Category Archives: Uncategorized

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.

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.

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.

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.

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].

Considering Teaching Content vs. Cognitive Skills

Before we fall down the techno-rabbit hole and demand tablets in every classroom, we need to seriously reconsider, for example, whether teaching content, as opposed to cognitive skills, can adequately prepare children for 21st-century professions. In other words, our nation’s educational mindset – one that traditionally uses fact-regurgitation as a marker of success – desperately requires a reboot.

Jennifer Miller, “Flipped Out”, Spirit (August 2013), 74-75.

The Printed Book Is Not Obsolete

For many people, as a number of studies show, reading is a genuinely tactile experience—how a book feels and looks has a material impact on how we feel about reading. This isn’t necessarily Luddism or nostalgia. The truth is that the book is an exceptionally good piece of technology—easy to read, portable, durable, and inexpensive. Unlike the phase-change move toward digital that we saw in music, the transition to e-books is going to be slow; coexistence is more likely than conquest. The book isn’t obsolete.

James Surowiecki, “E-Book vs. P-Book”, The New Yorker (29 July 2013), 23.

Something creep…

Something creepy happened when mystery became secular, secrecy became a technology, and privacy became a right. The inviolability of the self replaced the inscrutability of God. No wonder people got buggy about it.

Jill Lepore, “The Prism”, The New Yorker (24 June 2013), 35.

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The term Halakhah

The term Halakhah does not occur in the Bible; it is found only in tannaitic and amoraic literature and not even in other literary sources of the Second Temple period. In its form, Halakhah is an Aramaic noun and the verb (halak = “to walk” or “to go”) from which it is derived, serves in its various forms, to denote a person who observes the Lord’s Torah and fulfils its commandments. Thus, one “walks” not only in “the ways of the Lord” (Exodus 18:20), but also “in His statutes” (Leviticus 26:3), “in His judgments” (Ezekiel 37:24) and “in His Torah” (Exodus 16:4). Walking is parallel to observing. Just as one walks along known roads but the act of walking also lays new paths, so too, although one observes the commandments in established ways, the act of observance itself creates new forms.
The definition given by Nathan b. Jehiel of Rome, the 11th century author of the Talmudic dictionary, Arukh, which describes Halakhah as “something which came from ancient days and [will last] to the end [of time], or [alternatively] something according to which Israel goes,” accurately reflects the double meaning of the term: 1. A tradition followed throughout generations, and 2. A way accepted by the people as a whole. This definition also implies that the Halakhah is not explicit in the Bible and that, unlike the Biblical commandments, its source is not in direct revelation. The term, nevertheless, does carry the connotation of authority which is in no way inferior to that of the commandments of the Torah itself. Indeed, the parameters of the Biblical commandments – such as the place and time of their observance and who is obliged to perform them – are fixed by the Halakhah.

Ephraim E. Urbach, The Halakhah: Its Sources and Development, trans. Raphael Posner (Ramat Gan: Massada; Jerusalem: Yad la-Talmud, 1986), 2-3.