match, had they been public. However, there is a heavy responsibility on the groom: if he has relatives who could have observed the disfigurement by checking out his fiance in the womens' bath but neglected to do have them do so, he can't complain. This suggests (feminist complaints notwithstanding) that culpability in sub-prime crisis does not lie solely on the mortgage broker who glided over the fact that payments ballooned in the third year; but also on the buyer who happily neglected to read the fine print: : "Ignorance of the facts is no defense," Diamond says.

•Morals of the Mark-Up
Leviticus 25 of the Bible explains that you cannot charge the same price for land that is about to become useless (in this case, by reverting to its original tribal ownership) as for a parcel that still has decades of use left. Rabbinic tradition, says Diamond, interpreted that as a check on price-gouging and ruled that nobody should charge more than one-sixth above market value for anything.

[Time Magazine]

A young boy is called up to his teacher’s desk in a yeshiva grade school.

“Stay after class, Shmuley. I want to talk to you.”

Shmuley stays, frightened that he has done something wrong and his teacher will punish him. Once the other boys have gone, his teacher – a rabbi – places Shmuley on his lap and uses his tiny, warm body to stroke his erection. When the rabbi is finished pleasuring himself, he tells Shmuley to leave. “But you be quiet. You don’t tell anyone what we did. It’s lashon hara, and it will hurt you and hurt your parents.”

Shmuley leaves, frightened and confused.

Later, after the fifth molestation or the fiftieth, after months or years have passed, Shmuley tells his parents.

His parents tell the school’s head rabbi, who responds by denying the boy’s report. He sternly warns the parents not to “talk lashon hara” (gossip) about Shmuley's teacher or about the yeshiva.

This is not the first time the yeshiva head has heard allegations about Rabbi X, and he knows how to effectively respond.

“It is lashon hara to do so,” the yeshiva head says. “And it will only hurt you.” Your other children will have difficulty finding marriage partners, the rabbi says, and Shmuley – well, Shmuley will be “damaged goods” – no one, except a girl who is also very damaged, will ever marry him. This is far from an idle threat in a community that thrives on arranged marriages and rabbinic control.

The parents leave, frustrated and frightened. Their eight-year-old son is now “damaged goods.” They approach another rabbi, powerful in their community, and ask his advice.

“Your son is a minor. his testimony would not be accepted in beis din (religious court). It is his word against Rabbi X – and Rabbi X is a very well regarded teacher. And, from what you tell me, even if what Shmuley said is true – and I doubt that – no violation of Torah law took place. Shmuley was not violated.

“So, my advice to you – my legal judgement, in fact – is to listen to what the head of the yeshiva told you. Do not speak lashon hara against him, or against his school – and most certainly, not against Rabbi X.”

The parents go to another important community rabbi and get a very similar answer.

Without community support to back them, and with the very real prospect of “destroying” their children’s lives by branding them “damaged goods,” the parents stay silent.

Shmuley isn’t given counseling because the stigma, if revealed, would be too great. The family lives with this terrible secret, an elephant always in the room but never spoken of, the tarnished Elijah’s Cup of every meal, every celebration, every enjoyment they will ever have. Rabbi X continues to abuse young victims from his desk in the yeshiva, protected by a presumption of innocence belied by the facts, by the silence of Shmuley’s family – and by a Jewish law.

This nightmare scenario has allegedly been repeated multiple times in Brooklyn, Monsey, Bnei Brak, and other ultra-Orthodox communities worldwide. How did this happen? How did a law meant to protect people from gossip become a club used by rabbis to beat defenseless children and their families into submission?

There is a long answer and a short answer to that question, and both can be summed up in same three words: The Chofetz Chaim.

Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan is the iconic figure of today’s ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Kagan wrote many books on Jewish law in his long life. The first – and what may in retrospect prove to be his most controversial – was the Chofetz Chaim, a compendium of the laws of lashon hara.

Nothing that Kagan wrote in Chofetz Chaim was really new. What Kagan did – to the dismay of a few prescient rabbis – was compile laws scattered is disparate sections of the Talmud and in codes of Jewish law, and publish them for the first time as an organic whole with his commentary woven in. Kagan wanted his “little book” to be studied by the masses. He lived his entire long life firmly believing the messiah was literally coming any minute. Legend has it that at one point, he went into training for the “event,” running the stairs in his home to keep his aging body in shape for the blessed day. He thought the study of these laws would speed the messiah’s coming.

But Kagan’s book did bring these disparate laws out of the shadows and into the spotlight of Orthodox observance. And that, by and large, has been a bad thing.

Kagan’s idealism surpassed his realism. And, because Kagan’s book contained no dissenting opinions, that idealism became the baseline Jews were expected to follow – without nuance, without shades of gray, without real compensation for corrupt judges, rabbis, and leaders. It was Jewish law written in a vacuum but enforced in real life, law without context and without soul.

Kagan was a founder of the Agudath Israel movement, whose American branch recently campaigned against mandatory background checks for religious school teachers and employees, and would itself be linked to inaction in the face of rabbinic sexual abuse.

He urged Jews (with a few notable exceptions) to remain in Eastern Europe rather than settle in Palestine or America, and would go on to write twenty more books on Jewish law and ethics before he died in 1933 at the age of 95, in the shadow of the Holocaust that took so many of his followers and townspeople.

Kagan’s reputation as a saint survived nonetheless, and he and his books serve as totems worshipped with almost childlike veneration by ultra-Orthodoxy. He is often cited as the posek acharon, the final decisor and codifier of Jewish law, and his name and works have been preserved by the New York-based Chofetz Chaim Heritage Foundation. His books are found in almost every Orthodox home, library, shul and school – and in quite a few non-Orthodox settings, as well.

Orthodox Jews would be quick to point out that Kagan’s laws of lashon hara are misapplied by the rabbis in Shmuley’s story. Orthodox Jews are correct – the law is misapplied. But, like Kagan, what they miss is the inevitability of that misapplication, and the certitude of it.

The ultra-Orthodox community is not a democracy. It has no system of checks and balances, no ombudsman to press the case of the powerless, no campaign finance laws or transparency. It has no elections and no governance. It is a loosely joined series of potentates run by pashas dressed in black frock coats, fedoras and shtreimels, who owe allegiance to no one but themselves, and who are answerable only to God. And, as history and common sense tell us, God doesn’t often demand answers from those still here on this earth.

Until ultra-Orthodoxy adopts a fully transparent form of governance with a working system of checks and balances, laws meant to protect reputations will instead often be used to destroy lives – especially the lives of the smallest and the weakest, especially the lives of children like Shmuley.

Dude looks like a lady: You don't have to cross-dress to study the Torah anymore, yay.

On TV, women dish endless midrashim on the guys in their lives their idiosyncrasies in the bedroom, their chest hair and what to do about it. Me? I’m more a Talmud gal.

What’s a Talmud gal? We’re women who are more interested in using our minds to think than using our minds to speculate. We sit with hard ideas, and crack at them until we can suck the meat from the nut. We have well-trained minds, seasoned from years in the academy and neo-yeshivot where we are welcomed, where Yentls of the 21^st century can show up with blown-out hair and well-moisturized skin. We plunge into the page, tearing at the sugya. We wrestle with Rav, plunge with Papa and shimmy with Shimon.

Continue reading...

Tomorrow is Hanukkah, and we’ll be doing all kinds of fun Hanukkah coverage this week, but I wanted to let people know about another important thing happening for Jews tomorrow:

There’s one place in the siddur where we go by the Gregorian calendar rather than the Jewish calendar, and it has to do with when we start praying for rain. If you open a siddur to the middle of the Amidah, you’ll notice that there’s one place with two options. Either v’ten tal umatar livracha (give us rain and dew for a blessing), or just vten bracha (give us a blessing). The longer option is a specific request for rain, and we say it starting on the evening of December 4th. But why December 4th and not shmini atzeret, which is when we go through a whole rigamarole at shul asking for rain?
The Autumnal Equinox: ruins everything
Basically, the Rabbis in the Talmud decided that rain should not be requested prior to the sixtieth day after the Autumnal Equinox. It’s not clear why they chose this day, but some scholars have suggested that for the Babylonian farmers rainfall was considered a nuisance before the conclusion of the date-harvest (there’s a joke here about my dating life, my name, and the phrase “date-harvest” but I can’t quite figure out what it would be). Whatever the reason, it’s clear that the equinox, as a phase in the cycle of the sun, is most conveniently calculated by the civil calendar, which is a solar one.

In the course of the Middle Ages the Babylonian practice came to be accepted--though not without a struggle--by all Jewish communities outside of Israel. Israel itself follows a different, earlier date, defined according to the Jewish calendar (the 7th of Heshvan).

Surprise! Once again, normative practice has rejected the more reasonable precedents of praying for rain either when it is beneficial for our own climate, or when it is required in the Israel--in favor of the unlikely option of linking it to the climate of Iraq (the current inhabitant of the land that was formerly called Babylonia, where the Talmud was written).

But there’s still a bit of a math problem to deal with: The Autumnal Equinox actually occurs on the 22nd of September, so that the sixtieth day following should come out on November 20, not December 4!

The discrepancy originates in the methods that we employ for calculating the solar year. The Talmud assumes that a year consists of precisely 365 1/4 days and halakhic practice bases its calculations on that premise.

The calculation is very close, but it's not fully accurate, since an astronomical year falls eleven minutes and fourteen seconds behind that estimate. The margin is admittedly a tiny one, but when stretched across the centuries of Jewish history the minutes begin to add up. Every 128 years the Jewish reckoning pulls a full day ahead of the astronomical equinox.

Anyway, though it seems crazy to pray for rain based primarily on bad math, bad astronomy, and what’s good for Iraq, it’s pretty much the norm, so starting tomorrow night I’ll be praying for rain.

And in case you were wondering, no, I don’t know this stuff just off the top of my head. For more info, check out this source sheet, and this overview.

So my friend Adam sent me to this awesome blog by a chick who has insightful things to say about all kinds of things she’s learning from various Jewish texts. I really know nothing about her, but I loved this post about a playa-rabbi in Talmudic times. My favorite, though, are limericks she wrote that summarize a masechet of Talmud:
There Was An Old Man: from Pumpedita...

(2a)
All are obliged to appear
Before He-Who-Instills-In-Us-Fear
Unless you are not
Let me tell you, we've got
A long list of exceptions. Come, hear!

 

(2b)
A person half-slave and half-free
Says, "I serve both my master and me."
But he hasn't a mate
So he can't procreate
Thus says Shammai, "It simply can't be!"

 

(3a)
Can a mute learn? Well, it came to pass
Two mutes started attending a class
And when Rabi beseeched
That God heal those he'd teach
They gained speech, and their learning proved vast.

 

(3b)
Words of Torah are like cattle goads
That prevent cows from veering off roads
Thus with Torah we stay
On God's path, and don't stray,
Bringing life (not death) to our abodes.

 

(3b)
How to detect the insane?
Those who wander on dark lonely lanes,
Lie atop graveyard dirt,
Or start ripping a shirt.
Otherwise, you can trust he is sane.

 

There are a bunch more, so head over to D'yo Ilu Yamey to read them. There are also sonnets. If this chick was a guy living in Nashville I would totally date her.

I will admit to being obnoxiously addicted to my iPod. During the school year it’s not unusual for me to listen to it for four or more hours a day, and while a significant portion of that time is spent listening to music, I’m also a huge fan of the podcast. News podcasts, music podcasts, and cool radio shows like This American Life keep me company when I ride my bike to campus. One of my favorite things to listen to on my iPod (aside from Lip Gloss by Lil' Mama on repeat—thanks Annie!) is the awesome selection of Jewish learning podcasts. I am not even close to being able to keep up with learning a page of Talmud a day, but I’m a big fan of the two Daf Yomi podcasts available for free on iTunes (I can’t link to them, but just type “daf yomi” into the search window). You can subscribe to a weekly parsha podcast (I recommend the Pardes one—search for “Pardes”), do some meditation (search for “Jewish meditation”) or get Jewish book recommendations (via the Nextbook podcast. I actually had to unsubscribe from Nextbook because I was buying every book they recommended, and it was leaving me poor, if well-read). If you don’t have an iPod yet, but you’re thinking of getting one, you could shell out some cash for an iPod that already has the complete cycle of Daf Yomi uploaded onto it. For about $300 shaspod will send you an iPod that’s so frum it practically needs its own kipah.
My iPod Is So Frum: sometimes it looks at me and tells me to go put something more appopropriate on if I want to leave the house
If learning isn’t your thing, but you’re committed to davening, you can get yourself iDaven for about twenty bucks. The iDaven website brags:

With iDaven, there's no need to carry a spare Siddur with you for those Mincha moments – just open your iPod and pray! No need to search your purse for a bentcher – you've got your iPod! Sitting in the plane, Tefilat HaDerech is a breeze - read it on your iPod!

iDaven makes a great gift for the iPod fan in your family –it's simple, easy, and so cool!

iDaven features clear, razor-sharp Hebrew text with vowels on a white background. Each page of Hebrew text is a picture. Copy the pictures to your computer, synchronize with your iPod, and you're set!

I think that “so cool” might be something of an exaggeration, but it is kinda nifty.

Looking for something a little less yeshivish? The community where I’m learning this summer is offering free recordings of the classes online. We’ve got everything from an analytic look at various prayers to Biblical criticism to a look at what Maimonides said about business dealings with non-Jews (hint: it’s not good). Though the classes aren’t yet in podcast form, you can still listen from your computer while you fold laundry, cook dinner, or surf the web. You have to create an account in order to listen, but it’s worth it, and Hadar promises not to slam you with spam. Sign up and start learning by clicking here.

 

There’s no longer an excuse for slacking. Some of these podcasts are shorter than one express stop on the subway. If you sandwich it between the Jackson 5 and Amy Winehouse you’ll hardly feel a thing…

Herod: The one I rememberAccording to the HuffPo, an Israeli archaeologist has found the tomb of King Herod.   

King Herod?   

King Herod:

the Jewish proxy ruler of the Holy Land under imperial Roman occupation from 37 B.C. His most famous construction project was expanding the Jewish Second Temple in Jerusalem.

 I was a little surprised, reading the story,  to find out: 

…among key clues were that the sarcophagus was placed on a raised platform rather than in the underground tombs used for those of lesser rank, and that in accordance with Jewish religious law, it was not decorated with any human image.

Hmmmm.   See, my understanding of Herod (based on Josh Mostel’s portrayal of him as an obese  bagel-hurling  sunbather in Jesus Christ Superstar, and supplemented only with cliffsnotes to Josephus) is that he was a twisted mess of a man.  Credited with the Slaughter of the Innocents, and a complete puppet of Rome.  So it surprised me to think that he might have actually BEEN a Jew.

And this made me wonder why I  know nothing about him as a Jew.  Is his involvement with the story of Jesus the reason?  Did his importance for Christianity obliterate any interest we might have in the fact that he explanded the second temple?

Well, according to this site, the Talmud says: 

“Herod was a slave of the house of the Hasmoneans. He had set his eyes on a certain young girl [from that family]. One day he heard a Heavenly voice that said: ‘Any slave that revolts now will succeed’. He rose and killed all of his masters but left that girl alive. When she saw that he wanted to marry her, she ascended to the roof and raised her voice saying: ’Whoever comes and says: I am descended from the house of the Hasmoneans is a slave, for no one was left from them except this maiden (herself) and this girl is hurling herself from the roof to the ground’ (then she killed herself)”.

 Pretty interesting, right?  I mean, he sounds like an awful guy, but he’s in the Talmud, yo!  That seems worth knowing. And this site goes into great detail about how the Jews of the time felt about him: 
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All the worldly pomp and splendor which made Herod popular among the pagans, however, rendered him abhorrent to the Jews, who could not forgive him for insulting their religious feelings by forcing upon them heathen games and combats with wild animals. The annexation to Judea of the districts of Trachonitis, Batanea, Auranitis, Zenodorus, Ulatha, and Panias, which Herod through his adulations had obtained from Augustus, could not atone for his crimes. In the eyes of the pious Jew Herod's government was not better than that of Antiochus Epiphanes. Like him, but by other means, Herod endeavored to Hellenize Judea.

 So there we go… we actually know a lot about Herod, and he was a Jewish leader (albeit a bad one).  We just don’t talk about him, despite the fact that everyone else does…

Lilith: Hot as hell, nobody's wifeWe've all heard of Lilith, but really... who was she? 

My vague memories from a women's studies course suggest that she appears in the Torah, but elsewhere as well.  That she's an archetype from our Jewish tradition, but also mythologies beyond our own...  that she was Adam's first wife or something.  That her story is basically a defense of unequal treatment of Jewish women.

But a cursory search online tells me that she is NOT named anywhere in the Torah.  Though she does turn up in the Dead Sea Scrolls:

"And I, the Instructor, proclaim His glorious splendour so as to frighten and to te[rrify] all the spirits of the destroying angels, spirits of the bastards, demons, Lilith, howlers, and [desert dwellers…] and those which fall upon men without warning to lead them astray from a spirit of understanding..."

Okay, so she's keeping nasty company... But the Talmud gives us a lot more, offering a portrait of a winged demon with long hair, a sexual predator:

"Rab Judah citing Samuel ruled: If an abortion had the likeness of Lilith its mother is unclean by reason of the birth, for it is a child but it has wings." (Niddah 24b)

"[Expounding upon the curses of womanhood] In a Baraitha it was taught: She grows long hair like Lilith, sits when making water like a beast, and serves as a bolster for her husband." (‘Erubin 100b)

"R. Hanina said: One may not sleep in a house alone [in a lonely house], and whoever sleeps in a house alone is seized by Lilith." (Shabbath 151b)

"R. Jeremiah b. Eleazar further stated: In all those years [130 years after his expulsion from the Garden of Eden] during which Adam was under the ban he begot ghosts and male demons and female demons [or night demons], for it is said in Scripture, And Adam lived a hundred and thirty years and begot a son in own likeness, after his own image, from which it follows that until that time he did not beget after his own image…When he saw that through him death was ordained as punishment he spent a hundred and thirty years in fasting, severed connection with his wife for a hundred and thirty years, and wore clothes of fig on his body for a hundred and thirty years. – That statement [of R. Jeremiah] was made in reference to the semen which he emitted accidentally." (‘Erubin 18b)

Comparing ‘Erubin 18b and Shabbath 151b with the later passage from the Zohar: “She wanders about at night, vexing the sons of men and causing them to defile themselves (19b),” it appears clear that this Talmudic passage indicates such an averse union between Adam and Lilith.

It would seem that the stories of Lilith as Adam's first wife develop later, and turn this demon-creature into a Jewess of sorts.  As the story goes, Lilith refused to settle for "doing it" missionary style, and so Adam had to find himself a new wife.  As far as I can tell, this version doesn't come around until about 1000 CE, and it is taken from the Alphabet of Ben Sira:

He then created a woman for Adam, from the earth, as He had created Adam himself, and called her Lilith. Adam and Lilith immediately began to fight. She said, 'I will not lie below,' and he said, 'I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while I am to be the superior one.' Lilith responded, 'We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth.' But they would not listen to one another. When Lilith saw this, she pronounced the Ineffable Name and flew away into the air.

Ah, yeah... see...  THAT's the Lilith I remember.  Too bad she comes from what basically amounts to medieval porn.

 

Tragedy is the right time for introspection, and so after the massacre of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech I’d like to reverse a position I’ve taken in the past, including in this web space. I believe I was wrong about gun control. On this point, the liberals may be right. In a previous article in Jewcy I briefly noted my former view that the problem with gun control is that it"I Believe I Was Wrong About Gun ...

About a year and a half ago I was at a Chabad rosh chodesh meeting with one other college student and four middle aged women. The rebbetzin wanted to talk about the parsha (Bereshit) but the middle aged women wanted to talk about sex. I wanted to crawl under the table.

About ten minutes into the discussion one of the women brought up oral sex, and the conversation went something like this:
Various Middle Aged Women: “Well that’s not allowed, is it?”
“Not for men, because they can’t spill their seed, but for women it’s okay.”
“Thank God…”
Chabad Rebbeztin: “Actually there’s a prohibition against a man looking at his wife’s sexual organs.”
Long uncomfortable pause during which I consider fleeing.
Middle Aged Woman: Oh…Well…That’s good to know.
Avert Your Eyes: Looking at Jennifer Lopez's hooha may blind your children
Eventually I extricated myself from the conversation, but since then I’ve been a bit concerned about this. I keep imagining signs: Warning: Do Not Look Directly at the Vagina. In the admittedly crude words of a friend of mine, “Blind muff diving? That won’t end well.”

So I set the crack research team here at Faithhacker on the case, and here’s what I found out:

According to the Talmud (Nedarim 20b) Rabbi Johanan ben Dahabi claims that various sexual acts result in corresponding problems with the resulting children. If a couple has sex with the woman on top [the literal translation is if they ‘overturned their table’ which cracks me up] their child will be lame. The child will be mute if the man kisses the vagina. The child will be deaf if they speak during sex, and the child will be blind if the man looks at the vagina. The gemara doesn’t hold by Dahabi, though. It ends up saying that a man can do whatever makes his wife happy. To support this they bring up a handy little parable: Meat from the slaughterhouse can be eaten salted, roasted, cooked or boiled; so with the fish from the fishmonger. [I will never be able to think about fishmongers the same way…]

In the twelfth century, Maimonides weighed in when he wrote the Mishneh Torah, a comprehensive code of Jewish law. In Hilchot Issurei Bi’ah (The Laws of Forbidden Types of Sex) 21:9 he said that a man can have sex any way he wants as long as he doesn’t spill seed, but it’d be better if he didn’t stray from “the ordinary pattern of the world.” [I’m not sure, but I think that means if all your friends are having oral sex, you get to, too.]

The Shulchan Aruch, a 16th century catalogue of Jewish law says (Orach Chaim 240:4) that a man shouldn’t look at his wife’s private parts because it’s immodest, and contradicts the way he should “walk modestly with God” (Micah 6:8). In another location (Even HaEzer 25:2) the gloss on the text says that a man can do pretty much whatever he wants with his wife, he can kiss any area he likes, as long as he doesn’t spill any seed.

There’s also some discussion about whether the original prohibition that Rabbi Dahabi brings up in the Talmud is not against looking at the vagina, it’s against staring at the vagina. So if you just glance at it, you’re fine.

I find all this amusing, and ultimately comforting since it seems like the wives of all these rabbis (with the exception of poor Mrs. Dahabi) were getting theirs pretty regularly. For all the talk of prude old guys setting the standards, there’s a nice degree of leniency here. It’s no She Comes First (which, incidentally, was written by a graduate of Maimonides University), and I’m not thrilled that women are literally compared to meat and fish, but if there’s one thing I learned in Jewish day school it’s this: when the rabbis leave you room for creativity, you have to run with it. And run fast, before they catch up…

A 15-year-old boy in Israel was sentenced to cut off his hair as punishment for studying for a Math test while in Talmud class.

Adept at the art of negotiation (like all good Israelis), the teacher originally told the boy he wouldn't be able to take the Math test, to which the boy responded, "Let's not mix apples and oranges." The teacher then equated compromise with the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The teacher said, "This is like the peace agreements with the Palestinians. First you make the concession, then we'll have the negotiations."

 The wise son responded in kind, "And what did we (Israel) get out of that?" The teacher was forced to concede and decided a haircut would suffice.

Dan Sieradski entered the mix this morning with his first offering in the "Is Social Justice the Soul of Judaism" Big Question. I can't wait to see where the commentariat takes this one. Yesterday's opening installment saw Ashprintzen and Ilan clowning the Tikkun Olam fetishists, and Dan Freeman and various anonymi denouncing Steven I. Weiss as a burner of straw men. Ilan went so far as to compare Tikkun Olam to idol worship, or Avodah Zarah. (Note regarding Avodah Zarah: Best. Talmud tractate. Ever. And the only one I own.)Like Judaism, but Different: Gerald Ford's college football career

Jewcy hearthrob Freeman brought his Yale Law School pilpul training to bear and compared Judaism to--you guessed it--late President Gerald Ford during his days as a football All American at Michigan. Enough with the cliches, Dan. If Rashi said it, you don't get points for saying it, too. But that didn't stop Steven I. Weiss from running with it like Christian Okoye over the Raiders offensive line, leaving both a comment here and a post at his own blog, the latter including the least likely parenthetical phrase in the history of the English language: "Was Deacon Jones, to paraphrase Genesis, merely a great football player of his generation?"

Somewhere in the cosmos, Rav Kook looks very confused.