Monthly Archives: August 2013

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Outreach professionals should educate those who haven’t had formative Jewish experiences to foster a deeper commitment to Judaism through the study of its traditional texts

Outreach professionals should educate those who haven’t had formative Jewish experiences to foster a deeper commitment to Judaism through the study of its traditional texts. The outreach should not cause more divisions and fractures but help to enhance the unity of the Jewish people by building bridges to connect Jews of different persuasions. Outreach should enrich lives and society by making the Torah’s wisdom more broadly available. Further, outreach is not only about “one’s own” and we must bring people of different religions together in mutual understanding and respect by engaging in deep interfaith dialogue.

Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, “The Need for Empowering and Ethical Jewish Outreach”, eJewish Philanthropy (18 August 2013) {http://ejewishphilanthropy.com/the-need-for-empowering-and-ethical-jewish-outreach}

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The redactors of the Talmud were more than editors; they were partners in creation

The…redactors of the Talmud…were more than editors – that is, they did not just correct and arrange contents and style in conformity with set standards; they were partners in creation. They provided lengthy explanatory notes, completed defective statements, and supplemented the text with passages of their own. Above all, they initiated a new (rather, old and new) awareness that the discursive, too, deserves to be preserved, that how one arrives at a conclusion has importance beyond the pedagogic lesson of knowing how to arrive at new conclusions in the future. Disputation is an activity of the human mind and, as such, deserves to be known, studied, and explored. The redactors became masters of this genre of learning and influenced subsequent rabbinic learning up to this day.

David Weiss Halivni, Midrash, Mishnah, and Gemara: The Jewish Predilection for Justified Law (Cambridge, MA & London, UK: Harvard University Press, 1986), 3.

For a man, creating a child is almost accidental, where writing a book takes years of thought and effort.

For a man, creating a child – though certainly not raising one – is almost accidental, where writing a book takes years of thought and effort. Or to put it another way: raising a child can seem as ordinary, as continuous, and as ‘easy’ as life itself, while writing a book is like staying up all night. Or yet another way: few sixteen-year-old boys dreaming of being a writer, plotting how to become one, rehearsing and practicing, fantasizing and preparing.

James Wood, “Sins of the Father”, The New Yorker (22 July 2013), 72.

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The overwhelming majority of redactional changes occurred in the discursive passages of the Talmud

…the overwhelming majority of redactional changes occurred in the discursive passages of the Talmud, the ones that contain arguments and discussions, rather than in the apodictic passages, the ones that contain fixed law. Apodictic passages apparently needed no improvement; they were not defective. Such a substantial difference could not have taken place accidentally. There must have been a conscious decision to preserve carefully the fixed law and to neglect benignly the argumentational material. After a conclusion was reached, the means of arriving at it, the arguments that went into making it, seemed no longer important. This should not surprise us; it is exactly the way the authors of the Mishnah and the Braitha (ca. 50-200 C.E.) practiced transmission.

David Weiss Halivni, Midrash, Mishnah, and Gemara: The Jewish Predilection for Justified Law (Cambridge, MA & London, UK: Harvard University Press, 1986), 2.

Can a man or a woman fulfill a sacred devotion to thought, or music, or art, or literature, while fulfilling a proper devotion to spouse or children?

Can a man or a woman fulfill a sacred devotion to thought, or music, or art, or literature, while fulfilling a proper devotion to spouse or children? The novel may be the family’s ideal almanac, but only a handful of the great novelists of either gender had a successful family life. I have always liked Tolstoy’s diary entry from 1863: “Family happiness completely absorbs me, and it’s impossible to do anything.” Tolstoy is indeed the great novelist of family happiness, but delight is tempered by the vision of the father and husband he became—selfish, tyrannical, more faithful to his literary and religious followers than to his biological successors. Even gentle Chekhov joked that he would prefer a wife “who, like the moon, won’t appear in my sky every day.” He contrived to marry late in his short life, and spent much of his marriage in Yalta, while Olga Knipper worked a thousand miles away, in Moscow.

Perhaps the storyteller is especially ill-suited for happy family life. For even as the fiction writer tells humane stories about behavior and motive and family relations – what one might think of as a sympathetic skill – so he or she is also a little like the proverbial choirboy at the funeral: coldly observing, carefully pillaging, rearranging, impersonating, and re-voicing the very material that constitutes “family.”

James Wood, “Sins of the Father”, The New Yorker (22 July 2013), 70.

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Texts become defective if they are not carefully preserved

…texts, and oral texts in particular, become defective only if they are not carefully preserved, if they are not faithfully and reliably transmitted. In this case, we would have to assume that during the Talmudic period, certain texts (those that required redactional changes) composed by some of the great sages were transmitted haphazardly, in an incomplete and defective state. Some texts eventually may even have disappeared altogether: neglecting to preserve texts properly leads not only to defectiveness, but also to disappearance,

David Weiss Halivni, Midrash, Mishnah, and Gemara: The Jewish Predilection for Justified Law (Cambridge, MA & London, UK: Harvard University Press, 1986), 2.

Differences between Transmissional Changes and Redactional Changes

Transmissional changes enter the text without the transmitter’s awareness. In contrast, redactional changes are consciously made for the sake of improving the text, either contextually or aesthetically. Transmissional changes are understandable, though unpredictable. They are mechanical changes, made unwittingly by the transmitter. A person, for instance, may genuinely think he heard the word “can” and transmit it that way, whereas in fact the word “can’t” was said. Not all mechanical changes are a result of faulty hearing; they may also result from faulty speech. The speaker may think he said “can’t,” but the word he actually spoke was “can.” Transmissional changes are simply a part of human susceptibility to error. Redactional changes, on the other hand, are made purposefully by the redactors. When the purpose of these changes is to improve content or correct defects, the question arises: who is responsible for these defects? Did the original authors release defective texts? This is most unlikely; more plausibly, the texts became defective during the interval between the time of the authors and the time of the redactors.

David Weiss Halivni, Midrash, Mishnah, and Gemara: The Jewish Predilection for Justified Law (Cambridge, MA & London, UK: Harvard University Press, 1986), 1.

Stop the madness for constant groupwork

Stop the madness for constant groupwork. Just stop it. And I want to be clear about what I’m saying: because I deeply believe our offices should be encouraging casual, chatty, cafe-style types of interactions. You know: the kind where people come together and serendipitously have an exchange of ideas. That is great. That is great for introverts and it’s great for extroverts. But we need much more privacy, much more freedom, much more autonomy at work.
School – same thing: we need to be teaching kids to work together, for sure. But we also need to be teaching them how to work on their own. This is especially important for extroverted children, too. They need to work on their own, because that is where deep thought comes from, in part.

Susan Cain, “The Power of Introverts”, TED (Long Beach, CA: 28 February 2012) [Video posted at http://youtu.be/c0KYU2j0TM4?t=16m47s on 2 March 2012].

Suspense is a concept with which current blockbuster directors seem unfamiliar

Suspense is a concept with which current blockbuster directors seem unfamiliar. Directors today build suspense by incinerating the top two floors of the White House or by making a dino-alien lay waste to the Golden Gate Bridge. But seeing the Eiffel Tower blown to smithereens or watching the Statue of Liberty topple sideways doesn’t make people afraid of visiting national landmarks — it just trains them to yearn for even splashier C.G.I. effects next year. The career of Roland Emmerich aside, you can’t blow up the White House twice. Next year you’ve got to blow up a city, a country, a planet. A few swimmers on a beach in Amity? Who cares? Every story now has to involve a threat to the entire globe. This is meant to raise the stakes, but it actually lowers them, both by removing the specificity of local places and individual characters and by making it impossible to go see an action movie today without also expecting to witness the demolition of some unfortunate metropolis.

Heather Havrilesky, “‘You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Skyline…'”, New York Times Magazine (4 August 2013), 45.