Cambridge Limmud
Nov. 4th, 2013 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livHad the most brilliant weekend, after a bad start with travel woes Friday evening. Saturday I got to spend some time with jack and we made progress on our long-term anti-geography plan. And then we went to a really nice housewarming party at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sonicdrift and mobbsy's absolutely gorgeous amazing new place. That was full of people I really like, and extremely excellent food, and everybody was gratifyingly enthusiastic about my plans to spend more time in Cambridge in the future.
And Sunday was the Cambridge Limmud, which was my main reason for being in town. Cambridge Limmud has a kind of ongoing dispute with the national organization because they tend to create a programme which is what the org considers "too intellectual". Not surprisingly I love having a very academic-y programme, and the huge advantage Cambridge has is that the committee, being mostly university people, are extremely well connected and in a position to pull strings and invite some really impressive speakers.ewx asked me if lethargic_man was going to be there because LM's Limmud write-ups are always really interesting, which reminded me that I should probably put up some notes of the cool stuff I learned.
The Limmud was 6 sessions back to back, with barely enough time between to move to the appropriate room, because another thing about Cambridge people is that they heavily prioritize content over the sort of social stuff that goes around the edges of most community events. I understand that people want to feel they're getting their money's worth, but I think it would have worked better with 5 sessions a bit more spread out. Anyway I skipped the last session, partly cos my brain was full and partly cos I needed to get a train back to Stoke in decent time.
I have this bad habit with Limmud that I keep going to text study things to the exclusion of just about everything else, eg history, politics, social justice, art etc. And this Limmud in particular had a really shiny history track which I more or less skipped because teeeeeext.
So I started the day listening to R' Levi Lauer. His abstract mentioned phrases like
Lauer argued that Judaism can no longer rely on three foundational myths: trust (אמונה) that halachic practice will lead to ultimate meaning or connection with God; Enlightenment certainty that more knowledge leads to moral improvement; and Zionism. Trust in halachic practice he criticized from both ends, first of all we can't trust God to care if we keep the detailed laws or not, and secondly halacha can too easily become an end instead of a means, people get obsessed with the exact detail of practice rather than the theological meaning, and it's so irrelevant to modern life that Jews either become disconnected from reality or disconnected from Jewish tradition. The Enlightenment has failed morally because the most technologically adept and scientifically knowledgeable people have committed ultimately terrible crimes, because people mistake intellectual achievement for moral worth, and because we are post-Postmodern and can't really believe in certainty or objective truth. And Zionism has failed morally because Jews haven't handled military and political power any better than anyone else, and in spite of that, the State of Israel hasn't even offered physical safety or freedom from anti-semitic violence. It was very much the sort of talk where it's easier to state the problem than propose a solution, but Lauer's ideas certainly did appeal to me (despite above-mentioned political differences and some infelicities of expression).
So, instead of trust in halacha we need pluralist Jewish education, so that everybody is conversant with the texts and engaged with tradition, but we refocus on the ultimate meaning rather than obsessing over minor details of practice. We need to accept uncertainty and interdependence, without rejecting rational analysis and without getting to the point of ambivalence, of being afraid to ever act because we might not have the right solution. And we need to engage in meaningful social action and moral progress and give as much attention to that as we would to studying texts or supporting Zionist causes.
I mean, look, when you drill down to the detail, I'm annoyed with Lauer because he repeatedly assumed that everybody in his audience was male and in a very standard heterosexual relationship, because he made what amounted to ableist jokes, because his specific examples about his anti-trafficking org repeatedly confused sex slavery and trafficking with voluntary prostitution. But on the level of general principles, he believes in pluralism and social justice and the Levinasian thing of relating to the Divine through forming meaningful connections with our fellow humans. And the way he backed up this stuff with sources was just delightful. He had a really good take on the midrash I love anyway where angelic personifications of kindness, truth, justice and peace argue about whether it's right to create humanity, and the story that's much loved in Reform circles where the Kotzker Rebbe comforts a congregant who is terrified that he might be an atheist, and the Rebbe says that if you really care that much about whether God exists or not you're a good Jew. He's definitely coming from an Orthodox perspective but I think quite a post-theist one or at least open to deism.
And the last talk I went to was by the wonderful Boyarin. He rarely comes to Europe and I jump at every opportunity to sit at his feet. He's apparently working on a theory of the Talmud as the foundation and model for positive diaspora life, which involves demonstrating that there was much more contact between the Babylonian and Palestinian communities than previously thought, and that they were in active dialogue with eachother for several centuries. And that the Babylonian rabbis didn't have a sense of inferiority because they were in "exile" while the Palestinian rabbis didn't have a sense of inferiority because their community was much smaller and less influential than the Babylonian one. Some really cool stuff about the idea of diaspora as being explicitly about doubled cultural identity, about deliberately constructing a relationship to the host culture as well as to the culture of origin.
And a little tiny bit of text where Rav Nachman and Rav Yehuda have a confrontation where Rav Nachman uses a bunch of fancy Persian words, and Rav Yehuda rebukes him and says he ought to use terms that will be understood by ordinary Jews in both Bablyon and Palestine. Boyarin argued that the issue isn't linguistic purity; Rav Yehuda is completely comfortable with loan-words. And it's not exactly class, either; Rav Yehuda doesn't mind fancy words, but he does mind the kind of terminology that marks the Persian elite, which would be obscure to ordinary Babylonians (Jewish or not) whose vernacular was Aramaic, and obscure to the community in Palestine too. He compared the situation to the nobility in Tolstoy conversing in French rather than Russian. Adorable example: Rav Nachman uses the fancy word itrunga whereas Rav Yehuda says he should say etrog, meaning citron. Boyarin pointed out that the two terms are clearly etymologically related, but also that itrunga becomes naranja which eventually comes into English as orange...
We kind of ran out of time for Boyarin to expand on this, but he started to talk a little bit about how Talmud study helped to keep Mediaeval Jewish communities unified even while they were scattered all over Europe and Central Asia. Specifically the Talmud, because the interplay between the Babylonian and the Palestinian tradition provides such a good model for cultural survival in a diaspora context and for constructing a positive way of handling doubled or blended identities.
There was a very cool anecdote where a visiting rabbi from Palestine, whose name I didn't catch, was horrified to find that the Babylonian community were setting their own calendar rather than going by Jerusalem. So, when this rabbi was given the honour of being called up to read Torah, he sarcastically changed the words of the liturgy from
Listening to Boyarin is always a joy, but he also made me feel less annoyed with a talk I had found disappointing when I actually heard it. Yona Sabar was billed as talking about the revival of Aramaic as a living Jewish language. And he sort of did, but he was very discursive and spent a lot of his timeslot telling random linguistic anecdotes about Judaized dialects of other languages, such as Yiddish. Which is cute and all, but the point of Sabar is that he himself hails from a tiny community in Northern Iraq / Kurdistan that still had Aramaic as their primary language into the 20th century (so I didn't care about his random opinions about Yiddish, Ladino etc). Sabar's story was that this community were descended from the Assyrian captives and thus originally from the ten northern tribes of ancient Israel. I was a bit skeptical because every isolated Jewish community claims to be descended from the ten lost tribes, but at least Sabar had a plausible historical mechanism for how his ancestors might have ended up in that part of the world.
But the thing is that Sabar's anecdotes about being part of a community that still speaks Aramaic, the language of most of the later part of the Talmud, really matched up with Boyarin's concept of the intentional creation of diaspora culture. Because for example, Sabar mentioned that his community followed a more or less mainstream form of rabbinic Judaism, even though they had been in Kurdistan since 700 BCE ie a thousand years before the flourishing of rabbinic Judaism in Talmudic times. And his story was that visiting rabbis travelled from Europe and taught the Talmud to this community way out in the mountains.
R' Dr Rafi Zarum was excellent in the way that R' Zarum always is. He taught the weird bit of Gen 14 where this random, apparently monotheistic priest called Melkizedek turns up out of the blue and blesses Abraham. He referred to a talk that he and I were both at at a Limmud years ago, about how some Christian theology uses the story of Melkizedek and the reference to it in Ps 110 as a kind of justification for Supercessionism, as in there was this ancient priesthood which prefigures the coming of the Messiah and makes the Jewish priesthood obsolete. He brought some midrashic material to show ways that Jewish tradition both includes and rejects the idea of Melkitzedek being connected to the Messiah, but most of the session was taken up looking at the p'shat, the plain meaning of the actual Genesis text.
R' Zarum talked about how Abraham rejects the temptations of kingship, of despotic, materialistic authority, because he rejects any sort of gift or favour after helping the Canaanite petty kings to drive out the invasion of the Babylonian kings. Melkizedek is both king (melech) and priest, described as righteous (tzedek). But in the end he puts his kingship, his earthly authority and power, first, ahead of his sense of justice and moral authority. This is supported by a midrash in Nedarim, where Melkizedek loses his right to the priesthood because he blesses the victorious Abraham first, and only then remembers to thank God for the victory. Whereas of course in the rabbinic view God should come first. And the homily was that we are all like Melkizedek, we are caught between material power and wealth and comfort, and our higher moral duties to bring about justice in the world.
Totally love it when a theme falls out of a collection of disparate talks like that! Because how well does that link R' Lauer's ideas about bringing Torah to the street and aiming for a religiously informed and pluralist social justice, with Boyarin's ideas about a positive sense of diaspora identity, taking part in society while retaining your own culture and traditions? And the central role of text study permeating all these complementary perspectives, just wonderful.
Apologies if that's either too technical or too simplified! I'm happy to explain anything that isn't clear in these rather sparse notes.
jack and we made progress on our long-term anti-geography plan. And then we went to a really nice housewarming party at sonicdrift and mobbsy's absolutely gorgeous amazing new place. That was full of people I really like, and extremely excellent food, and everybody was gratifyingly enthusiastic about my plans to spend more time in Cambridge in the future. And Sunday was the Cambridge Limmud, which was my main reason for being in town. Cambridge Limmud has a kind of ongoing dispute with the national organization because they tend to create a programme which is what the org considers "too intellectual". Not surprisingly I love having a very academic-y programme, and the huge advantage Cambridge has is that the committee, being mostly university people, are extremely well connected and in a position to pull strings and invite some really impressive speakers.
ewx asked me if lethargic_man was going to be there because LM's Limmud write-ups are always really interesting, which reminded me that I should probably put up some notes of the cool stuff I learned.The Limmud was 6 sessions back to back, with barely enough time between to move to the appropriate room, because another thing about Cambridge people is that they heavily prioritize content over the sort of social stuff that goes around the edges of most community events. I understand that people want to feel they're getting their money's worth, but I think it would have worked better with 5 sessions a bit more spread out. Anyway I skipped the last session, partly cos my brain was full and partly cos I needed to get a train back to Stoke in decent time.
I have this bad habit with Limmud that I keep going to text study things to the exclusion of just about everything else, eg history, politics, social justice, art etc. And this Limmud in particular had a really shiny history track which I more or less skipped because teeeeeext.
So I started the day listening to R' Levi Lauer. His abstract mentioned phrases like
tikkun olam[Jewish way of expressing social justice, in terms of "repairing the world"], and
willed naïvetéand
intersection between the beit midrash [study house] and the street. Which lead me to think, this talk is either going to be right up my street or really waffly and annoying. And in fact it was really right up my street, even though R' Lauer and I are not very closely aligned politically.
Lauer argued that Judaism can no longer rely on three foundational myths: trust (אמונה) that halachic practice will lead to ultimate meaning or connection with God; Enlightenment certainty that more knowledge leads to moral improvement; and Zionism. Trust in halachic practice he criticized from both ends, first of all we can't trust God to care if we keep the detailed laws or not, and secondly halacha can too easily become an end instead of a means, people get obsessed with the exact detail of practice rather than the theological meaning, and it's so irrelevant to modern life that Jews either become disconnected from reality or disconnected from Jewish tradition. The Enlightenment has failed morally because the most technologically adept and scientifically knowledgeable people have committed ultimately terrible crimes, because people mistake intellectual achievement for moral worth, and because we are post-Postmodern and can't really believe in certainty or objective truth. And Zionism has failed morally because Jews haven't handled military and political power any better than anyone else, and in spite of that, the State of Israel hasn't even offered physical safety or freedom from anti-semitic violence. It was very much the sort of talk where it's easier to state the problem than propose a solution, but Lauer's ideas certainly did appeal to me (despite above-mentioned political differences and some infelicities of expression).
So, instead of trust in halacha we need pluralist Jewish education, so that everybody is conversant with the texts and engaged with tradition, but we refocus on the ultimate meaning rather than obsessing over minor details of practice. We need to accept uncertainty and interdependence, without rejecting rational analysis and without getting to the point of ambivalence, of being afraid to ever act because we might not have the right solution. And we need to engage in meaningful social action and moral progress and give as much attention to that as we would to studying texts or supporting Zionist causes.
I mean, look, when you drill down to the detail, I'm annoyed with Lauer because he repeatedly assumed that everybody in his audience was male and in a very standard heterosexual relationship, because he made what amounted to ableist jokes, because his specific examples about his anti-trafficking org repeatedly confused sex slavery and trafficking with voluntary prostitution. But on the level of general principles, he believes in pluralism and social justice and the Levinasian thing of relating to the Divine through forming meaningful connections with our fellow humans. And the way he backed up this stuff with sources was just delightful. He had a really good take on the midrash I love anyway where angelic personifications of kindness, truth, justice and peace argue about whether it's right to create humanity, and the story that's much loved in Reform circles where the Kotzker Rebbe comforts a congregant who is terrified that he might be an atheist, and the Rebbe says that if you really care that much about whether God exists or not you're a good Jew. He's definitely coming from an Orthodox perspective but I think quite a post-theist one or at least open to deism.
And the last talk I went to was by the wonderful Boyarin. He rarely comes to Europe and I jump at every opportunity to sit at his feet. He's apparently working on a theory of the Talmud as the foundation and model for positive diaspora life, which involves demonstrating that there was much more contact between the Babylonian and Palestinian communities than previously thought, and that they were in active dialogue with eachother for several centuries. And that the Babylonian rabbis didn't have a sense of inferiority because they were in "exile" while the Palestinian rabbis didn't have a sense of inferiority because their community was much smaller and less influential than the Babylonian one. Some really cool stuff about the idea of diaspora as being explicitly about doubled cultural identity, about deliberately constructing a relationship to the host culture as well as to the culture of origin.
And a little tiny bit of text where Rav Nachman and Rav Yehuda have a confrontation where Rav Nachman uses a bunch of fancy Persian words, and Rav Yehuda rebukes him and says he ought to use terms that will be understood by ordinary Jews in both Bablyon and Palestine. Boyarin argued that the issue isn't linguistic purity; Rav Yehuda is completely comfortable with loan-words. And it's not exactly class, either; Rav Yehuda doesn't mind fancy words, but he does mind the kind of terminology that marks the Persian elite, which would be obscure to ordinary Babylonians (Jewish or not) whose vernacular was Aramaic, and obscure to the community in Palestine too. He compared the situation to the nobility in Tolstoy conversing in French rather than Russian. Adorable example: Rav Nachman uses the fancy word itrunga whereas Rav Yehuda says he should say etrog, meaning citron. Boyarin pointed out that the two terms are clearly etymologically related, but also that itrunga becomes naranja which eventually comes into English as orange...
We kind of ran out of time for Boyarin to expand on this, but he started to talk a little bit about how Talmud study helped to keep Mediaeval Jewish communities unified even while they were scattered all over Europe and Central Asia. Specifically the Talmud, because the interplay between the Babylonian and the Palestinian tradition provides such a good model for cultural survival in a diaspora context and for constructing a positive way of handling doubled or blended identities.
There was a very cool anecdote where a visiting rabbi from Palestine, whose name I didn't catch, was horrified to find that the Babylonian community were setting their own calendar rather than going by Jerusalem. So, when this rabbi was given the honour of being called up to read Torah, he sarcastically changed the words of the liturgy from
For Torah shall come forth from Zion and the word of the Eternal from Jerusalemto
For Torah shall come forth from Babylon and the word of the Eternal from the Euphrates valley. And the Babylonian rabbis argued with him that you should not read mi-Tzion, from Zion, but rather metzuyenet, excellent, the place where Torah teaching is most excellent ie in this case Babylon. But there are Mediaeval examples where people change the words of the quote sincerely, not sarcastically, Rabbenu Tam says "from Otranto and Bari", cities in Apulia in southern Italy, and some Sephardi rabbi says "from France and Germany".
Listening to Boyarin is always a joy, but he also made me feel less annoyed with a talk I had found disappointing when I actually heard it. Yona Sabar was billed as talking about the revival of Aramaic as a living Jewish language. And he sort of did, but he was very discursive and spent a lot of his timeslot telling random linguistic anecdotes about Judaized dialects of other languages, such as Yiddish. Which is cute and all, but the point of Sabar is that he himself hails from a tiny community in Northern Iraq / Kurdistan that still had Aramaic as their primary language into the 20th century (so I didn't care about his random opinions about Yiddish, Ladino etc). Sabar's story was that this community were descended from the Assyrian captives and thus originally from the ten northern tribes of ancient Israel. I was a bit skeptical because every isolated Jewish community claims to be descended from the ten lost tribes, but at least Sabar had a plausible historical mechanism for how his ancestors might have ended up in that part of the world.
But the thing is that Sabar's anecdotes about being part of a community that still speaks Aramaic, the language of most of the later part of the Talmud, really matched up with Boyarin's concept of the intentional creation of diaspora culture. Because for example, Sabar mentioned that his community followed a more or less mainstream form of rabbinic Judaism, even though they had been in Kurdistan since 700 BCE ie a thousand years before the flourishing of rabbinic Judaism in Talmudic times. And his story was that visiting rabbis travelled from Europe and taught the Talmud to this community way out in the mountains.
R' Dr Rafi Zarum was excellent in the way that R' Zarum always is. He taught the weird bit of Gen 14 where this random, apparently monotheistic priest called Melkizedek turns up out of the blue and blesses Abraham. He referred to a talk that he and I were both at at a Limmud years ago, about how some Christian theology uses the story of Melkizedek and the reference to it in Ps 110 as a kind of justification for Supercessionism, as in there was this ancient priesthood which prefigures the coming of the Messiah and makes the Jewish priesthood obsolete. He brought some midrashic material to show ways that Jewish tradition both includes and rejects the idea of Melkitzedek being connected to the Messiah, but most of the session was taken up looking at the p'shat, the plain meaning of the actual Genesis text.
R' Zarum talked about how Abraham rejects the temptations of kingship, of despotic, materialistic authority, because he rejects any sort of gift or favour after helping the Canaanite petty kings to drive out the invasion of the Babylonian kings. Melkizedek is both king (melech) and priest, described as righteous (tzedek). But in the end he puts his kingship, his earthly authority and power, first, ahead of his sense of justice and moral authority. This is supported by a midrash in Nedarim, where Melkizedek loses his right to the priesthood because he blesses the victorious Abraham first, and only then remembers to thank God for the victory. Whereas of course in the rabbinic view God should come first. And the homily was that we are all like Melkizedek, we are caught between material power and wealth and comfort, and our higher moral duties to bring about justice in the world.
Totally love it when a theme falls out of a collection of disparate talks like that! Because how well does that link R' Lauer's ideas about bringing Torah to the street and aiming for a religiously informed and pluralist social justice, with Boyarin's ideas about a positive sense of diaspora identity, taking part in society while retaining your own culture and traditions? And the central role of text study permeating all these complementary perspectives, just wonderful.
Apologies if that's either too technical or too simplified! I'm happy to explain anything that isn't clear in these rather sparse notes.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-04 11:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-11-05 10:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-05 08:24 am (UTC)That's gratifying to know, in the light of the resounding silence I often get when I put them up.
I'd wanted to go to Cambridge Day Limmud this year, but I'd already booked train tickets to visit my parents when they announced the date. Maybe next year when I (most probably) won't be trying to squeeze in lots of visits to my mother in her remaining time.
Here's some notes from a different talk on Melchitzedek to keep
(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-05 10:31 am (UTC)I am sorry you weren't in a position to come to this Limmud; as you say, hopefully there will be other opportunities in future. I'd omitted encouraging you to come because I had assumed you'd be tied up with family stuff.
As for not getting many comments on your Limmud posts, I think that long detailed essays on specialist topics are not fertile ground for comment discussion. With the barrier to commenting being so high relative to eg FB likes, especially when people read on their phones, people rarely comment just to say, this is interesting, thanks for writing it. And don't know enough about the matter being discussed to actually contribute an opinion.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-05 09:32 pm (UTC)But they do to other people's posts. Two people (so far) have even done it to this post of yours!
(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-06 12:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-11-05 09:34 pm (UTC)Also, a "Cool!" on LJ or DW will help counteract the feeling I should give up on LJ and DW in favour of Facebook. Most of the comments I have recently got on blog posts of mine have been on Facebook; my last post has seven comments by people other than me on Facebook, and eight likes, but only one comment on DW and none whatsoever on LJ. But seeing feedback from people like you would remind me there are people who only read my blog on one of the older platforms.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-05 09:31 am (UTC)I mean I went to the annual socialism conference in London and it was great, but they have those every year! BOYARIN!
(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-05 10:36 am (UTC)Boyarin basically comes to Cambridge Limmud because he enjoys swanning about in the hallowed halls of the university, he's more or less said he's not going to bother with any other Limmuds, including the main one. But yeah, he is the reason I rearranged my life to be able to get to this Limmud, even though I enjoyed the other talks too. I think this theory of diaspora he's working is going to be really profound, maybe even more of a seismic shock to the Jewish world than his earlier reading Talmud with slash goggles insights.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-05 03:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-05 07:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-11-05 11:49 am (UTC)You have a story like that in your holy books? Your religion is so cool it melts my mind :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-05 12:25 pm (UTC)The earliest I know of is in Targum material, which is translation of the Bible with commentary from the first century CE. There's a story where Cain says to Abel: what if there's no justice and no Judge? which in fact is the language reflected in the story of the Kotzker Rebbe and the atheist. And he gets about two pages of soliloquy making a strong case for atheism. Now clearly Cain isn't a sympathetic character, cos the next thing he does is murder his brother, but he's not making obvious straw-man arguments, he's the mouthpiece for what looks like a serious exploration of atheism.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-05 11:51 am (UTC)first of all we can't trust God to care if we keep the detailed laws or not
This seems like it might be saying that we can't trust God to keep the covenant; I'm guess that's not what Lauer intended. Could you expand a little on this point so I can understand it, please?
(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-05 12:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-05 01:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-05 07:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-05 07:21 pm (UTC)Thanks for the link, anyway - I'll have a look.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-05 01:30 pm (UTC)So, if the author is trying to propagandise "Abraham gains legitimacy by learning priest-ness from M-Tz", wouldn't it SAY that? Unless this is supposed to be one of those things where Abraham and M-Tz using the same language for praising God is supposed to be a reminder for an oral tradition, but somehow it doesn't feel like that to me, are there indications that's what going on?
Conversely, if the author didn't think Abraham learned priest-ness from M-Tz, why would they be careful to record the exact form of words both men used to praise God, and not just put in something normal and praising?
(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-05 07:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-11-05 09:24 pm (UTC)