When the Authority Figures Improvise

If a person doesn't know, should he improvise an answer, or should he admit that he doesn't know ?

Here is an example from the field of Jewish studies, one in which I am not expert at all. It concerns a problem I have encountered in the Hebrew prayer book, and I have made an effort to consult a number of experts with whose help, and that of books they recommended, I found what I believe to be the correct answer.

The problem arises from the daily Amidah prayer, part of which I reproduce here:




(Text, transliteration, and translation courtesy of a Christian group).

Now here is the problem. In the first line shown above, the prayer addresses G'd twice, each time asking, rhetorically, "who is like you ?," each time using a personal, second person pronoun-suffix. The first time the pronoun-suffix is used, " in "khamokha," G'd appears to be addressed as a male, but the second time, in "lakh," G'd appears to be a woman.

How is this apparent inconsistency to be explained ?

Ask people charged with being knowledgeable about such things, and you will get one of three answers:

1) I do not know.

2) Since G'd is neither male nor female, the writers of this prayer here indicate the gender neutrality of the deity by alternating the grammatical gender indicators. Some variation of this is the most commonly elicited answer. It happens to be ignorant, wrong, and unacceptable from one whose professional responsibility is to either know better or, at least, to understand the limitations of his own knowledge.

3) The correct answer, which I will not fully give away here, can be found by consulting a work on pausal forms in the history of the Hebrew language, for example pp. 96-98 of Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar, Second English Edition, 1910.

The problem with improvising knowledge about materials that come to us from the past is that this improvisation tends to be in the direction of what is now, currently, fashionable. In the case at hand, the improvised interpretation looks at the ancient text in the light of current, fashionable "gender fairness." Historians call this error one of anachronism.

Why is this kind of error so bad ? To put it most briefly, it robs us of understanding the text at hand. It suggests meanings to the prayers we utter that these prayers do not contain. In short, in this case, it reduces the actual Hebrew text to a mumbojumbo of phrases that are recited by rote without understanding.

For a stimulating discussion of gender in Jewish prayer, see the article by Lois C. Dubin

A Lesson from the Torah

Rabbi Wolpe, whose mini-column I read every week in the Jewish Week, had a particularly important lesson last month. Here is an excerpt:

The Dubno Maggid told a story that should be learned by every Jewish child. He told of a father in a small Eastern European village who was walking his child to cheder, to school. Suddenly they heard a fanfare of trumpets and an elaborate coach pulled by beautiful horses rode down the road. The coach stopped right by them and out stepped a man wrapped in lush furs and dripping with jewels, dazzling the onlookers.

The father whispered to his son: “Take a good look, my child. For unless you learn and live Torah, that’s what you are going to look like!”

Learning Torah — and living Torah — can save us from the excesses that masquerade as meaning. How many of us are wise enough to whisper those words to our children — or heed them ourselves?

Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. His latest book is “Why Faith Matters” (HarperOne).

From: Jewish Week, Sept. 15, 2009

Peace Now -- Peace in Our Time

Mr. Neville Chamberlain (center), Pg. Joachim von Ribbentrop (left), Führer Adolf Hitler, Sept. 28, 1938

History has not been kind to Mr. Chamberlain. The agreement with Hitler that he so proudly displayed on his return to Britain proved to be worthless. In a way, mutatis mutandis, Chamberlain was the Barack Obama of his time: confrontation is noxious and dangerous, he believed, negotiation is the only reasonable way to go. Of course the situation then was not the situation today, and today's foes are not identical to the foes of 1938; Obama's path today may yet prove to be the wise one that his admirers hope it will be.

But there is something eerily similar between then and now. Hitler's Nazi movement made an appeal to dark human passions that sweet reason could not assuage. Sweet reason -- can't we all just get along ? -- does not solve all issues, pace Chamberlain, Obama, and the bien-pensant liberals of our day. Today, I fear, our (mostly liberal) chattering classes, so intent on getting on with negotiation and avoiding confrontation, simply fail to notice that Islamism, in this respect not unlike the Nazism of yore, appeals to passions that are not provided for by rational-man images of bourgeois society.

Today's New York Times tells us that "at least 6 die as Islamists clash with Hamas" in the Gaza territory. The story of bloody mayhem, members of one Islamicist faction killing those of another, is buried on page 7, with the front page taken up by more important news: "retailers see slowing sales in key season," "idle Iraqi date farms show decline in economy," a shooting in Harlem, etc. But the violence of Palestinian Islamicists against one another gets swept under a page-seven rug. And New York Times's readers are spared a confrontation with uncomfortable reality.

The sweet-reason, can't-we-all-just-get-along movement in Israel is called Peace Now, and is promoted by left-wing parties like Meretz. Peace Now was founded some thirty years ago with the proposition that if only Israel were nicer to the Arabs, the Arabs, in turn, would be nicer to Israel. If Peace Now has a guiding principle, it is that radical, uncompromising Islamicism is to be strictly ignored. But, alas, while Israel has tried to be as nice as possible to the Arabs (most notably at Camp David in 2000 and at Taba in 2001), more or less following Peace Now prescriptions, there have been no positive results, peace now being more elusive than ever. Consequently, as explained by Carlo Strenger in a recent issue of Haaretz, Peace Now has virtually disappeared from Israeli politics.



Update on the intra-Islamist violence in Gaza (Haaretz, 8/15/09):

Dr. Moaiya Hassanain of the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza said 24 people were killed, including six Hamas police officers and an 11-year-old girl. At least 150 people were wounded, he said.

When Everything is Black or White: Caldwell's book on Islam in Europe

In the Photoshop program for editing photographs, there is a facility by which one can increase or decrease the contrast of an image. I took a black-and-white portrait of my youngest granddaughter, and then dialed up the contrast to a maximum. The result is a picture, interesting in itself, but lacking all nuance of shading. Everything is black or white.

I thought of this ability to rev up contrast, with its result of utter distortion, as I read the book "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe" by Christopher Caldwell. Caldwell is upset by the large Muslim populations in Europe, and, indeed, there are real enough problems. But Caldwell sees everything in black and white. The Muslim populations, he claims, have not assimilated, AT ALL, to European culture. Caldwell is not a scholar, and his use of statistics (and other data) is tendentious and naive. I think that he does point to things we need to worry about, but his highly contrasty portrait will not help us think about the problem intelligently.

I have reviewed this book for Amazon.

Sotomayor: My Mom Doesn't Get It

Celina Sotomayor (AP)

The Senate confirmation hearings of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court were bland and brought little to surprise anyone. Certainly, if I were a US Senator I would vote to confirm. That said, I must report my unease at her response, which I heard on CSPAN, to comedian Al Franken's question: why do you want this job. I have so far been unable to obtain the transcript of her response, but the NY Times blog The Caucus gives an account very close to what I remember:

Franken and the Job | 12:16 p.m. Why does the judge want to join the Supreme Court? asks Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota.

This prompts a lengthy story from the judge, in which her mother, Celina, and her stepfather, Omar, play a role. As she tells it, her mother couldn’t understand why she would take a job that involved a sizable pay cut from her lawyer’s work in private practice, would limit her foreign travel and would prohibit her from having friends who might come before her in court. Her stepfather apparently, at the end, turned to his wife, and said in Spanish, “You know you daughter and her stuff with public service.”

And the judge continued: “That really has always been the answer given, who I am, my love of the law, my sense of importance about the rule of law, how central it is to the functioning of our society …” Those have always created a passion in her, she added. “I can’t think of any greater service I could give to the country.”

As I recall the Judge, she said "all this was in Spanish," wink wink, suggesting, when taken together with her verbiage here, an unpleasant condescension toward her mother --how cute, my old mom, but alas lacking in the sophistication of all those Eastern schools where I learned my selfless morality. There is no doubt that the judge has great affection for her mother, whom she has praised repeatedly in the public record. But condescension nevertheless.

As it happens, Celina Sotomayor achieved graduation from college in New York and became a Registered Nurse, passing her RN boards in English, so the Judge's condescension is doubly misplaced.

Doubly: even if her mother had not had American higher education, or English proficiency, it is a bit outrageous to suggest that our immigrant parents and grandparents cannot be trusted with making ethical decisions as good as ours.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright: "Them Jews aren't going to let him talk to me"

And as he tries to "explain," the Rev. Wright becomes even more rabid. See the New York Times treatment.

The Menace of "Alternative Medicine"

Daniel David Palmer (1845-1914), Father of Chiropractic

There was a time, some thirty or forty years ago, when the elite medical schools and hospitals warned patients away from self-styled healers who lacked medical training. Then as now, "chiropractic," "naturopathy," "acupuncture," and many others, were popular and offered their wares, but then they were rejected without equivocation by established medical authorities. But oh, how things have changed.

To give but one example, New York University's Langone Medical Center now offers naturopathy, acupuncture, and herbalism among its treatments for a long list of ailments, including, yes, cancer. Unbelievable ? Click here to see for yourself.

The gradual change in attitudes by leaders of the medical profession is documented in a 2005 article by the sociologist Terri Winnick, "From Quackery to 'Complementary' Medicine: The American Medical Profession Confronts Alternative Therapies." The article is as much a symptom of the change as a description of it, thereby offering some clues to attitudes that caused it.

To Winnick, changes in medical positions seem all to the good. Her narrative is mainly one of sordid political power plays by the AMA in the 1960's, replaced by more reasonable positions now. Some fifty years ago, she tells us, the medical establishment had more power and could therefore fight off the claims of the rival "modalities." Today organized medicine is constrained to be more reasonable, and, she suggests, has therefore come to see the light of cooperation with "CAM" ("complementary and alternative medicine").

The striking shortcoming in Winnick's article, and in the many similar books and articles on the subject, is absence any sort of hard-headed examination of the claims made by these "alternative" practitioners and of their scientific credentials.

As for the claims, the short answer is that, now as before, there simply is no evidence that any of these alternatives to scientific medicine have any merit whatever. This may seem a harsh and intolerant thing to say, but it is the conclusion reached, despite much pressure in opposite directions, by the very government agency set up to find any and every possible scrap of merit in these "alternatives," namely the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine of the National Institutes of Health.

As for scientific credentials of the "alternative" practitioners, it is instructive to look at those of the man hired by NYU to cure cancer (among other ailments) by "alternative" methods. This is what we read

Dr. X, N.D., joins NYU Urology from the Center for Holistic Urology at Columbia University Medical Center.

Dr. X. holds a four-year naturopathic doctoral degree and a two-year acupuncture degree from the University of Bridgeport. His clinical practice and research focus on integrative, holistic appraches to urological conditions.

Readers should ask themselves how these credentials compare to those of Board-certified medical practitioners. And they should ask the people in charge of NYU and Columbia whether they themselves, personally, would entrust their health and that of their families to the man from Bridgeport.

To be sure, there still are clear voices of warning. Edzard Ernst has recently written a no-nonsense book, and then of course there is Quackwatch. But given the prevailing anything-goes attitudes of our elite medical institutions, these voices seem to be coming from the wilderness.