We’ve just had an earthquake here. In case you’re wondering, there’s a bracha for just such an event. Now’s your chance to say it! Blessed are you haShem, our God, king of the universe, who enacts the works of creation / ‘oseh ma’asei breishit.
Not a bracha one often gets the opportunity to use. And yes, it is the same as the bracha for lightning. Nothing like having the primeval world poke its nose into our busy day and remind us of deep things.
Shabbat shalom.
Shayna
In case you haven’t checked my calendar link, I thought I’d let you know about a series of six classes I hope to give in May and June. Each class will be 60-90 minutes long and they will be given in private homes on Mondays from 1.30 pm to around 3 pm, from May 6 to June 17 (we’re skipping May 20, Victoria Day). The cost for the series is $150.
Each class will address one of the Six Remembrances/Zechirot: six Torah passages that require us to remember something. (In some siddurs this list of six appears at the end of the morning prayers, along with “Ani Ma’amin”, a brief credo based on Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles, and the Ten Commandments.)
The six remembrances are:
– the exodus from Egypt
– the experience at Sinai
– the attack by Amalek
– God’s anger at the generation of the desert
– God’s punishment of Miriam on the road out of Egypt
– the sabbath
No prior level of Jewish education or observance is required; classes are conducted in English and materials are provided in translation. If you’re interested, then email me to let me know.
Shayna (who seems to have memory on the brain lately)
A recent article in the New York Times, “Borges, Paradox and Perception” (read it here http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/borges-and-the-paradox-of-the-seen) reminded me of one of those abiding problems that makes me look at the world in a different way.
The writer, William Egginton, discusses the relationship between Jorge Luis Borges’ story “Funes the Memorious” and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. (A copy of the short story may currently be found here http://www.srs-pr.com/literature/borges-funes.pdf. You must read it. I will grant no exemptions. You must.) Egginton says that “that the uncertainty principle was intuited by Heisenberg’s contemporary, the Argentine poet and fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges, and predicted by philosophers centuries and even millenniums before him.”
Egginton then goes on to suggest that what all these scientists and philosophers–and at least one poet, Borges–shared was the assumption that the world presented itself to us in paradox, inviting us to infer physical continuity and a separate reality not contingent on our own observation. Yet deeper analysis always ends by confronting us with the elusive nature of observation–that to observe is to manipulate and that the act of observation changes the observed.
Borges’ fictional Ireneo Funes is a human being tormented by the perfection of his memory, a peculiarity that befell him after an accident that paralyzed him. He now remembers everything he has ever observed in all its detail and particularity. The result is that he is completely incapacitated from generalizing, as he cannot erase enough details from his observations to see overarching ideas or themes. (Yes, Borges mentions Platonic forms.) He writes of Funes before the accident:
“…For nineteen years he had lived as one in a dream: he looked without seeing, listened without hearing, forgetting everything, almost everything.”
Or, as Holmes observed to Watson in “A Scandal in Bohemia”, “You see but you do not observe.” We are all half-blind, ignoring and forgetting what we see.
“…Now his perception and his memory were infallible,” Borges continues. “Funes remembered not only every leaf of every tree of every wood, but also every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it.”
What Funes lacks is uncertainty; he alone is granted perfect perception and the result is a nightmare. In a world without blurriness, continuity becomes impossible. (Any mathematicians reading this are laughing beneath their breath, thinking of how continuity is defined in their field.) Perfect knowledge is paralysing.
And thus the ability to forget becomes a blessing. In Jewish tradition there is an “angel of forgetting”. Among this angel’s jobs is visiting every fetus just before its birth. Apparently we each spent our time in the womb learning all of Jewish tradition and, just as we are about to be born, this angel touches us and we immediately forget everything we have learned. (The little dent above your upper lip marks where the angel touched you.)
But for me the real truth of this charming midrash is that forgetfulness is a necessity for living in the world. By letting our experiences cloud over a little, we exchange perfect observation for reasoning and understanding. This Heisenbergian trade-off is what allows us to ignore the paradox of the world for long enough to live in it.
One of the qualities attributed to God is omniscience–a quality that causes no end of trouble philosophically. (How do you reconcile divine omniscience with human free will? with cause and effect? with time’s arrow?) But we, as imperfect copies made in God’s image, are spared the burden of omniscience. Instead we can live in the paradox of a world that is all too real and at the same time not real at all.
Yours for more imagination and less reality,
Shayna
Shalom, Chevrah.
It’s been a while but I’ve thought of something that might interest you.
For the 30 or so years that I’ve lived in Toronto, the dominant–indeed, the only agency certifying the kosher status of food purveyors was COR — the Council of Orthodox Rabbis. (Their website is here: http://www.cor.ca) Of course, prepared food coming in from other parts of the planet would have other hechshers/kosher certifying marks — the OU or Kof-K from the US, the MK from Montreal. And those other marks were perfectly reliable and everything in the garden was lovely for the consumer.
By way of contrast, I think of my years living in New York, where any restaurant that wanted a hechsher could get one…from somebody! Restaurants that used foods from doubtful sources, restaurants that were open on Saturday, posing deep problems to the kosher consumer–there was always some rabbi who would certify every establishment as “kosher”. As a result, it was impossible to get a simple answer to the question: is it kosher? Being told that the place had a hechsher was just the beginning of the inquiry. Who gives it? What are his standards? Is he affiliated to any rabbinical organization? Where was he ordained? What other facilities does he certify? Tedious, infuriating, time-consuming, and often unproductive.
Well, to mix a metaphor, the quiet waters of Toronto’s kosher Eden are being roiled. It started a few years ago with the attempt by KSA, an American certifying agency, to supervise and certify a Krispy Kreme donut outlet. This elicited a mixed response of doubts about their standards and the assertion (with a genuine halachic basis) that “local is better” when it comes to hechshers. Things died down pretty quickly but now big waves are rolling in.
First was the establishment of a new local hechsher–Badatz Toronto. (The first word, used by many kosher agencies around the world, is an acronym from “beit din tzedeq”–”a righteous tribunal”.) Suddenly, a number of restaurants are switching hechshers to Badatz.
And then this spring came news that the other major Canadian hechsher–MK–was stepping on COR’s toes. See this article:
“Parties quiet on change in Sobeys hechsher” http://www.cjnews.com/food/parties-quiet-change-sobeys-hechsher
Of course, at the bottom of all this is money. COR charges a fee to certify the kashrut of a product or premises–understandably, as it is a tremendous amount of work. Badatz and MK aren’t in business out of pure good-heartedness either. All of these certifying agencies, while engaged in a great service for the kosher consumer, are also businesses that have to pay the rent and buy supplies for the coffee machine. So what we have here is capitalism at work; a successful monopoly–COR–is being attacked by competitors, both local and distant.
And what this reminds me of is the phone wars that followed the break-up of Ma Bell. Gather round, kiddies, and I’ll tell you a tale. Once upon a time, telephone service used to be a monopoly. Each province had one service provider and that was where you got your phone. They were all regulated by the federal telecommunications authority, which ensured that basic home service was affordable.
The downside was that there was no price or service competition; they charged what they charged and they did what they did, and your only choice was to buy or not. Doing without a phone was not practical politics for most of us, and so everyone knuckled under and bought their phones and their phone service. The service I grew up with was very good but the price of unregulated services such as long distance was breathtaking. When I lived away from home, the cost of airfare began to seem competitive with our phone bills.
The upside was simplicity. (sigh)
Now, of course, buying a phone and subscribing to a phone plan requires days, if not weeks, of investigation. Assessing what your needs are, gathering information about various plans and providers, balancing cost with reliability and convenience–you can probably get a PhD in phone buying these days. The actual monetary cost is much cheaper, but when you factor in the time and aggravation involved in choosing, the gain can seem illusory.
You can see where I’m going now, I’m sure. If COR breaks up, we’ll be living in New York North as far as hechshers are concerned. We’ll all have to get our doctorates in the minutiae of which hechshers impose which standards and which are less reliable. We may see a drop in kosher food costs — wouldn’t that be a miracle! — but we’ll pay a price in other ways. Changes a-coming! Get ready.
Yours in troglodyte mode,
Shayna
So, the makers of Twinkies are going into bankruptcy. See here, among many articles that will give you the full scoop: http://www.suntimes.com/business/16425279-761/twinkie-maker-hostess-to-close-illinois-workers-to-lose-jobs.html
I will ignore the serious economic side of the story (it’s entering its third[!] bankruptcy to quash a strike) for the moment and will speak personally. Twinkies were one of the great forbidden foods of my youth. Keeping kosher, I could only look longingly at those goodies which were not under rabbinical supervision. No hechsher, no eating. Twinkies, which had such a high profile in popular culture, seemed to represent the acme of treif temptation. They and Oreos were what I yearned to eat.
Eventually, of course, I did eat them. When I lived in New York, I had access to numerous American products which had hechshers unavailable on the Canadian version. Finally, I tasted a Twinkie! Result: feh.
Now, I claim no great virtue in my dietary choices; those of you who know me personally know that this is an obvious concession. (My downfall is salty and savory stuff, though; sweets are not what get me.) But I learned a couple of things from the Twinkie fiasco. The obvious lesson was that nothing is what it’s cracked up to be. No big news there.
The second one is more interesting, I think; having a hechsher is no guarantee of nutritive or gustatory value. In fact, kosher polysorbate-60 is no better for you than the treif stuff is. And that, it seemed to me, represented a deeper lesson. Technical compliance with kashrut rules doesn’t necessarily make food better. Enlarging the idea, technical compliance with mitzvot doesn’t necessarily make people better.
This is one of those difficult questions that keep cropping up. If one of the purposes of the mitzvot is to give us an optimal set of instructions for life, why do we keep running into technically observant Jews who are not great people? The voyages of many a ba’al teshuva and plenty of frum-from-birthniks have foundered against the rocks of the imperfection of the Jewish people taken individually.
It is easy to point to the thematic mitzvot — e.g., “Love your fellow as yourself” or “Be holy” (Leviticus/VaYiqra, Ch. 19) — and say that our imperfect co-religionists are missing the point of those. But I doubt that many people set out to be villains or even flawed; I suspect that they all think they are doing their best to comply with even those great mitzvot, despite the difficulties. After all, it’s much easier to watch out for technical rules about how to separate meat and milk than it is to “be holy.” Where do you even begin with that?!
I have no solution for this. The theory, according to some, is that the self-discipline and focus required for the technical mitzvot develop our character to combat the larger temptations in life. I hope that this is so. But empirical observation still seems to be throwing brickbats at it!
Imperfectly yours,
Shayna
—————-
“I know of no mistake that I could not have made myself.” — Goethe
Hello? Tap, tap, tap! [Peering through the screen] I’ve thought of something interesting to say. (Actually, I’ve thought of other things but haven’t got myself in order to post them before they became stale-dated.) But here I am now. Perhaps you’re still out there?
I was struck by an odd thing while listening to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg torture the Spanish language as he attempted to speak to his city’s citizens about the superstorm. Painful. Especially in contrast to the ease with which Obama spoke Spanish on the campaign trail.
And it occurred to me that there seems to be a greater fluency in languages among the politicians of the left than those of the right. Of course there are honourable exceptions on the right and execrable exceptions on the left; Abba Eban is one that springs to mind on the right. His native English was impeccable but so far as I can tell, so was his Hebrew. I started to wonder why this might be.
It occurred to me that this may relate to the psychology of how we relate to the other. For conservatives, the other is unconnected at best, a competitor who must be conquered or controlled at worst. This is a necessary consequence of the adherence to the capitalist viewpoint which regards weakness as something of which to take competitive advantage. Helping others is antithetical to one’s own interests; offering help is only catering to those who need to learn to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
On the other hand, for liberals, the other is socially connected and a joint participant in society, one who may need help or may be appealed to for help, depending on the inequality present (if any). This is a product of both economic and legal theories associated with the left.
In the result, there is no reward for communicating with the other in conservative theory and an absolute necessity for communicating with the other in liberal theory. I don’t think that either side’s politicians consciously subscribe to this viewpoint but I suspect that somewhere underneath the surface of their minds, these ideas either discourage or encourage them in their endeavours to master another language. What is the reward for the effort? How useful will it be? Subconsciously, the answers to those questions are very different in different parts of the political spectrum.
Yours for multilingualism,
Shayna
No, this is not another whiny post about how hot it is here and how I feel as though I’m being slowly poached.
It’s actually about cooking. I was thinking this past Shabbat afternoon about why there are so many rules particular to cooking in the halachah/Jewish law about keeping Shabbat. As anyone familiar with the halachah knows, there are plenty of rules for almost every activity you might consider doing on Shabbat. Playing baseball, running through the sprinkler, walking over to visit friends in another part of town, and a hundred other activities all come within the halachic rubric of the Shabbat laws. But cooking is special.
Cooking involves many different kinds of melachah or labour; grinding, chopping, soaking, straining, and, above all, heating all involve halachic questions on Shabbat. Structurally, this all arises because cooking is one of the more intricate processes to impose physical changes on the stuff around us. It is also a daily necessity. So naturally it interacts in numerous ways with the laws surrounding Shabbat.
But on another level, it seems to me that something else is happening here. For those of us who are carnivores, every meat meal comes at the cost of another life; even for vegetarians, there is a necessary arrogance involved in claiming the right to turn a piece of the planet into a part of ourselves. And that arrogance is the opposite of the purpose of Shabbat.
Take a cupful of “And God rested”, add a soupcon of imitatio dei et voila! The recipe for Shabbat (as set out in the Ten Commandments in Shmot/Exodus Ch. 20): God stopped making the world, and so for one day a week we stop too. The act of cooking is the supreme claim to control the world around us; we not only transform, we absorb what we have transformed.
No wonder there are so many fetters on our ability to cook on Shabbat. It is a day upon which we choose not to exercise dominion, not to be in control of the material world around us; for twenty-five hours, we release our clutch on the stuff of daily life. Emblematic of that are the numerous changes in that most quotidian of activities, making food. Shabbat is not about what we can lay claim to and colonize. As Wordsworth put it:
THE world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
Shabbat is the antidote for that lack of self that is externalized into the need to consume.
Shayna
