New York: Penguin, 2013

US: $27.95, CA: $29.50

I have to confess that I committed an error of critical thinking in conceiving this review: I came up with my thesis before I read the book.

In my defense, I’ve read a fair chunk of the rest of Pollan’s ouvre, and I had read some other reviews of Cooked, so I had a fairly good idea of what to expect from it. But the thesis crystallized for me when my fiancée, Sarah, who had claimed dibs on reading it, mentioned Pollan’s discussion of Sylvester Graham:

[T]he American minister and nutritional reformer Sylvester Graham...blamed white flour for many [of] the ills of modern life [and] fervently extolled the virtues of coarse dark breads... To remove the precious health-giving fraction of bran from wheat was to “put asunder what God had joined together”—a fall from dietary grace for which modern man was paying with his troubled, sluggish digestion. (Cooked, 260)

Absent the overt references to God in that paragraph, Pollan may as well be describing his own project, raising the question: even if it’s not named as such, how far removed, really, are religious concerns from his work? Graham was part of a larger food and hygiene movement in the 19^th century that explicitly linked a proper, wholesome diet with morally upright living and proper religious devotion. How one ate was a major part, both physically and spiritually, of disciplining oneself in order to cultivate correct habits and a correct worldview, which in turn involved recognizing that nature—and its foods in particular—had an intelligible, intrinsic, divinely appointed order.[1]

Despite being a liberal American Jew, Pollan’s underlying sensibilities are in many ways deeply Puritan. He is also deeply steeped in a particular sort of virtue ethic. His entire body of work—especially Cooked, in which Pollan apprentices himself to a series of culinary masters—can be read as a process of shaping an unreflective reader, mired in a miasma of modernity, into a deliberating thinker and moral actor. Pollan wants to cultivate his reader into a certain sort of person.

Even more deeply Puritan is an underlying anxiety in his work: the fear that the pleasure of a recreational pursuit itself is not enough to justify it. Fun for fun’s sake is suspect: there has to be a “serious” purpose to it for it to be truly worthwhile.

It's true that Pollan explicitly declares himself roundly in favor of pleasure, decrying “nutritionism” and food science as more concerned with health than pleasure. But two factors complicate his superficially “pleasure-positive” stance. First, he seems less than open to what Alasdair MacIntyre refers to as the “polymorphous character” of pleasure. (After Virtue, 63) Consider, for example, his “Microwave Night” experiment, wherein each member of his family chooses a microwavable entrée in the frozen food case:

The dishes all tasted better on the first bite—when you might be tempted to think, Hey, not half bad!—than on the second or third, when those words would be unlikely to cross your mind. (198)

Foods that Pollan doesn’t find pleasurable are thus not truly or intrinsically pleasurable to anyone—much, indeed, as food that has been processed in ways of which Pollan disapproves is no longer “food” but rather an “edible foodlike substance.” (10) Experiencing something as pleasurable is not enough—a truly pleasurable food takes certain forms, is made in certain ways, and is consumed in certain ways.

Now, I have to admit that, were I to try “microwave night,” I would probably come to the same conclusions as Pollan does. I am, after all, a self-confessed food snob—but, unlike him, I know better than to universalize my tastes. Who’s to say that the immediate pleasures of microwaved food are less pleasurable, to someone who isn’t a food hobbyist, than foodie-approved acquired tastes like strong cheeses, preserved lemons, and hoppy craft beer?

The second factor that complicates Pollan’s stated pro-pleasure stance is that there always seems to be a correlation between that which is truly pleasurable and that which is practically or morally good. Consider the meal he places in direct contrast with Microwave Night:

I had braised [duck] with red wine and sweet spices in my new terra-cotta pot…By the time the sweet smells of allspice, juniper, and clove began to fill the house, Isaac and Judith had gravitated to the kitchen; I never had to call them to dinner. (200)

This is food porn, pure and simple—and I mean that as a compliment. For me, it’s nearly as pleasurable to read as the dish must have been to eat. But Pollan can’t leave it at that. There has to be a moral to the story:

For the first time all day, it felt like we were all on the same page, and though it would be overstating things to credit that feeling entirely to the delicious braise, it would also be wrong to think that eating from the same pot, this weeknight communion of the casserole, had nothing to do with it, either. (200-201)

Conversely, something which isn’t a true pleasure, on Pollan’s view, must also be practically or morally destructive in some way. So, for example, not only is microwaved food un-pleasurable—apparently, it’s destructive, as well, and not just nutritionally. The mechanism and form of the dinners themselves are divisive:

Very little about this meal was shared; the single serving portions served to disconnect us from one another, nearly as much as from the origins of this food, which, beyond the familiar logos, we could only guess at. Microwave Night was a notably individualistic experience, marked by centrifugal energies, a certain opaqueness, and, after it was all over, a remarkable quantity of trash. (200)[2]

The food activists of the 19^th century also distinguished true and false pleasures. One of the main aims of proper diet was to encourage proper sexual behavior. As John Harvey Kellogg wrote in Plain Facts for Old and Young:

The science of physiology teaches that our very thoughts are born of what we eat. A man that lives on pork, fine-flour bread, rich pies and cakes, and condiments, drinks tea and coffee, and uses tobacco, might as well try to fly as to be chaste in thought. He will accomplish wonders if he remains physically chaste; but to be mentally virtuous would be impossible for him without a miracle of grace. (391, 1882 edition)

This quotation is part of a section on how to discourage masturbation. Here, too, an immediately apparent pleasure is contrasted with a greater, long-term, truer pleasure—that of right conduct and virtuous living. While the true pleasure is associated with social order and good health, the immediate, false pleasure is associated with catastrophic effects on physical health—Kellogg links masturbation to, among other things, impotence (363), consumption (365), and insanity (370).

Clearly, Pollan is more grounded in actual evidence than Kellogg was (though Kellogg’s ideas about masturbation were fairly widely accepted when he was writing.) But he betrays the same underlying belief that truly pleasurable things must also be healthy, and vice versa. This bespeaks certain assumptions about virtue, right conduct, and natural order—assumptions that are deeply rooted in religiosity, even if a particular religious tradition is not invoked.

Underlying all this is the assumption that a good person will come to realize that only those things that are salutary and wholesome are truly pleasurable. What’s more, as Emily Rapp notes on Role/Reboot, we as a society often associate being a truly good person with being healthy. But this doesn’t reflect how the world actually works. Many of us experience as genuinely pleasurable things that we know damn well aren’t good for us or for society, and we experience as genuinely unpleasant things that we know equally well are very good for us and for society. Furthermore, a great deal of the things we find pleasant or unpleasant turn out, practically speaking, to be neutral.

To be fair, in my critique, I appear to have fallen into something of the same trap that Pollan has. After perhaps my 20^th snide comment about something in Cooked that annoyed me, Sarah asked if I would please shut up and allow her to enjoy her food porn.

This is an entirely reasonable request. I only wish Pollan would heed it.

This is the point at which I tell that voice in my head to shut up. The dualism it establishes—between engaging “seriously” in prayer or ritual, and “making a statement”— infuriates me, and recent news out of Israel provides an object lesson as to why.

Nashot ha-Kotel, or Women of the Wall, is an interdenominational group of Jewish women who meet every month at the Kotel (Western Wall) in Jerusalem to conduct prayer services. Their “central mission is to achieve the social and legal recognition of our right, as women, to wear prayer shawls, pray and read from the Torah collectively and out loud at the Western Wall.”[2] Women of the Wall have been meeting for the past 24 years; in the last six months tensions between the group and the Kotel’s state-sanctioned religious administration have heightened considerably. As Haaretz reports:

For the past few months at Rosh Hodesh, the start of every Hebrew month, women worshipers have been forcibly removed from the square and taken for questioning, and sometimes even arrested. Their crime: use of a tallit, prayer shawl, or a siddur, prayer book, or singing aloud in the Western Wall plaza. The arrests point to a significant tightening of the limitations placed upon women’s prayer at the Wall.
Over the years, the Women of the Wall worked out various arrangements that enabled them to conduct their services; for instance, for a long time they were allowed to wear tallitot so long as they did not look like the traditional black-and-white prayer shawl. This led to the development of a colorful women’s tallit that became a symbol of the Women of the Wall.
Later, the police stiffened the rules and ordered the women to wear the tallit as a scarf around their necks and not to drape it across their shoulders in the traditional fashion.
Last week, a new order stipulated that women cannot enter the Western Wall plaza holding either a tallit or a siddur. For the women, this restriction was too much; some refused to relinquish their tallitot or remove them from their shoulders. Little by little, these orders seem to have metaphorically cut away at the women’s tallit, with the intention of making it disappear.

When asked for comment, the Chief Rabbi of the Western Wall, Shmuel Rabinowitz, responded by characterizing Women of the Wall as “fanatics” and belittling their religious commitment:

“They don’t come to worship, they come to demonstrate,” Rabbi Rabinowitz of the Western Wall adamantly declared. “Every month they come and stir up a new provocation, so as to attract the media. They tried to bring in Torah scrolls, they deliberately sing loudly, and they do these things to create a fuss…What I decided is to remove this struggle from the Western Wall, because it makes Israel and the Western Wall look awful. We told them that the Western Wall is not the place to express political opinions.” (emphasis mine)

Rabbi Rabinowitz is implying, of course, that it’s impossible to demonstrate and worship at the same time. (It’s also worth noting that his wording rhetorically links Women of the Wall to anti-Occupation demonstrators, another group he likely considers deviant and traitorous to the Jewish norm.) And, in all fairness, the idea that worship is an activity in which you remove yourself temporarily from day-to-day concerns is not a position without, you know, significant precedent. Even etymologically, both the English (from Greek) word “sacred” and the Hebrew word kadosh, “holy,” come from roots having to do with “set-apartness” and “withdrawal.” Similarly, it is hardly controversial to suggest that the main goal of worship should be to direct attention not to yourself, but to the Divine.

But what Rabinowitz doesn’t see — or chooses not to see — is that separating worship from daily affairs and not drawing attention to oneself in the practice of worship is a luxury reserved for powerful people with normative practices. If you’re a member of a group that’s “out,” accessing the same prayer sites, practices and rituals, with the same level of respect and dignity, as the “in” group can’t not attract attention. In such a case, worship necessarily becomes a political action.

One of the great ironies of this situation is the fact that an Orthodox Rabbi — a person who, presumably, considers prayer to be very, very important — is belittling acts of prayer. Either prayer— the valuation of which presupposes allowing worshipers to pray freely and with dignity at sacred sites— is important, or it isn’t.

If prayer isn’t, in fact, important, Rabbi Rabinowitz is still upholding an inequitable structure, but he sounds a little less ridiculous when he claims that Women of the Wall are merely creating a petty fuss. However, given that the Western Wall Heritage Foundation has claimed, per Haaretz, that “women’s worship can harm the sensitivities of male worshipers at the Western Wall,”[3] one might then ask him why, if prayer isn’t important, it’s so critical to protect the sensibilities of the men who pray at the Kotel. (For the record, the entire institution of the mechitza--the wall that divides the sexes in Orthodox prayer spaces--is incredibly offensive to my sensibilities, but I doubt the foundation would be so quick to accommodate me.)

If, on the other hand, prayer is important, then it’s just as important for women (and for genderqueer folks) as it is for men. And an arrangement that precludes those people from equal access to prayer is not, to borrow a phrase from Rabinowitz, “a way that allows everyone to be together with one another, and so no extremist group can do whatever it wants.”

I’ve never prayed with Women of the Wall. In fact, I’ve only prayed at the Wall once in my life, and in retrospect that wasn’t exactly a watershed experience. Frankly, in my own practice and belief, the Kotel just isn’t that important. To the extent that I have a relationship to it, that relationship is ambivalent on many levels. I don’t mourn the Temple—I think the Rabbinic Judaism that succeeded the Temple cult is in almost all ways a better tradition. I find a focus on one particular landmark or site of worship to tread uncomfortably close to idolatry. And all of this is not to mention my deeply troubled relationship, on both political and religious grounds, with Zionism as a whole.

But let’s make something very, very clear: Women of the Wall’s struggle isn’t about The Wall as such. It’s about what the Jewish community has made the Wall a symbol of, and the implications of that for the value of women as Jews, and of their prayers as Jewish prayers. Powerful voices and traditions within the Jewish community have, over the years, defined the Kotel as “the holiest site in Judaism,” to the point where that definition is a glibly accepted truism in the vast majority of conversations about this issue.

If the Kotel is, at least in popular discourse, the “holiest site in Judaism,” then the ways in which worship occurs there become, to borrow Clifford Geertz’s language, not only a descriptive model of, but also a prescriptive model for, an ideal form of Jewish worship. As such, the unequal treatment of non-male prayer at that site sends a powerful message about who the ideal, normative Jew is, and about the value of the prayers of people outside that norm in an ideal Jewish world.

It’s worth remembering that the “just making a statement” slur has been used to discredit plenty of other outsiders who attempt to worship on equal terms with the in group. Gay marriage isn’t “real marriage,” it’s just a political stunt. The ordination of female and gay priests, ministers, or bishops aren’t about the spiritual needs of the relevant bodies of worship, they’re political ploys. Et cetera. Et cetera. Let’s recognize language that labels the worship of the marginalized as “political stunts,” “demonstrations,” "fusses," and “statements,” for what it is: a way to exclude, discredit, and infantilize groups outside the norm of worship, by telling them, “you’re just making a scene.”

Against this backdrop, if I didn’t know the context behind it, I’d wholeheartedly agree with Rabinowitz’s claim that he “[fails] to understand the merit of prayer that hurts others.” Unfortunately, I do know the context. The regulations surrounding the Kotel make it exactly a prayer space that hurts others. And in such a case his comment is cynical and astonishingly fatuous.

This photo, taken by State of Formation's own Becky Silverstein, was retrieved from Wikimedia Commons and is used under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

I have had Libby since my childhood. She is 16—a good old age for a cat—and has weathered some health scares before. Three years ago, what we worried was some sort of intestinal cancer turned out instead to be hyperthyroidism, a chronic but manageable condition. But this fall, when all of the vet’s tricks failed to stem her chronic diarrhea, when she lost almost half of her body weight, and when an ultrasound revealed a severely thickened intestine, cancer (probably lymphoma) remained as the most likely culprit.

Right now, Libby is still a somewhat more subdued version of her loud, spunky self. She still exuberantly demands her food (even if her appetite for it has waned a little), asserts her desire for attention, and purrs vigorously when petted. Sometime in the next few weeks, however, she will stop eating, and become more and more lethargic. Then, it will be time to call the vet to come to my apartment and give her a lethal dose of barbiturates, so she can die peacefully before her life becomes too crappy (no pun intended) to bear.

More so than when beloved humans in my life have died, as I prepare for Libby’s death I find myself needing to believe—against any rational argument, against my significant philosophical problems with dualism, and even against my own tradition’s famous ambivalence about an afterlife—that she has a soul, that that soul will somehow persevere after her death, and that some day, I will see her again.

In all my thought, religious and otherwise, I try to be rigorous. I believe we ought to hold our religious views to a stringent critical standard, that we should never be too sure of ourselves nor too comfortable in our beliefs. I have argued here on State of Formation that religion should be hard, and I still believe that. I think there are very good philosophical, practical, and moral reasons for doing so.

But Libby’s impending mortality has reminded me that even that belief is one in which I can—and probably have—become just a little too certain. Sometimes, I think—I hope?—there is a value to a belief, even an irrational one, whose main purpose is to comfort. Sometimes even a rigorist may admit a moment of cognitive dissonance if doing so salves a wound that makes life, at that moment, too painful.

If at this moment I allow myself to believe, more or less unquestioned, that Libby has something in her that’s immortal, it doesn’t mean that I will stop accepting as valid the conclusions of modern science. I will not stop going to the doctor or getting vaccinated, and I will not stop believing the enormous and terrifying weight of evidence that the planet is warming dangerously and that humans are causing it. I will not stop accepting evolution, nor will I suddenly decide that the fossil record is somehow invalid. I will not accept on faith that homosexuality is a condition that is "reparable" by spurious “conversion therapies."

My critical discipline is good. I will not disparage it. But I will also try to learn that I can distinguish between the consequences of particular irrational claims, and to affirm that there are some that I am morally allowed to hold.

At the same time, I won’t sequester this allowance in a vacuum. I will force myself to wonder why, if I believe that my cat has a soul, I didn’t extend the same courtesy to the Thanksgiving turkeys I cooked and ate last week without much compunction. I’ll wonder why I allow myself to weep for my cat more than I allowed myself to weep for my much-loved father, or why it is that her impending death made me want to believe in an afterlife more than his did. And I’ll certainly wonder why I’m more emotionally distressed by the death of a cat, at a ripe old age and after a pampered and love-filled life, than by the suffering of the Chinese kid in a sweatshop who probably made my shiny new iPhone.

But I will also try to give myself a small space for my grief to be just that before I do so. Recognizing privilege requires seeing it clearly for what it is, criticizing it, trying to rectify some of the oppression that comes along with it—but I am trying to learn that there are occasional moments when it doesn’t also require self-flagellation.

When I call the vet in to euthanize Libby, I will do so because I want to spare her a degree of pain that will make her life more of a torture than a joy. Perhaps her tacit lesson in that moment is that it is also acceptable for us humans, psychologically and spiritually, to extend a small amount of that same mercy to ourselves.

The attached image belongs to the author.

The book of Lamentations (or, in Hebrew, Megillat Eicha) is one of the Hebrew canon’s five megillot, or scrolls, which are read at different points in the Jewish liturgical cycle.  In the Tanakh, it is situated between Ruth and Ecclesiastes; in Christian Bibles it is found between Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

Traditionally read in synagogue on Tisha B’Av, (the fast commemorating the destruction of the Temple), Lamentations begins with a question—Eicha: How?! It describes the wreckage of a besieged Jerusalem in the wake of the destruction of the first temple, and its imagery would not be out of place in a horror movie: the old and the young alike, filthy and starving in the streets, children asking for sustenance that is not there, mothers eating their babies. This desolation and suffering is contrasted with Jerusalem’s former glory: “They that fed on dainties are desolate in the streets; they that were brought up in scarlet embrace dunghills.” (4:5)

We wonder what could possibly have caused this suffering and horror, but the scroll’s initial eicha is a rhetorical one: almost immediately, we learn that “Jerusalem has grievously sinned.” (1:8) The calamity is a consequence of human immorality, and the nations who have sacked the city and destroyed the temple are instruments of God’s justice and wrath. When there still might have been time to correct course, Jerusalem’s seers “did not expose your iniquity, so as to restore your fortunes, but prophesied to you oracles of deception and delusion.” (2:14) The only response, the text exhorts, is repentance; but this can only happen with divine help: “turn us unto you, O Adonai, and we shall be turned.” (5:21)

The verses quoted above describe in heartrending detail the suffering of the people in the besieged city. The town centers, once atria of commerce and activity, have become charnel houses: people come together there not to socialize, but to die. The verses give particular attention to the suffering of children. Even the weak and innocent among the people are not spared the consequence of Israel’s sin: “As babes and sucklings languish in the squares of the city, They keep asking their mothers, ‘Where is bread and wine?’” Calamity has upended natural orders. Parents, who are supposed to provide for their children and keep them safe, cannot. Children, who should not know want or violence, “languish like battle-wounded.” Even the epitome of refuge and nourishment has run dry: the lives of children “run out in their mothers’ bosoms.”

Even the narrator (identified in multiple traditions, though not by modern scholarship, as the prophet Jeremiah) is not immune: “My eyes are spent with tears, my heart is in tumult, my being melts away”—the Hebrew for which phrase literally reads “my liver spills on the ground”—“at the ruin of my poor people.” Is his suffering sympathetic? Does he watch from afar, echoing his people’s torment in his own psyche? Or is it literal? Is his physical being actually melting away, the churning of his innards his body’s response to starvation and the pestilence that comes with widespread death? Even in the midst of his own slow demise, is he able to feel sorrow for his fellow humans, to think past his own survival instinct and toward moral behavior?

This Tisha b'Av, the extreme heat many of us are experiencing in North America forces us to confront the reality of climate change and the consequences of environmental degradation. Generally speaking, Lamentations is not the first book that comes to mind when one is asked what the Tanakh has to say about the environment. Yet, I believe that this text has some significant things to say about environmental ethics—specifically about the consequences of environmental destruction for humans. (We might thank the recent film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road for bringing this aspect of the issue into the public consciousness).

These particular verses point us, I would suggest, in three specific directions. First, the wrenching description of how the people of Jerusalem suffer for lack of basic resources pushes us, to appropriate Jonathan Schofer’s words, to “[confront] vulnerability as a basis for ethics.” (Schofer, 2010, 187) As physical beings, we cannot live, or flourish, or serve God if the basic needs of our bodily survival are not met-- and the resources that enable us to meet these needs come from the world that God has created.

Second, in emphasizing the particular suffering of children, the text reminds us that our actions have consequences for the innocent. Even if we decided that particular people who behave immorally deserve everything they get as a result, this text forces us to see that they are not the only people punished for their behavior.

Third, the perspective of the narrator, whichever way we decide to interpret it, reminds us that there is still room for empathy and moral choice within a crisis, even one as grave as we see here. If the narrator is watching from afar and suffers in the abstract, we learn that we can feel for and try to ameliorate the suffering of others, no matter how grievously they have sinned. And if the narrator is speaking from the midst of the horror, we learn that, even in the most dehumanizing situations, there is nevertheless room for humanity.

Cross-posted to my personal blog. A version of this essay was presented on March 16, 2012, at the Mid-Atlantic AAR regional meeting in New Brunswick, NJ.

This image, by Gustav Dore, is in the public domain and was retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.

Turing conceived the principle of the modern computer. He described an abstract digital computing machine consisting of a limitless memory and a scanner that moves back and forth through the memory, symbol by symbol, reading what it finds and writing further symbols…The actions of the scanner are dictated by a program of instructions that is stored in the memory in the form of symbols. This is Turing's stored-program concept, and implicit in it is the possibility of the machine operating on and modifying its own program.

Turing was also a pioneer in artificial intelligence: the “Turing Test, in which an artificial intelligence would be judged intelligent if another human could not tell the difference between the responses of a human and the artificially intelligent machine,” remains the ideal toward which AI continues to strive. Additionally, Turing’s work in cryptography played a critical role in the Allied victory in World War II. He developed codebreaking machines and algorithms, which revealed the positions of Nazi Germany’s U-Boats and detailed Hitler’s communications with his generals. Copeland suggests that the contributions of Turing and his team may have shortened the war by two to four years, which translates, by his calculations, into 14 to 21 million lives saved.

For his outsized contributions to the war effort and for revolutionizing the shape of modern sciences, economies, and societies, you might expect Turing to have been lauded as a national hero. Instead, in 1952 Turing was convicted of “gross indecency” after reporting a petty burglary that a male lover of his participated in—homosexuality being illegal at the time. He was offered a choice between imprisonment, and chemical castration through injections of a synthetic estrogen. He chose the latter. In 1954, he died of cyanide poisoning; an event many suspect was a suicide—though Copeland contends that the evidence for this is scant. In 2009 then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an official apology for the government's treatment of Turing.

What does all this have to do with Jewish ethics? As it turns out, plenty. We can read Turing’s ordeal at the hands of British indecency law as a modern example of what the Talmud calls “verbal wronging.” Commenting on Mishnah Bava Metzia 4:10, which states, “Just as there is [fraud by] overreaching in buying and selling, so there is wrong done by words,” b. Bava Metzia 58b records the following discussion:

R. Johanan said on the authority of R. Simeon b. Yohai: Verbal wrong is more heinous than monetary wrong…R. Eleazar said: The one affects his person, the other [only] his money.  R. Samuel b. Nahmani said: For [monetary wronging] restoration is possible, but not for [verbal wronging.]

A tanna recited before R. Nahman b. Isaac: He who publicly shames his neighbor is as though he had shed blood. Whereupon he remarked to him, “You say well, for I have seen it [as a result of such shaming], the ruddiness departing and paleness supervening.”[1]

This passage does a couple of interesting things. First, and most obviously, it understands a form of unquantifiable, non-material damage as greater than material wrong—precisely for the reason of its unquantifiability. If I know exactly how much someone has lost due to a wrong, I stand a chance of being able to make it up to them; and if I know a person has lost something material, I know that there is a tangible means by which I might be able to make restitution. To use Abraham Joshua Heschel’s language, monetary wrong is a wrong done in space, and a change to a space at least stands a chance of being undone. Verbal wronging, on the other hand, is a wrong done in time.[2] Once someone has seen or heard something, I cannot (short of erasing their memory in some way, which would likely involve grievous physical harm) make them unsee or unhear it, because I cannot erase the moment in time in which the perception took place.

Second, it recognizes that not only a person’s psyche, but their social self as well, is integral to their being. Furthermore, these aspects of the self are just as vulnerable to real injury as the physical aspect—the text goes so far as to explicitly compare, in somatic, visual terms, the result of shaming to that of physically drawing blood. In doing so, the text recognizes that a person is complex and interconnected, irreducible to a single feature, and vulnerable in many different ways.

If Turing did in fact commit suicide as a result of his ordeal, this would be a case where verbal wronging quite literally resulted in bloodshed. It would also not be the only case in which bloodshed has literally resulted from verbal wronging—one need only look at the recent rash of queer teen suicides in response to anti-gay bullying. Even if Turing did not commit suicide, however, his case and others like it stand as testimony to the pettiness of such shaming, and to the tangible damage it can do.

Consider that Turing’s sexuality harmed no one. Consider that his sexuality was exposed in the process of his actually performing a civic duty—reporting an actual crime. For this he was rewarded with a prosecution that besmirched his name and wasted public time and money, as well as his own. In the end he was offered a choice a choice between two significant injuries: the loss of his freedom and career, or the loss of his sexuality. I would suggest we consider the number of lives he saved and his contributions to a discipline without which all our lives would be radically different, but the truth is, what was done to Turing would have been just as wrong had it been done to anyone else.

There is one sense, however, in which comparing the pettiness of Turing’s shaming to the vast weight of his accomplishments serves to highlight an especially sinister feature of verbal wronging:  it makes a person’s life entirely about the ways in which they differ from a prescribed standard.  The whole person—their accomplishments, their interests, their loves, their sense of self—become inconsequential. They are reduced to a single act or characteristic that has been marked as worthy of derision, and in this way they are marked as other, and dehumanized. This is true of the all-too-common phenomenon of slut-shaming, which I discussed in a previous article. It is true of the anti-gay bullying which continues to drive too many youth to suicide, it is true of Turing’s treatment, and it is true of countless other cases in which we publicly shame people over actions or characteristics which have no bearing on our own lives (but which may be immensely and legitimately important to the victim of that shame). And it stands in direct contrast to the broad and complex vision of humanity suggested by our Talmudic text.

Cross-Posted to my personal blog.

This photograph, of a sculpture of Turing at Bletchley Park, England, was taken by Jon Callas. It was retrieved from Wikimedia Commons and is used in accordance with a Creative Commons 2.0 license.

[2] See A.J. Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1951, 1979)

The parshah I’ve worked on for my Bat Mitzvah is, given my graduate research, apt—and not entirely accidental. My research deals with sexual ethics—and queer sexuality in particular— in Judaism. And as you follow along in your Chumashim, you will notice that parshat K’doshim-Acharei Mot contains perhaps two of the most controversial verses in the Hebrew Bible: Leviticus 18:22—“you will not lie with a man as with the lyings of a woman”—and Leviticus 20:13—“If one lies with mankind as one lies with womankind, they have both committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death.”

In my research, naturally, I have had to deal with these verses, and with possible mitigating interpretations of them. I can tell you the following—first, many such interpretations exist. Second, all of them, to my mind, are some degree of unsatisfying.  There is always the feeling that these interpretations are trying to turn the text into something that it is not. They always, to my mind, fail to erase the stark punch to the gut these verses in their plain sense are to a reader.

At this point, I’d like you to imagine me, at twelve, just starting to realize that I like girls, reading Leviticus for the first time.  And then I would like you to imagine, after that experience, how you, as a twelve-year-old, would respond to the suggestion that you commit to a faith that holds this text as sacred. These verses are alienating. No matter how we try to turn them, they are disturbing. And if you are queer, like me—no matter the interpretation, no matter the academic distance you may try to put between yourself and your subject—ultimately, they still hurt. Any effective and honest response to them, therefore, must begin by acknowledging that.

Futhermore, such a response should, in my opinion, not attempt to retroactively paint the past meanings of the text as something it is not. We have, as a species, a strong tendency to confuse is and ought. That is, we assume that because a thing is the status quo—because it’s “natural,” or “traditional,” or so on—that it is therefore ethically valid. Or, conversely, we might assume that, because we find a thing ethically valid, that it therefore must reflect the natural or original state of affairs.

But these assumptions are erroneous. Just because a thing is “natural” or “traditional” doesn’t make it right—after all, murder, sexual violence, tribalism, and racism are all natural states of affairs. And just because a thing is right doesn’t mean it reflects some primordial state of perfection—racial and sexual equality, for instance (despite assertions to the contrary), appear to be fairly recent concepts.

Effective advocacy for equality or justice, then, needs to start from the understanding that there is a problem to be fixed—that there is something in the world that is wrong and broken. I would suggest that in some cases, the same is true for effective engagement with religious text. David Weiss Halivni posits that Rabbinic interpretation is generated in response to what he describes as the “maculateness” of the Biblical text—that is, the text, as a result of existing within human history, has problems or inconsistencies within it whose function is to generate interpretive responses. He writes, “When the people of Israel congregated once more—at long last and of their own accord—they found not Moses and the pure and perfect Torah of the wilderness, but Ezra and his composite Torah, mad maculate by centuries of human history.” (Peshat and Derash, vi.)

I’d like to go one step further—the text has actively unethical commands in it, whose purpose is to teach us to recognize them. These texts are meant to reflect and demonstrate the brokenness of the world, and goad us into doing something about it.

I would add at this point that we do not have a very good track record when it comes to responding to such texts. Indeed, a look into the prophetic literature reveals that God anticipates this. In Ezekiel 20:25-26 we find the chilling admission: “I gave them laws that were not good and rules by which they could not live: When they set aside every first issue of the womb, I defiled them by their very gifts”—that is, instead of consecrating the firstborn to the temple they sacrificed them—“that I might render them desolate, that they might know I am Adonai.”

God, in other words, knew that the Israelites would get the commandment tragically, horrifically wrong—and handed it down anyway. Suffice it to note, by the way, that while theodicy (that is, the justification of God in the face of suffering or evil) is not the main focus of this drash, the fact that God would take such action, at such terrible consequence, anticipating our brokenness and fallibility, raises deeply troubling questions about the very nature of God.

Despite our poor record thus far, there nevertheless are Rabbinic precedents for this sort of interpretation. Perhaps the best-known example is found in the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin 68b-72a. This sugya engages the Biblical edict (Deut. 21:18-21) that “if a man has a [stubborn and rebellious] son…they shall bring him out to the elders of his town at the public place of his community…[and] the men of his town shall stone him to death.”

Clearly, the Rabbinic interpreters are deeply troubled by this text. First the mishnah (Sanh. 8:1-5) and then the Gemara restrict the definition of the stubborn and rebellious son to the point of absurdity, until the Gemara finally says, “There never has been a stubborn and rebellious son, and never will be. Why, then, was the law written? That you may study it and receive reward.” (71a)

Notice what this interpretation doesn’t do. It doesn’t say that the law used to apply but no longer does. It doesn’t try to excuse it, or to erase it. It brings it forward in all its bald horror, allows it to punch us in the gut, and then goes about making sure that it will never be carried out. Yet in doing so, it preserves a purpose for the law—it is there to learn from. It is there as a witness, as a thing to study—and we should bear in mind that in Talmudic parlance, there is a very real sense of fighting and struggle implicit in study and learning. (For more on this, see Jeffrey Rubenstein’s excellent book, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud.)

There are clearly some differences between the Exodus and Sanhedrin texts, and the ones we have in front of us. Against the assertion that “there never was such a son,” there have been, and continue to be, many, many LGBTQ people who have been hurt, directly or indirectly, as a result of the texts we’ll be chanting shortly. And I’d argue vociferously against the notion that there is personal reward to be gained from learning these texts—we should instead be hanging our heads in shame. But as for why the law was written? “That you may study it” may be the only interpretation I can accept.

In studying this text, I am confronted with a world that is so broken that even the Scriptures given to it, even the laws contained within those Scriptures, contain ethical abominations, contain violent and dehumanizing prescriptions. I am also powerfully confronted with an obligation to help fix it. I am reminded that this law was written, not so that I may “study and receive reward,” but to force me to think critically about it, to stir me and make me uncomfortable, to punch me in the gut so that I may “study and DO SOMETHING.” Shabbat Shalom.

This image is used under a Creative Commons 3.0 license and was retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.

Cross-posted to my personal blog.

I have a truly shocking announcement: I am a woman, and I enjoy sex.

Apparently, admitting to this makes me a slut.

I am not, of course, unusual. For many of us, sex is fun. For many of us—cis-women[1] who sleep with cis-men, thereby risking pregnancy, included[2]—sex is a thing that brings joy to life and contributes to its being worth living. One of the great things about the technological age is that we have a range of medicines and devices that make it possible to have a fulfilling sex life while significantly reducing the risk of an unplanned pregnancy. By all measurable standards of human flourishing, this is awesome. And yet, society has a problem with us saying this out loud.

According to “Finally, a Feminism 101 Blog,” slut-shaming is “the idea of shaming and/or attacking a woman or a girl for being sexual, having one or more sexual partners, acknowledging sexual feelings, and/or acting on sexual feelings. Furthermore, it’s “about the implication that if a woman has sex that traditional society disapproves of, she should feel guilty and inferior” (Alon Levy, Slut Shaming).”

If it please the court, I’d like to present (only the latest) exhibit A:

"What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic] who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex -- what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex."

As we are likely all well aware by this point, Rush Limbaugh directed the above screed at Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke, who testified before a congressional committee in support of the Obama administration’s contraception coverage mandate. Never mind that Limbaugh’s statement betrays a gross misunderstanding of how hormonal birth control actually works. (For those who are curious, you have to take it every day, regardless of how much sex you are or are not having.)

Never mind that much of Fluke’s testimony was directed towards the use of hormonal birth control for non-contraceptive purposes, or that it never mentioned her own sex life, or even whether she personally uses hormonal birth control, once. It was enough that a woman unapologetically acknowledged that birth control was a real need in women’s lives.

However, much as Limbaugh might prefer to think otherwise, this article is not about him. Rather, his comments were an especially egregious representation of a larger cultural trend—a trend, unfortunately, which has significant roots in religious traditions.  One of the stranger and more disturbing episodes in the Hebrew Bible describes a test as to whether a woman suspected of adultery is guilty:

"After he has made the woman stand before the Lord, the priest shall bare the woman’s head and place upon her hands the meal offering of remembrance, which is a meal offering of jealousy. And in the priest’s hands shall be the water of bitterness that induces the spell…Once he has made her drink the water—if she has defiled herself by breaking faith with her husband, the spell-inducing water shall enter into her to bring on bitterness, so that her belly shall distend and her thigh shall sag; and the woman shall become a curse upon her people. (Numbers 5:16-27, JPS)"

The point here is that unrestrained female sexuality represents a threat to the social structure: in this case, a material threat, since it made establishing a child’s paternity difficult. The best way that structure could restrain it was to place not just legal sanctions but social stigma on the suspected adulteress, or sotah. The ritual was meant to physically mark her; her body itself became a kind of scarlet letter that told everyone who saw her: this is a slut.

The ritual sounds arcane and anachronistic, but don’t we take women’s bodies and how they appear as physical markers of their supposed sexual virtue? Tight or low-cut clothing, or even physical features women may not have any control over—large breasts or buttocks, for instance—we assume that these markers aren’t for the women themselves, but for us, to signal their sexual status.

Similarly, the admission that a woman uses birth control, and especially the acknowledgement by a woman that yes, sex is an important part of her life, isn’t assumed to be about her own needs and desires, but about broadcasting her sexual availability to the rest of us. And that is assumed to be shameful.

Why is this a problem? For one thing, a culture that shames an open conversation about women’s sexuality is a culture that is going to make it more difficult for women to get the reproductive healthcare that they need—especially women with limited resources, or women who might be in urgent or dangerous situations.

For another, the assumption that women’s sexual choices aren’t for them but for our collective benefit leads to a horrifying degree of victim-blaming in cases of rape and sexual assault. Slate’s Emily Bazelon notes that this even manifests itself in rape law:

"Rape law also still treats certain kinds of sexual conduct as unacceptable for women, by exempting it from the rule that places a woman’s sexual history outside the bounds of evidence that can be admitted at a rape trial…In many cases, it’s deviance that’s deemed to make a woman’s history distinctive, allowing the court to give the jury the chance to conclude that a particular’s woman’s claim of rape is less legitimate."

This has to stop. And because religious traditions have helped build this structure, religious voices have a moral responsibility to be a part of what stops it. Can we step up? In subsequent posts I’ll explore resources within my own tradition that I think can be useful for doing so. But I hope dearly I won’t be spitting into the wind.

Do our traditions contain the resources to build a truly feminist, inclusive, sex-positive sexual ethic? I hope so. I think so, and I want to believe so, but I am honestly not sure. Are there texts and rituals within our traditions that contain theological and philosophical grounds upon which such an ethic can be based? Yes, there are. Do our traditions furnish us with methods of interpretation and practice that can help us emphasize those parts and confront and repair destructive ones? Absolutely. Is there the human will—the intellectual bravery and moral conviction—to use those methods? I cannot answer that question. I can be one part of the answer, but the rest is up to everyone else.

Original artwork, "Scarlet Letters," by author. Cross-posted to my personal blog.

[2] It is absolutely not my intention to erase transpeople who have not yet undergone gender reassignment surgery or have chosen not to and who might therefore also run the risk of impregnating someone or of becoming pregnant; rather, this post is about a social phenomenon that overwhelmingly applies to people who can become pregnant and are perceived as female. Transphobia—in general, and with specific regard to sexuality and to religion—is a huge issue of its own, and something I hope to address in future articles with the depth and attention it deserves.

For prophets, on the other hand, “the urgency and magnitude of the evils they see admit of no delay, no calm and patient dialogue…Suppose Jeremiah had said, ‘the heart of Israel is corrupt utterly, but on the other hand there are some very nice people there.’” (Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice, 1999, 240-1)

Nussbaum’s own inclinations and ultimate sympathies lie with the philosopher—and most of the time, mine do, too. Often, I firmly believe that attributing a problem or an evil to an entire religion, or religion as a whole, is not only inaccurate and unhelpful, but actively destructive. I often jump into the fray to point out concrete examples of principles and themes of a tradition, or groups or individual practitioners within a faith—mine or any other—that I truly believe are at work for the good. I truly believe that religion is not a monolith, and that it can do, and has done, great work in the service of humanity and of our universe. And I truly, deeply believe that the God I serve is good.

Yet both Nussbaum and I—precisely because of “the philosopher’s interest in the nuances of individual cases” (Nussbaum, 1999, 241)—are sometimes compelled to admit that the prophet has a point. Sometimes, stating the nuance and the capacity for good in a tradition that has hurt people is deeply inappropriate. Sometimes, devotion to the underlying goodness of a tradition and to its prerogative to practice as it sees fit comes at great cost to the lives of real people.

This past week, Rolling Stone Magazine published a heartbreaking article, "One Town's War On Gay Teens," detailing the toll of anti-gay bullying in Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin school district. In 1994, according to the article, the conservative, evangelical group Minnesota Family Council (MFC) pushed the Anoka-Hennepin school board into adopting a district wide policy, “which pronounced that within the health curriculum, ‘homosexuality not be taught/addressed as a normal, valid lifestyle.’” While the language was specific to the health curriculum, the policy practically erased discussion of homosexuality “in any context.”

When queer students—or even students who were perceived as such—complained to teachers and administrators of anti-gay bullying, they received no relevant support, and the homophobic smears continued unabated. The policy may have been quiet, but its toll is now known nationwide. Since 1999, nine students, many of whom were queer or taunted as such, committed suicide, most notably 15-year old Justin Aaberg in July of 2010.

In many of the progressive circles I frequent, both online and in real life, variations on a theme of the same angry, horrified response to the Rolling Stone article came up: Is this truly what “Christian love” looks like? Is it true that people like the MFC can’t be made to see the grave harm they’ve caused? And the conclusion often was: No, these people knew exactly what they were doing. To make the non-conformers this desperate was precisely the point.

And as much as I want to believe otherwise, I find myself agreeing with this conclusion. According to the article, MFC activist Barb Anderson blames “pro-gay groups for the tragedies”:

She explained that such "child corruption" agencies allow "quote-unquote gay kids" to wrongly feel legitimized. "And then these kids are locked into a lifestyle with their choices limited, and many times this can be disastrous to them as they get into the behavior which leads to disease and death," Anderson said. She added that if LGBT kids weren't encouraged to come out of the closet in the first place, they wouldn't be in a position to be bullied. (emphasis mine.)

And Nussbaum notes with astonishment that Roger Scrunton argued—in 1995!—that “schools ought to teach revulsion toward homosexuality, on the grounds that the perpetuation of this revulsion is ‘a human good.’” (Nussbaum 1999, 192) I will pause for that statement to fully sink in. If one truly believes that, well, what are a few suicides?

It is, in a way, ironic that one of the go-to Scriptures for anti-gay activists is the story, in Genesis 18 and 19, of Sodom and Gomorrah. Because according to many (to my mind, convincing) interpretations, the sexual sins of those cities of the plain were not homosexuality, but gang rape—sex used in the service not of pleasure, but of terror employed to enforce submission and conformity. Rabbi Steven Greenberg writes:

While the event that sealed the fate of the Sodomites was their demand for Lot to bring out his guests so that the mob might “know” them, this was still not seen so much as sexual excess as hatred of the stranger and exploitation of the weak…[in Sodom] no difference was tolerated. (Greenberg, Wrestling With God and Men, 2004, 65-6)

The invocation of sexualized violence to assert dominance and enforce conformity should ring familiar. For make no mistake—the bullying that drove people like Justin Aaberg to suicide, both from their classmates and, more sinisterly, from the supposedly moral, responsible adults of the MFC was nothing other than psychological and spiritual gang rape. Its purpose was none other than to strip people like Justin of all individuality, of all self-respect, of all autonomy, to break them until they shaped up—or disappeared.

So when I encountered these generalizing statements about Christianity, or religion, or despairing for the humanity of those pushing anti-gay policies, my first response was to jump in and correct the generalizations. I then decided against it. Because in the wake of such tragedies—in the wake of the real threat of harm, or of actual, already perpetrated harm—someone for whom it is most important to jump to the defense of an institution rather than to demand justice for the people that institution has hurt is, forgive me, someone who has their priorities deeply screwed up.

Our traditions and our faith communities are important to us, as they should be.  But we cannot let them become ends in themselves.  Abraham was right to argue that, for the sake of ten righteous, the city should be spared; truly, there are far more than ten righteous in the cities that are our traditions. Yet when violent crimes occur in our cities, our first response should not be to say, “we’re not all like that!” Our first response should be to root out the perpetrators, and to seek justice for the victims.

Cross-posted to my personal blog.

Image: John Martin, The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (1852). This image has passed into the public domain and is used courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Two thoughts came to mind. First, “I will no longer spend money here.” Second, “What beliefs and fears is this poster trying to exploit?” With the language of “mandatory,” the ad clearly speaks to a fear of losing the individual freedom to make choices about health. But is freedom really the best framework to use in this scenario? Or was the ad a demonstration of how individual freedom is a poor premise on which to base discussions of public health?

The anti-vaccine movement, in its contemporary iteration, began in 1998 when the British doctor Andrew Wakefield published a paper in the medical journal The Lancet, positing a link between the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. Subsequent studies failed to corroborate Wakefield’s claims; indeed, evidence strongly suggesting that Wakefield’s work was not only incorrect, but actively fraudulent, has since come to light. None of this has stopped the vaccine-autism claim (which grew from a specific focus on the MMR vaccine to equally inaccurate claims about mercury-based preservatives and about “too many vaccines too soon” overwhelming the immune system) from sweeping the public consciousness in a big way, aided most notably by figures such as David Kirby, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Jenny McCarthy.

Tragically, the spread of this claim has had consequences: Measles, which in the mid 1990s was on the verge of eradication in the United Kingdom, has returned to endemic levels. This past year saw the largest U.S outbreak of measles in 15 years. And in Charlottesville, VA, where I live, there was a measles outbreak centered around the local Waldorf school this May.

In addition to the fact that the claims on which the entire movement is based are incorrect, and that the drop in vaccination rates precipitated by the movement is likely responsible for actually killing people, there are several other troubling premises behind it: can we, for instance, pause to note the breathtaking ableism of the assertion that risking a child’s death from infectious disease is preferable to risking autism?

Equally troubling is the callous disregard of scientific consensus in favor of conspiracy theory, as well as the “Appeal to Nature” fallacy. (I would suggest that those who oppose vaccination because it does not confer “natural” immunity cease, in the name of intellectual consistency, any use of corrective lenses, contraceptives, refrigerators, computers, and so forth.)

I am most interested in here, however, in vaccine refusal as a “right.” I think this language has a particularly strong pull within religious communities. Certainly the idea of being forced to take actions contrary to one’s strongly held beliefs is anathema to many people of faith, particularly those who belong to minority traditions.

And the language of “health freedom” often used in arguments for vaccine refusal echoes that of “religious freedom”—after all, if what we do with our souls is a matter of the most personal choice, surely this is also true for our bodies? Don’t we have the right to make whatever healthcare decisions we wish, however ill-advised, for ourselves and our families?

Not quite.  Not all bodily decisions are created equal. As the rise in measles rates indicate, the decision not to vaccinate has consequences for more people than those who make that decision. Indeed, as Steven L. Weinreib, M.D, pointed out in a recent New York Times op-ed, high vaccination rates are an essential bulwark against infectious disease for those who, because they are too young, have certain allergies, or are immuno-compromised, cannot be vaccinated:

Young babies, the immuno-compromised and people who get chemotherapy are not able to process most vaccinations. Live vaccines in particular, like those for measles and chickenpox, can make us sick. But if 75 percent to 95 percent of the population around us is vaccinated for a particular disease, the rest are protected through what is called herd immunity. In other words, your measles vaccine protects me against the measles.

Weinreib’s point demonstrates that the language of individual rights is insufficient when considering the ethics of vaccination and similar public health issues. Instead of thinking, “It’s my right to refuse a vaccination for myself or my child if I want to,” we should be thinking, “It’s my responsibility to vaccinate myself and my child for the health of the whole community.”

In Health Care and the Ethics of Encounter: A Jewish Discussion of Social Justice, Laurie Zoloth argues precisely this point:

At issue here is not what feels right to the individual, guided by an individual heart, but ‘What does it take to live an honest life within this particular community?’ Hence, a number of actions may be argued for, but all ought to be directed toward the community interest, not only the self. (Zoloth, 1999, 158)

Furthermore, Zoloth argues, the Jewish tradition provides a framework for such community-centered ethics: “Autonomy…is neither a presupposition nor a goal of Judaism…[a person is not] ‘entitled’ to act in complete freedom; he or she is required to act in community, in covenant with God, and in accordance with halakhah.” (Zoloth, 158)

One source for the primacy of communal obligation is the book of Ruth (in which Naomi’s family flees a famine-stricken Bethlehem for Moab, and is afterwards stricken with the deaths of all its male members), from which she derives several principles of an “ethics of encounter.” The first of these is particularly salient here: “To leave the community at a time of scarcity/danger is wrong. There is no personal escape from collective scarcity:”

Why does disaster fall upon this family? Who is [Naomi’s husband] Elimelech? The rabbinic response is that he must have been a man of substance, who abandoned Bethlehem at the first sign of trouble…Elimelech is the prudent libertarian. [He] chooses his individual solution, leaves the land and the community, and disaster strikes. Rather than turn his face to the face of the other, he turns away and heads in the opposite direction. (Zoloth, 204)

If we replace “scarcity” with “risk” in Zoloth’s formulation, we find it applies perfectly to the issue of vaccines and herd immunity.

It’s true that vaccines are not without risk. A small minority of people do react badly, and there is the occasional fatality (at rates, it should be noted, that are miniscule compared to the toll of infectious disease). To vaccinate is to take a risk, albeit a very small one, for the sake of a greater personal and communal good. With vaccination rates as high as they are in the developed world, any given person can go unvaccinated and will likely remain quite safe; this is also what protects those who cannot be vaccinated or for whom vaccine-conferred immunity does not take.

But too many defections, and the herd immunity that newborns, immune-compromised individuals, individuals for whom the vaccine did not work, and those who voluntarily refuse vaccination depend on will collapse. Those who refuse vaccination based upon a claim of individual autonomy thus behave exactly like Elimelech in this story—fleeing the community at the first sign of risk, and disclaiming their membership therein.

That the eradication of infectious disease depends upon a community upholding its responsibility to protect its citizens cannot be overstated. Precisely because of the nature of infectious disease, it is impossible to protect oneself by withdrawing from the community. Unless you can figure out how to stop breathing air, stop drinking water, stop eating food, and stop engaging in any physical contact with anything else, you will come in contact with vectors for infectious disease as a consequence of existing. This is a risk we share as a community; its amelioration is a responsibility we similarly share as a community. The vaccine issue is an object lesson as to the validity of Zoloth’s argument for the value of an ethic based on communal obligation in issues of health.

Cross posted to my personal blog.

This public domain image is a work of the Federal Government and appears courtesy of Wikimedia.

The [Great Assembly] originated three maxims: "Be not hasty in judgment; Bring up many disciples; and, build a hedge for the Torah."

-Pirkei Avot 1:1

End-of-year report, first grade:

“Rebecca has the ability to be an outstanding student. She has a tremendous amount of knowledge and is eager to learn. Although she has wonderful ideas, she has produced very little work that would give evidence of this. Her inability to attend to the task at hand and to complete her work has caused her great frustration this year.”

By fourth grade, I have learned to perform reasonably well in school. But my work is disorganized, and I’ve picked up the nickname “Hurricane Rebecca,” reflecting the disaster area that is my desk.

By the time I’ve reached high school, I’ve learned to game the system. Despite my disorganization and last-minute work habits, the work is easy enough for me that I build up an eminently respectable academic record, and manage to graduate in three years.

I enter college with designs on a biology major, but first-year bio and chem classes prove my undoing; the pass-fail option is my salvation. Religious studies is interesting enough to me that I put serious work into it. But I still start papers at 3 am the day they’re due. I worry that someone will discover that I’m not working hard enough, and as I get more seriously into the subject, the stakes get higher. Somehow, I graduate with high honors. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time until I get caught.

In my second year of grad school—last fall—I meet with my advisor for my independent reading. He tells me to shut the door. “This is not graduate-level writing,” he says. “You’re in graduate school, and you need to get serious.” He pauses. “How many hours a day do you work?”

The jig is up.

I tell him that I’ve suspected for a while that something’s wrong with me, but that I can’t afford to see a therapist regularly right now.

“Then sell your books and see one. Your brain is your most important tool. If you were a dancer you wouldn’t make excuses about not taking care of your feet.” He continues, “I wouldn’t be telling you this if I didn’t think you were smart enough to do this. It’s clear that you are. But you’ve got to decide to undertake the discipline necessary. What we do in the academy is a discipline. It’s unnatural. You have to train yourself to do it.”

That February, after spending two months not writing the thesis I need to have a draft of by April first, I finally get my butt to a therapist. I get an official diagnosis of inattentive-type ADHD, and begin a course of Adderall.

The first night I take it, I read and annotate two books in three hours. What’s more, I haven’t wasted energy stalling, so I actually enjoy it. By the end of March, I have a complete draft of my thesis. This semester, ten months later, I haven’t pulled a single all-nighter, because my work gets done on schedule. And for the first time, I’m completing work that isn’t required for my classes.

For the vast majority of this improvement, I have to credit drugs and therapy. However, learning Rabbinic texts (a practice I began regularly this summer) has helped me understand the way my brain works-- and the ways to manage that--much better.

After my first academic taste of Talmud [1] as an undergrad, I seem to recall joking about it being “religion with ADHD.” The way the sages seemed to leap from one topic to another, seemingly unrelated one, was comical, albeit uncomfortably familiar to me. Consider Bava Batra 73a, which begins as a commentary on a mishnah concerned with the proper protocol for selling a ship. By the next page, 73b, we have gotten here:

"Rabbah bar Hanah further stated: I saw a frog the size of the fort of Hagronia. (What is the size of the fort of Hagronia? Sixty houses.)"

Yet, if Talmud was religion with ADHD, it was also religion for the clinically anal-retentive, built upon series of rules and practices that were so obscure and finicky as to be absurd—Mishnah Berakhot 7:3, for instance, prescribes a lengthy and specific blessing for a meal with ten thousand guests. But, if ten thousand and one are present, the prescribed blessing is short and generic. The documents themselves are separated into categories within categories—first, general orders, or sedarim, then tractates within the orders, chapters within the tractates, verses within the chapters. And the methods for commenting on texts within the Rabbinic genre are themselves subject to very particular rules.

What seemed a ridiculous contradiction at the time made much more sense to me once I started learning about ADHD. In their 1994 book, Driven to Distraction, psychiatrists Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey write, “Structure makes possible the expression of talent. Without structure, no matter how much talent there may be, there is only chaos…The ADD mind is like spilled mercury, running and beading. Structure is the vessel needed to contain the mercury of the ADD mind, to keep it from being here and there and everywhere all at once.” (Hallowell and Ratey, 1994, 221)

Talmud, and Rabbinic texts in general, might be understood to work the same way. When one interprets a text, whether a mishnah or a verse of Bible, the order of the day is atomization: each verse is a complete unit in and of itself, and any other verse from the canon is fair game to use as an intertext—that is, a text to throw against it, to react with it, and to generate an interpretation—as long as the interpreter can make it work. Which feels a lot like free-associating, and seems like it could easily disintegrate into interpretive chaos.

But. There are rules in place, structures to contain the madness. There is an end that must be achieved, an interpretive problem that must be resolved. Often, the impetus for the interpretive chaos in the first place is some problem or irritant in the original text, something that doesn’t fit with another text or with a larger principle. In Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds, Christine Hayes writes, “[a given mishnah may be] ambiguous in the sense that it contains a gap of information. The gemaras must work to fill that gap.” (Hayes, 1997, 57)

The initial stimulus—a problem to be solved—structures the whole interpretive section, reeling it back in at the end to the original text. The discussion may go far afield, but it always has to bring itself back to the text at hand. Eventually, it must come up with some sort of resolution to the task it has set itself.

The quotation at the top of the page, from Pirkei Avot (“Chapters of the Fathers,” a collection of ethical maxims found in Tractate Avot of the Mishnah)—specifically the line about building a hedge around the Torah— is one that has bedeviled me ever since I was introduced to it.

The traditional interpretation is that one must guard the commandments of the Torah from transgression by strengthening them (so, if the Torah says, “don’t go to thus and such place,” I should not even go within, say, a mile of it) I always read it as an expression par excellence of stiffness, hideboundness, of religious or doctrinal inflexibility.

Now, I see an alternate meaning. Building hedges—building limitations around one’s behavior—is a way of structuring one’s day-to-day life. In setting myself a schedule for the day, in insisting I accomplish a certain number of tasks before I can goof off, in creating small rituals (my cup of tea, my morning crossword, the sweatpants I wear to work) around which I structure those tasks—I am building hedges. By limiting my initial options, I increase the number and variety of things I can accomplish.

ADHD forced me to see the need for that lesson. The Rabbis taught it to me.

(Cross posted to my personal blog.)

This cartoon is the work of the author and is used under copyright release.