Aaron Hamburger – Jewcy

Why Older Jews Have a Problem with Barack Obama

Aaron Hamburger — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 06:00:23 +0000

Barack Obama has been the subject of some serious rumblings among Jews lately, so much so that in January a group of prominent Jewish leaders put out a letter condemning a “whispering campaign” against the Illinois Senator. But why are older Jews so anxious about him? Recently Richard Cohen and Roger Cohen each wrote a column that together usefully illustrate two main fears that Jews of their generation have about Barack Obama:

A) Blacks think it’s acceptable to hate Jews.

B) Because of their experience of racism, blacks identify with other minorities, but not Jews, whom they perceive as whites masquerading as a “false minority.”

Richard Cohen struck first, back on January 15th, in a Washington Post column provocatively titled “Obama’s Farrakhan Test.” Few people symbolize black antisemitism more powerfully than Louis Farrakhan, who once lauded the achievements of Adolf Hitler. Though Cohen does not say that Obama shares Farrakhan’s views, the juxtaposition of these two African-American public figures (who share little besides skin color) inevitably invites comparisons. In reality the only link between these two men is that the magazine run by the daughter of Jeremiah Wright, the minister of Obama’s church, gave an award to Farrakhan. Cohen wonders what Obama makes of all this. (For the record, Obama has stated publicly and repeatedly, including at last night's debate, that he deplores Farrakhan’s antisemitic rhetoric and disagrees with the award.)

Is it disappointing that Obama’s minister would make such a move? Definitely. But considering that it is possible to play "Six Degrees of Louis Farrakhan" with any prominent African-American politician, such a sensationalizing column could only be justified on the assumption that any potential African-American presidential candidate personally owes Richard Cohen a denunciation of Farrakhan.

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My Crush On Catholicism

Aaron Hamburger — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 20:46:14 +0000

Recently a lapsed Catholic friend confessed a serious case of religion envy—for the religion I happened to be born into. “I’ve always had a strong admiration for Judaism,” he told me. “If I had to choose any religion, it would be yours.” Ironically, I had a similar confession to make: I’d always felt the same way about the Catholic Church. In an age when schoolchildren in the most goyish suburbs learn to sing “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel” alongside “Silent Night,” when churches and synagogues engage in interfaith outreach, and where politicians regularly lump sharply contrasting belief systems together under the category of “faith,” it shouldn’t be surprising that religions can seem interchangeable. Especially when your own religion feels a bit lacking. Don’t like fasting on Yom Kippur? Why not try on Catholicism for size? Unhappy with the latest Pope? Drop by your neighborhood synagogue or mosque. But religious values aren’t a Chinese menu, where we can pick two from Column A and three from Column B to suit ourselves. In fact, the better metaphor here would be a delicately balanced house of cards; pull out one from the middle, and the whole thing comes crashing down. As my friend explained his high regard for Judaism, I realized that he was attracted to certain Jewish cultural traditions but didn’t realize how they fit into a larger philosophical framework. He had two reasons for his high regard for Judaism, beginning with our people’s famous penchant for heterodoxy. Unlike Catholicism, we have no Vatican that issues The Final Word which all Jews must follow. He also admired our tradition of scholarly debate: rabbis carrying on heated discussions long into the night, not to mention Jewish writers and intellectuals like Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt carrying on that tradition in the secular culture. My friend found this refreshing compared with Catholicism, in which the word of God goes directly through the church to its adherents, with no room for questioning. I found it difficult to recognize the religion he was describing. True, we lack a central authority, and our rabbis don’t hector us from the pulpit like stereotypically stern Irish priests. But then our rabbis don’t need to hector us, as the Jewish laity has more than ably fulfilled that role. Judaism emphasizes faith performed in the context of a community (which is why, in order to pray, you need the presence of ten adult males.) Step outside its accepted norms and you’ve got two choices: subject yourself to an earful about it from family, friends, and strangers, or walk away from the community. And while there is a lot of debate in religious circles, I wouldn’t necessarily categorize it all as intellectual since it focuses mostly on matters of ritual rather than philosophy. (What’s so intellectual about a debate over whether it’s permissible to put sugar into tea or tea into sugar on Shabbat?) This reflects Judaism’s emphasis on practice over intent—the here-and-now over the metaphysical. Our leaders often find themselves absorbed in such profundities as the proper way to slit the throat of a chicken. In fact, most of our greatest intellectuals (Spinoza, Marx, Freud) were reacting against the grain of our religion, not with it. Compare this to Catholicism, which inspired St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante.
And that’s why, as I told my friend, I’ve long had a secret case of religion envy for Catholicism, with its emphasis on the soul, not rituals. Catholics have the freedom to live their daily lives as they see fit, because Catholicism has few rules governing the banalities of what to eat or what clothes to wear. Also, especially in contrast with Jews, Catholics have a much better knack for pageantry and decoration. Walk into any Catholic cathedral and then a Jewish synagogue; which space is more likely to inspire a state of awe and meditation conducive to prayer? Perhaps the chief source of my Catholic religion envy, though, is the ritual of confession. Imagine it, free therapy! For a Jew, what could be a bigger wet dream? But as my friend quickly pointed out, Catholicism’s fetishization of the soul can become meaninglessly ritualistic in itself. Catholics can eat shrimp to their heart’s content, but their penalty for breaking the faith’s few key rules is rather extreme: an eternity in hell or a slightly shorter time in purgatory. As for Catholicism’s theatrical pageantry, it’s fun to look at occasionally, but after a while, it can all get a bit tacky, even gruesome. The point is not to inspire individual meditation, but mass conformance to Catholic dogma. And Confession isn’t a bit like therapy. The priests aren’t there to sympathize but merely to help you atone—all in all, a ritual as empty as the rabbi of a synagogue with over a thousand members shaking a congregant’s hand on Shabbat. That’s when it hit me: Understanding someone else’s religion is like learning a language. You can’t just translate the words one-to-one. Rather, you have to begin by tackling the logic of the whole supporting system underneath.
It’s not just a question of Judaism and Catholicism, either. I find it lovely that many Muslims search for the kashrut symbol on non-meat products in American grocery stores because a kosher product is often also halal. Keeping kosher and eating halal, however, are hardly the same thing. In fact, one of the reasons kosher meat is not considered halal is that kashrut is based on the Jewish principles of cleanliness and the ethical treatment of animals. Halal rules incorporate these principles, but they privilege the uniquely Islamic value of submission to God’s will, which is why a prayer affirming the greatness of Allah must be uttered immediately preceding the animal’s slaughter. Why do we feel the desire to mold unfamiliar religions to fit our own wishes and ideals? Maybe in an era of terrorism and armed conflict in the name of God, we want to comfort ourselves by affirming the notion that deep down we really are all the same. (We are, but our religions aren’t). For some of us, religion envy may be a symptom of a consumer society in which almost every product can be customized to fit each customer’s specific tastes. “Would you like your sandwich on whole wheat, foccacia, rye, white, country Tuscan, country Tuscan whole wheat, or country Tuscan whole wheat low-carb?” “Would you like your religion belief-centered, practice-centered, monotheistic, pantheistic, ritual-heavy, or ritual-lite?” The more I hashed the matter out with my Catholic friend, the more it became clear that our religion envy came out of sadness, even regret. Just as children idealize their friends’ parents when their own parents seem not to understand them, we too idealized each other’s faiths (and denigrated our own) because of our desire to correct what we saw as the flaws of the religions we’d been born into. Religion envy is a band-aid, but it doesn’t quite fit over the wound.
For example, my friend stumped me with the following un-Jewish question about Judaism: “What happens if you don’t go to synagogue? Is that a sin? Does that mean you’re going to hell?” He’d been turned off from Catholicism after being told that skipping church on Sundays was a mortal sin. But Judaism addresses the subject of hell only in passing, with scant detail. For all Judaism’s rules, our emphasis is not on doing right to receive a reward or avoid a punishment, but on doing right for its own sake. Perhaps the best answer I could come up with was, in true Jewish form, another question: “Does the Pope wear a yarmulke?” Similarly, in all my questions about Catholicism’s emphasis on spirituality the name “Jesus Christ” never came up. In fact, I was surprised when my friend explained that you can’t be a good Catholic without affirming your belief in Christ as the Son of God who once walked on Earth and died for our sins. “But what if, even if you’re not sure Jesus was divine, you follow all of his teachings to the letter?” I asked. Nope, not good enough. For Catholics, faith in Jesus’ godly status is a prerequisite. I’d been unable see this dogmatic aspect of Catholicism because I was too busy admiring the religion’s spirituality as an antidote for Jewish dogma. If we must accept the notion that different faiths are indeed fundamentally different, where does that leave those of us who’d like to promote interfaith understanding, particularly now, when we’re so frightened of people who passionately believe things that are antithetical to our own belief systems? A false understanding of how other religions work is just as bad as no understanding. Instead of promoting untruths like “we all believe in the same God, just with different names,” we should approach the faith of the Other with a completely open, almost childlike sense of wonder and bewilderment. In other words, we should be adult enough to say something as juvenile as, “Wow, your god used to think if you eat meat on Fridays you’d go to hell? Interesting, but I don’t understand that at all. Tell me more.”

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Scrap the Mechitza

Aaron Hamburger — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 15:31:40 +0000

Two of my brothers recently started attending Orthodox synagogues where mechitzas divide men from women, ostensibly to eliminate improper thoughts in shul. As a gay man, I never know where to sit. Seating me with a bunch of men is like locking Jackie Gleason in a delicatessen, as the old Jackie Mason joke goes. But if I were to sit with women, my own beauty might distract everyone around me. I could sit in a section composed solely of gay men, but then we’d all distract each other. To be safe, I’d have to sit in a room with only one other person, a lesbian. But first, we’d both have to undergo testing to make sure neither of us had any latent bisexual tendencies. The mechitza—the partition keeping apart men and women in an Orthodox synagogue—is a failure, not only for gay men like me, and not only for Conservative and Reform Jews, who’ve long ago discarded the practice, but also for Orthodox Jews, who aren’t getting from it what they think. Supposedly, a mechitza creates a sacred space by separating the sexes. The trouble is, sex is not an either/or proposition. In fact, today we understand that gender and sexuality exist in a range of fuzzy shades that sometimes bleed into each other. It’s a paradigm far more complex than the Talmudic scholars who created the mechitza ever imagined. There are three reasons separating men from women is supposed to create holiness. First, mixing the sexes could be distracting; as the argument goes, a man who sees a pretty woman can’t help looking up from his prayer book. Second, separating the sexes makes people feel more comfortable. Third, this separation reaffirms the natural order of things. It isn’t that men are better than women or vice versa, but that God created Adam and then Eve in the Garden of Eden; a mechitza reaffirms that essential truth. Too bad none of these premises holds water.
Separating men from women does not make shul a sex-free zone. Even in a synagogue that bars openly professing homosexuals from attending, you might still have a few closeted gay or lesbian congregants who secretly get their jollies from sitting among members of the same sex. And then you’ve got to worry about the heterosexual congregants, who are not wholly immune to the attractions of their fellow men and women. (After all, a substantial number of female beauty contest viewers are heterosexual women, and even the most hot-blooded heterosexual male can tell the difference between Brad Pitt and former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert.) Also, where would you seat a hermaphrodite, or someone who’s undergone a sex change? If you seat a biological male who’s turned female among men, you’re certainly creating a distraction there. However, a mechitza requires you to do just that because its designers could only conceive of gender in bifurcated terms. Men go with men and women go with women, even if they’re men who lack penises or women who have them. Furthermore, distraction in synagogue can come in any number of forms. A person can be distracted from prayers by thirst, depression, anxiety, a neighbor’s acne problem, or the rabbi’s slightly askew yarmulke. Why is attraction to beauty the only distraction that requires stamping-out at all costs? Of all our natural urges, desire isn’t that much more consuming than hunger or physical pain or the love of one’s family. And anyway, what’s wrong with a little distraction from time to time? The whole “distraction” argument is so tenuous that even mechitza defenders don’t waste much time on it anymore. Instead they’re more likely to talk about how the mechitza actually makes people feel more comfortable, rather than less. An Orthodox rabbi I spoke to described how awkward his teenage male students felt in the presence of teenage girls. As soon as the girls were removed from their company, the boys felt free to express their true selves. He also told me about women who grew up with a mechitza and felt comfortable with it, even preferred to sit away from men.
These feelings might be true for some people. But for others, being in an all-male or all-female environment can be equally discomforting. Some women resent being separated from men. Some men feel uncomfortable being separated from their families. Why does their discomfort count for less than the rather unnatural discomfort at finding yourself next to a member of the opposite sex, the way you would on any street corner? As far as the mechitza being a “natural” way to separate people, it’s unclear why separating people by sex is any more natural than separating people in any number of ways: adults from children, disabled from non-disabled, black from white. The “separate but equal” argument doesn’t really work either because the act of separation is in itself inherently unequal. Walk into any Orthodox synagogue, and you won’t need much time to figure out which sex is in charge. (If you need a hint, it’s the one you see on the bimah.) Don’t blame us, the Orthodox say. God created Adam first, then Eve. Isn’t that a sign of something? However, this traditional interpretation of Genesis is actually just one version of the story. As Rabbi Steven Greenberg has pointed out in his book Wrestling with God and Men, if you look closely at the original text, it says, “And God created a human being [single, with no specified gender] in his image / In the image of God made he him / Male and female made he them.” According to the Talmudic rabbi Yirmiyah ben Eleazar, this first human being was actually androgynous—since God has no gender, and since this human was made in God’s image, it couldn’t be male or female. From this single genderless human, God created man and woman. So the original design is not two, but one. After one was separated into two, the result was not holiness, but rather our Fall from grace. Wouldn’t it then make sense that holiness would be achieved when men and women come back together, rather than by keeping them apart?
I brought these arguments to an Orthodox rabbi and asked him how he would respond to them. “I don’t know,” was his honest answer. “Those are good points.” In the end, however, he maintained that God wants us to have a mechitza in shul, and so we are obligated to fulfill that desire, even if we don’t understand it. I brought up the fact that there’s no mention of a mechitza in the Torah—it’s a commandment interpreted by the men who wrote the Talmud. The rabbi argued that God wanted the men to write the Talmud in that way. However, even if God wants us to divide men from women, this desire is impossible for us to realize. Gender isn’t a black-and-white issue, with men all behaving one way and women all behaving in the opposite way. A more honest representation of gender is as a spectrum, not a dialectic. It’s porous, not discrete. If you’re trying to separate the sexes, all of them, one wall just isn’t enough. What do we do as humans when God asks us to observe a commandment that we cannot fulfill? Take the case of barren married couples, who cannot observe the commandment of “be fruitful and multiply.” According to the Talmud (the same source for the mechitza), when we are incapable of doing something we are commanded to do, God releases us from the obligation. Therefore, since the commandment of the mechitza also asks us to do something that is impossible, I argue that we are no longer required to fulfill it either. And good riddance.

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Related in Jewcy:

Separate but equal? Laurel Snyder considers the mechitza in Faithhacker

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