“Allow yourself to make mistakes and serve the team” – Lesson from Patinkin

“If you ask me, ‘You’re 60, what’s one of the best things you’ve picked up?’ Two things I would say. One is stop trying to be Superman. Allow yourself to make mistakes and serve the team. I spent so many of my younger days thinking it had to be about me, you had to hear me, you had to see me. The other thing is, and it’s a double-edged sword because I live to work, I love it, is that all my life, no matter what happened, I wanted to capitalize on it, turn it into something to move me forward, make my career better. Where do I need to go? As opposed to ‘Are you even for one second where you are? Are you seeing anything you’re doing?’”

Mandy Patinkin quoted in Alex Witchel, “‘I Behaved Abominably'”, The New York Times Magazine (25 August 2013), 58.

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There is only one outcome that the United States can possibly favor: an indefinite draw…

The war is now being waged by petty warlords and dangerous extremists of every sort: Taliban-style Salafist fanatics who beat and kill even devout Sunnis because they fail to ape their alien ways; Sunni extremists who have been murdering innocent Alawites and Christians merely because of their religion; and jihadis from Iraq and all over the world who have advertised their intention to turn Syria into a base for global jihad aimed at Europe and the United States.

Given this depressing state of affairs, a decisive outcome for either side would be unacceptable for the United States. An Iranian-backed restoration of the Assad regime would increase Iran’s power and status across the entire Middle East, while a victory by the extremist-dominated rebels would inaugurate another wave of Al Qaeda terrorism.

There is only one outcome that the United States can possibly favor: an indefinite draw.

By tying down Mr. Assad’s army and its Iranian and Hezbollah allies in a war against Al Qaeda-aligned extremist fighters, four of Washington’s enemies will be engaged in war among themselves and prevented from attacking Americans or America’s allies.

That this is now the best option is unfortunate, indeed tragic, but favoring it is not a cruel imposition on the people of Syria, because a great majority of them are facing exactly the same predicament.

Non-Sunni Syrians can expect only social exclusion or even outright massacre if the rebels win, while the nonfundamentalist Sunni majority would face renewed political oppression if Mr. Assad wins. And if the rebels win, moderate Sunnis would be politically marginalized under fundamentalist rulers, who would also impose draconian prohibitions.

Maintaining a stalemate should be America’s objective. And the only possible method for achieving this is to arm the rebels when it seems that Mr. Assad’s forces are ascendant and to stop supplying the rebels if they actually seem to be winning.

This strategy actually approximates the Obama administration’s policy so far. Those who condemn the president’s prudent restraint as cynical passivity must come clean with the only possible alternative: a full-scale American invasion to defeat both Mr. Assad and the extremists fighting against his regime.

That could lead to a Syria under American occupation. And very few Americans today are likely to support another costly military adventure in the Middle East.

A decisive move in any direction would endanger America; at this stage, stalemate is the only viable policy option left.

Edward N. Luttwak, “In Syria, America Loses if Either Side Wins”, The New York Times (25 August 2013), SR 4.

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The rabbis did take notice of shifts in historical reality, but only when…

…the rabbis did take notice of shifts in historical reality, but only when such comparisons provided some contribution toward an understanding of their own situation. The past thereby emerges as a way of defining or categorizing the present, just as discussions on the cessation of prophecy helped contribute to an understanding of the role of the sages.

Regarding historical causality in rabbinic thought, it appears meaningful only when understood within a framework of moral virtue or culpability. Punishment following sin (for nations as well as individuals) thus becomes a form of moral causality, with the nature of the divine chastisement frequently deriving from the essence of its causes. This is not to say that the rabbis were totally oblivious to the role of history in the halakhic process. Their discussions surrounding gezerot and takkanot clearly portray an awareness of the impact of social realities in the past on the development of certain halakhic behavior. But here too history plays a subservient role, and it is the relevant legal issues that remain at the center of the rabbinic discourse.

Isaiah Gafni, “Concepts of Periodization and Causality in Talmudic Literature”, Jewish History, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), 34.

Publishing has its own significance, even if no one actually reads the book…

Publishing has its own significance, even if no one actually reads the book. Let’s be honest, of the many volumes of commentary on talmudic tractates that are published by people in yeshiva and kollel every year, does anyone read them? With so many great works of rishonim and aharonim on the tractates, as well as the writings of contemporary gedolim, the modern commentaries by unknown talmidei hakhamim are understandably not anyone’s focus. Yet they are of great benefit to the author, in developing his ideas and advancing his learning, and that is reason enough for the works to appear.

Marc B. Shapiro, “Answers to Quiz Questions and Other Comments, part 2”, The Seforim Blog (25 March 2012) {http://seforim.blogspot.com/2012/03/answers-to-quiz-questions-and-other.html}

Social justice: what government does – and fails to do – matter enormously

Social justice requires economic support from government, a concern for family life, and serious efforts to strengthen community institutions and to protect public order. Religious progressives may find their vocation in insisting that our society needs to grapple with each of these issues. At the heart of their arguments should be two principles: compassion is good, but justice is better; and while government certainly cannot solve all problems, what government does – and fails to do – matter enormously.
But how does one define justice? That question is central to sorting out what government’s role in the marketplace should be.

E.J. Dionne Jr., Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith & Politics After the Religious Right (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), 80-81.

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A Gigantic Difference between Manziel and Saban Players

At Media Days, McCarron talked of God, family and the university, and called Saban his “second dad.”

“I’ve always done it how it’s supposed to be done; that’s the way I want to be remembered,” McCarron said. “I don’t want to be remembered as some off-the-wall-type guy doing all this crazy stuff.”

This is a Sabanized man. It is so far from Johnny Football it is hilarious.

Campbell Robertson, “Improvising Anxiety”, The New York Times (25 August 2013), Sports, p. 10.

Masculinity, itself, was a tenuous state of existence in Late Antiquity

…if indeed anatomical equipment was not absolutely determinative of one’s place on the gender spectrum, then it stands to reason that masculinity itself was a tenuous state of existence that required more than possession of a penis. According to Maud Gleason’s assessment, ‘‘manhood was not a state to be definitively and irrefutably achieved, but something always under construction and constantly open to scrutiny.’’ While there is little indication that men actually became (or thought they could become) women, numerous sources do betray an awareness of the possibility of gender slippage, the very real danger of sliding into the much-maligned mediating category of effeminate male, of being infected with, in the words of Philo of Alexandria, the ‘‘disease of effemination’’ (noson the¯leian).

Jason von Ehrenkrook, “Effeminacy in the Shadow of Empire: The Politics of Transgressive Gender in Josephus’s Bellum Judaicum,”  The Jewish Quarterly Review 101:2 (Spring 2011), 148-149.

We tend to think of national sovereignty as an all-or-nothing proposition…

Ancient Israel and Judah’s extended encounters with the Assyrian empire thus point out another lesson that may have a future: While we in our day tend to think of national sovereignty as an all-or-nothing proposition, reality offers up many shades of autonomy in between. For small states in dangerous neighborhoods, degrees of deference and vassalage were more common historically than either total independence or complete submission to foreign rule. It may happen again.

Dov S. Zakheim, “The Geopolitics of Scripture,” The American Interest (July/August 2012), 14.

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The Considerable Importance of the Effect of the Extensive Commentary Tradition on the Shulhan Arukh

This extensive commentary tradition had a further effect of considerable import: By and large, the commentaries to Karo’s Shulhan ‘arukh that appeared on the printed page were written by Ashkenazic rabbis; the Sephardic commentaries did not usually appear alongside the text. In this intensified Ashkenization of a Sephardic text, one can find a larger trace of one of the central shifts from the early modern to the modern in Jewish history, a shift that has parallels in the transformation of Lurianic Kabbalah by the founders of Hasidism in the eighteenth century and one that is undergirded by a massive demographic transformation of Jewish populations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When Karo wrote the Shulhan ‘arukh, the Jews of the Ottoman Empire were among the largest Jewish communities in the early modern world. When Gombiner wrote his commentary a century later, this demographic profile was beginning to change; and when Israel Meir ha-Kohen composed his in the nineteenth century, the Jews of the Levant were but a small minority of the world’s Jewish population.

Yaacob Dweck, “What is a Jewish Book?” AJS Review 34:2 (November 2010), 371.

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A Couple of Realities Regarding the Middle East…

…too often we forget that the people in these countries are not just objects. They are subjects; they have agency. South Africa had a moderate post-apartheid experience because of Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk. Japan rebuilt itself as a modern nation in the late 19th century because its leaders recognized their country was lagging behind the West and asked themselves, “What’s wrong with us?” Outsiders can amplify such positive trends, but the local people have to want to own it.

As that reality has sunk in, so has another reality, which the American public intuits: Our rising energy efficiency, renewable energy, hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling are making us much less dependent on the Middle East for oil and gas. The Middle East has gone from an addiction to a distraction.

Thomas L. Friedman, “Foreign Policy by Whisper and Nudge”, The New York Times (25 August 2013), SR 11.