Desperately Seeking Blogs

Anyone know any good blogs that I might be interested in? I currently read Cross Currents, Hirhurim, DovBear, Rationalist Judaism, Emes veEmunah and a couple others, but no good Orthoprax or skeptical blogs (unless you count Rationalist as skeptical blog).

UPDATE: Please do plug your own (or anyone elses) blog in the comments, I am interested in seeing what else is out there (new or old). My blogroll has stagnated a bit.

The Head of Reform Judaism is Quite Frum

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of Reform Judaism, writes about the "Frustrating, Difficult, Never Ending Search for God". He says that he is often asked how to connect with God, and says the obvious answer is via davening. But since people don't always like davening, he suggests learning Torah and performing Mitzvos. Seriously, that's what he says.

Project Conversion

The Huffington Post reports on Andrew Bowen who has decided to try 12 religions, 1 a month:

1. January: Hinduism
2. February: Baha'i
3. March: Zoroastrianism
4. April: Judaism
5. May: Buddhism
6. June: Fringe
7. July: Mormonism
8. August: Islam
9. September: Sikhism
10. October: Wicca
11. November: Jainism
12. December: Catholicism

Each month he will immerse himself in the selected religion, as follows:

1. Week One: Religious Practices, Worship, and Ritual
2. Week Two: Culture and Art
3. Week Three: Social Issues/Conflicts
4. Week Four: Personal Reflection on the Month

Sounds like an interesting idea. However only one month for Judaism? Which type? Orthodox? Reform? You could probably spend 12 months just trying out the various forms of Judaism, or even just the various types of Orthodox Judaism. I've actually tried a few of these below:

1. January: Extreme Chassidic: Satmar
2. February: Regular Chassidic: Belz / Ger
3. March: Wacky Chassidic: Breslav
4. April: Ultra Wacky Chassidic: Lubavitch Meshichist
5. May: Extreme Bnai Brak Chareidi
6. June: Regular US Chareidi
7. July: RWMO / MO Machmir
8. August: LWMO (non Orthoprax)
9. September: LWMO Orthoprax
10. October: Frum Sephardi*
11. November: Not so frum Sephardi*
12. December: Baal Teshuva

* A bit lame I know. And Bucharians, Iranians, Iraqis, Temanim etc are all different too.

How most inter-personal fights start

I've been thinking about inter-personal relationships and fights for a while now, and have observed over the last few years a number of large and small fights between colleagues, friends and family. What I've noticed is that many of these fights follow a very predictable pattern. It goes like this.

Step 0: Person A and Person B are going along quite happily as friends, family or colleagues.

Step 1: Person A does something without really thinking that offends Person B. Person B may have had a right to be offended, or may not, it doesn't make much difference. Person A had no intent to do malice or harm, and does not even realize that Person B was offended. Person B however is horribly offended and cannot believe that Person A just attacked him for no good reason at all.

Step 2: Person B responds angrily to Person A and tells him just what he thinks of him. How dare Person A do such a thing!

Step 3: Person A is now horribly offended. From his perspective he did nothing wrong, and suddenly Person B is now accusing him of all sorts of hateful things. Person A responds badly to Person B and raises the anger level higher.

Step 4: Person B is now really steaming. Not only did Person A start this whole fight,but when B pointed this out to him, Person A not only didn't apologize, but was rude again! Unbelievable. Now Person B really gives it to Person A, as he deserves.

Step 5: Now Person A is really steaming. Not only did Person B completely attack him out of the blue once before for no good reason, he is now attacking him again rather than apologizing. Unbelievable! Person A really gives it to Person B, as he deserves.

Step 6-100 repeat.

Could prophecy exist? Sure. Pink Unicorns Too.

Thanbo writes:

I could try to explain further, but it's clear from your last sentence that you've accepted the faith position that "prophecy cannot exist". Without prophecy, there will be no good evidence for the Divinity of the Torah. Without prophecy, you have no divine revelations, to individuals or groups. Without prophets, you don't have a Moses to be the greatest one. Without a greatest prophet, you have no way to receive God's word in the sense He meant it. Therefore, without prophecy, there's no Divine Torah, and no way it could be divine.

Hmm, so what was my last sentence? It was this:

The reason why it's irrational to believe that God wrote the Torah is NOT because there's evidence that multiple people wrote it. But rather it's because there's no good evidence that God wrote it.

So, I didn't say anything like 'prophecy can't exist'. What I actually said was, there's no good evidence that God wrote the Torah. Or alternatively, there's no good evidence that prophecy exists. This is poshut. So why can't an otherwise intelligent person like Thanbo see that?

Appreciating the complexity of Torah

From here:

To ask whether the Bible fails to give consistent answers or be of one voice with itself presumes that it was built to do so. That's a false presumption, rooted no doubt in thinking of it as the book that God wrote. Biblical literature is constantly interpreting, interrogating and disagreeing with itself. Virtually nothing is asserted someplace that is not called into question or undermined elsewhere.

Nor can we presume that such contradictions are stupid mistakes, editorial oversights or divine typos. We'll never know all the details about the history of the development of the literature now in our Bibles. What we do know is that it was thousands of years in the making and involved countless people writing, editing, copying, canonizing, publishing and so on. Can we honestly believe that, if agreement and consistency were the goal, such discrepancies would not have been fixed and such rough seams mended long ago? That creation stories would have been made to conform or be removed? Could all those many, many people involved in the development of biblical literature and the canon of Scriptures have been so blind, so stupid? It's modern arrogance to imagine so.

The Bible canonizes contradiction. It holds together a tense diversity of perspectives and voices, difference and argument -- even and especially when it comes to the profoundest questions of faith, questions that inevitably outlive all their answers.

The Bible is not a book of answers but a library of questions. As such it opens up space for us to explore different voices and perspectives, to discuss, to disagree and, above all, to think. Too often, however, that's not what happens.

We are the fundies who say 'cog-NI-tive dissonance'

From a commenter:

"As for me, I personally don't see the conflict with TMS vs DH. There are various solutions:

1) God wrote in multiple voices - this is R' Breuer's position. The textual analysis for DH is undeniable, but so is God's authorship - therefore there must be a resolution.

2) There was a Sinaitic revelation, but it was recorded by four+ authors, and re-edited together in the days of Ezra - this is the position of R' David Weiss-Halivni and a number of Conservative rabbis that I've run across. Weiss-Halivni may instead believe in a single original text which, in the absence of regular public reading, was degraded in four different ways.

3) My position: those I've encountered who vehemently propound DH tend to have an unstated agenda. For the 19th-C Germans, or Spinoza, it was a desire to undermine Judaism. For a number of moderns I've encountered on the internet, it's a faith position that prophecy does not exist. If there's no prophecy, there's no Divine Torah, so it must have been written by humans. Once that is your premise, DH is a reasonable solution to the multiple voices.

4) My cousin's position: Dr. Edward Greenstein, of Bar-Ilan (JTSA before making aliyah) - it doesn't matter about the origin, it should be treated as a singular text, because whether ancient editors redacted it that way or God wrote it that way, that is how it was meant to be treated. As Douglas Hofstadter might say, he unasks the question.

I'm sure there are others I haven't thought of."

This collection of "solutions" is laughable.

1) God wrote in multiple voices. Right. And he also wrote just like the Hamurabi and other ANE texts. In fact, he wrote the Torah exactly like you would expect it to be written had it been written by multiple people over hundreds of years and finally redacted in 500BCE. But hey, God wrote it so none of that is problematic.

2) The original Torah got degraded. Sure. I hear the original Koran got degraded too. And the original book of Mormon was made of Gold Plates and was awesome.

3) Makes no sense. So if its human, it must be multiple authors, but if its prophecy, then not? Huh?

4) Err, so the final redactor meant it to be taken as a singular text, therefore it is indeed a singular text? Amazing how that works.

These solutions are not solutions, they are as unrealistic, un-evidenciary and unbelievable as TMS is.

The truth is though that the DH has nothing to do with anything. It's entirely irrelevant.

The reason why it's irrational to believe that God wrote the Torah is NOT because there's evidence that multiple people wrote it. But rather it's because there's no good evidence that God wrote it.

Are there any real true believers amongst the educated MO?

Following on from my recent post about MO and cognitive dissonance, I often wonder about how MO people who are truly educated and knowledgeable about science, religion, Bible Scholarship etc (I'm not talking about the masses here) can truly believe the ikkarim. Considering my access to a wide array of friends, family and contacts across the spectrum of Modern Orthodoxy, you would think I could fairly easily ask some probing questions and get an answer.

The problem is, every time I get close enough to ask someone what they truly really believe (and get an honest answer) it always turns out that they don't quite truly really believe at all. I'm not saying they are secret militant atheists, but there's always some excuse - they believe in the DH and Divine Inspiration, they believe something happened at Sinai but they couldn't say exactly what, they believe that belief is not an ikkar, they believe in the ikkarim but not literally (?), they believe Torah is literature. And on and on and on.

Now you could say that there is a selection bias here, I only get close to people who are secret skeptics. But I don't think that's true, because I am friendly with all these people prior to knowing their true beliefs, and also in some cases prior to becoming skeptical myself. And even the ones who casually profess true belief, they quickly backtrack under heavy questions.

So are there any really true believers amongst the racks of the educated MO? Cos I don't think I know any.

Religion Is Evolving

From here. Not sure I agree (at least not from an Orthodox perspective) but interesting anyway:

"Change or die" seems to be the operative phrase for religion these days.

The reasons driving the evolution are varied and complex but can be summarized, I think, in terms of three main cultural changes.

The first is overwhelming pressure from science and a broad shift toward a rationalist worldview. Atheism has always been a fringe effort in the U.S., but a series of events at the turn of the century helped birth the New Atheist movement. The effort to include intelligent design theories in science curriculum was a major wake-up call for prominent atheists as was a resurgence of religiously motivated terrorist activity in the United States and Europe. The movement has succeeded in establishing the primacy of scientific explanation -- a view formerly confined mainly to the academy -- at the cost of other explanatory models, particularly religious ones.

Things have changed so dramatically and the movement has been so successful, that a physicist of the stature of Steven Hawking felt confident enough to come out boldly and claim that the God hypothesis is no longer needed to unlock the most intractable cosmological puzzles. Hawking believes physics will unify our understanding of the universe and in case his readers miss the point, he wanders outside of his discipline and into theology to assert plainly that God can't.

The second change is coming by way of the tremendous pressure exerted on religion from the flattening of the earth. As the world shrinks, young people are exposed to -- and are easily able to interact with -- others who hold very different worldviews. Kids now have access to a wealth of information about religions other than the one in which they were raised. Brand loyalty no longer is a given when it comes to religion and that's creating a massive shift in what people accept as true about their particular faith and about faith in general.

...

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, religion is being forced to change from the inside out due to what could crassly be called a services problem: Congregations are becoming dissatisfied with what formal religion has to offer. Believers find efforts to "modernize" shallow and patronizing. While small numbers are turning to more liturgical and morally or socially demanding faiths (opting for Mormon, traditional Catholic and even Muslim communities), many are choosing to leave institutional religion altogether, exchanging it for a more personalized faith -- or no faith at all.

The next decade will indeed be fascinating and an exciting time to observe and engage in this transformation. The metamorphosis we're experiencing not only will affect believers specifically but will have enormous social and political impact on all of us. That's an invigorating thought.

Torah True Evolution

People think that Chareidim don't believe in evolution. But that's not true at all. They certainly do hold of evolution, just that it's going in the opposite direction. Every generation away from Sinai (or perhaps from Adam Harishon) is getting progressively worse - it's called 'Yeridas Hadoros' - the decline of the generations.

Ironically, Chareidim like to poke fun at Darwinism by saying that how can we believe our grandparents had tails. But Darwinism (or more broadly evolution), held that we evolved from apes (or rather a common ancestor) millions of years ago.

In contrast, Chareidim believe that we evolved from Chazal (who were almost like Malochim - angels) down to our debased level in less than two thousand years. So, while the scientists believe we are about 1 million years removed from our ape-like ancestors, if you extrapolate from the decline from Chazal, Chareidim apparently believe we are about 2,000 years removed from our ape-like descendants.

So Rabbi Bamberger, which is more ridiculous? Our ancestors a million years ago had tails - or our descendants in 2,000 years will? Nobody wants an ancestor with a tail, but given the choice, I'd rather have apes in my distant past than in my not too distant future.

The Rabbi on the Airplane (and monkeys)

So apparently the older kids in the local day school were treated to a speech by a visiting Rabbi, Rabbi Ben-Zion Bamberger of Monsey (anybody know this guy?), and during his speech he mentioned the famous "Rabbi on the airplane story". He also told the kids about how Darwin thought their grandparents had tails. Some kids and parents were offended by this, personally I think that sort of narishkeit demeans Torah more than Science, but I do think the speaker (and the school for that matter) should have more sense. This isn't Monsey.

Anyways, now is a great time to tell my version of the Rabbi on the airplane story. It's much truthier than the other version.

So Reb Elyashiv and Professor Richard Dawkins happened to be sitting on a plane next to each other. They each had their grand children on board too. During the flight, Reb Elyashiv's grand children were behaving like vilda-chayos (wild animals), jumping around and generally causing a huge disturbance. Dawkins' grandchildren on the other hand were very well behaved and sitting quietly, like proper English schoolboys.

After a while Reb Elyashiv turns to Dawkins, and says "Excuse me professor, but how come my grandchildren are so badly behaved, while yours are so well behaved?"

Dawkinds replies "Ah Rabbi, the answer is poshut. You see, we believe in evolution, in the ascent of man. Each generation gets increasingly more human and more sophisticated, hence my grandchildren are models of restraint and good behavior. However you believe in yeridas hadoros, that every generation away from Sinai is further and further devolved. Hence your grandchildren are behaving like monkeys!"

Modern Orthodoxy is built on cognitive dissonance

"It may seem cognitively dissonant, but Modern Orthodoxy is built on cognitive dissonance. Every educated person knows that the Bible is likely the product of human hands, for example. Yet, to be modern and Orthodox is to accept a dialectical tension between the dictates of reason and those of faith, which, in this case, hold that God wrote the Torah. Most Modern Orthodox Jews I know do not resolve this tension. They accept it, and get on with the important business of living."

From here.

A simple solution to the brain death controversy

Its so simple. Chareidim hold of nishtaneh hatevah, that's why the strange cures and remedies mentioned in the gemarah are no longer valid today. Human biology has changed, putting a leech on someones stomach no longer can cure cancer. Therefore and likewise, anything Chazal said about life and death halachah is no longer valid because our biology has changed. It used to be that heart stoppage meant death, but now brain stem death is death. Nishtaneh hatevah!

(One kashyeh could be raised though - maybe it wasn't the human biology that changed, maybe it was the leech?)