Of Daddies and Stories and Personal Fulfillment

I passed by this ad on the way to work today. It took me a few moments to figure out what it was about, but then it came together: the ad is a reference to a scandal at the University of Illinois this year, in which trustees and high administrative officials pressured the admissions office to accept applicants from well-connected political families.

The ad stuck with me as I continued on my way. Perhaps this was because I have spent a good deal of time over the last week writing a couple of papers examining the role that the thinking of Immanuel Kant has played in shaping American higher education. We’ll get to the link between Kant’s thought and this ad in a second, but I need to explain a little bit about what I’ve been wrestling with.

Like other Enlightenment thinkers, Kant believed that man’s enemy was enslavement, that human beings yearned to be free. Freedom for Kant meant exercising one’s own will and reason, independent of any institutions or beliefs that might cloud one’s judgment. In this, Kant amplifies a central idea in Plato, who says that all education is really recollection: if we simply apply our clear reason, we can find the truth, which resides within our immortal soul.

For Kant, religious institutions are frequently a form of enslavement. They keep individuals from thinking for themselves, and teach them to behave out of a slavish adherence to tradition. For many of Kant’s intellectual inheritors, it is not only religious institutions, but religious ideas themselves, that become a problem. If science can explain the world better than religion, then to maintain “religious” ideas about the creation or miracles or history is blind to the facts and ultimately slavish. Religious ideas, and not only organized religion, are problematic.

All of this led to three fundamental postulates of secularism in the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries: 1) Religion should be separate from the political apparatus of the state; 2) Religion had no place in political discussions; 3) Religion would ultimately decline and become irrelevant to most people’s lives. At this point, while most people in western democracies would agree on point 1, there would be considerable disagreement over point 2, and there would be near uniform rejection of point 3 (religion hasn’t gone away). This has led some to argue that we are living in a postsecular age.

Now whether Kant himself would have argued for all three of these points is up for discussion, and more serious scholars of Kant and Enlightenment philosophy are welcome to weigh in. But one of the things that I think came about through the de-nuancing of Kant and Enlightenment philosophy was a cultural climate uncomfortable with notions of inherited identity, which are seen by (too) many to be yet another form of enslavement, keeping individuals from achieving their full uniqueness–which, after all, is the aim of life, right?

Saba Mahmood, author of a wonderfully insightful study called Politics of Piety, builds another narrative. She bases her theory on Aristotle and Foucault, and uses it to explain how Muslim women in Egypt have taken on pietistic forms of observance (in Jewish parlance we would say they’ve become ba’alot teshuva) in a way that is not demeaning to their sense of selfhood, but rather a fulfillment of it. “Tradition,” she writes, “is not a set of symbols and idioms that justify present practices, neither is it an unchanging set of cultural prescriptions that stand in contrast to what is changing, contemporary, or modern. Nor is it a historically fixed social structure. Rather, the past is the very ground through which the subjectivity and self-understanding of a tradition’s adherents are constituted.”

That is to say, when I eat the matzah on Passover; when I circumcise my son on the eighth day after his birth; when I recite the Shema in the morning or recite the Maariv prayer at night, all out of a sense of obligation, I am not giving up my agency or my autonomy–I am, rather, fulfilling it.

The assumption of the ad here is that it doesn’t matter who your daddy is. And while I believe that’s true, that each life is its own individual story, I also believe that it matters very much who your parents and grandparents were, what choices they made, what inheritance they left you, what stories they began for you. As the linking of the holidays of Passover and Shavuot teaches us, to be free does not mean only to throw off the yoke of enslavement–it also means embracing one’s story.

For too long, our colleges and universities have been focused on only the first half, teaching critical thinking and untying the knots of previous identities. For too long, they have let slip the essential second step, weaving a coherent sense of identity in the wake of the unweaving. I believe we are starting to turn a corner, and to find a way that identity can be not only about freedom from, but also about commitment to; not only about rejection of the determinism of the past, but also about embracing the truth of the story it bears.

 

Broken Walls and Broken Glass

The 20th anniversary of the demolition of the Berlin Wall got a lot of press yesterday, and deservedly so. Yet I hardly saw a whimper about the 71st anniversary of Kristallnacht, which took place on November 9-10.

The coincidence of these anniversaries is striking. Both were instances of violence. Both were instances of breaking. Yet one was a destructive event that hastened the othering, subjugation, and elimination of a group of people for the sake of German identity; the other was a destructive event that was constructive at heart, and that brought about unification, reconciliation, and formation of a new German identity.

In the 51 years between Kristallnacht and the fall of the wall, the very idea of personhood, of nationhood, shifted dramatically. In 1938, the logic of nations was still rooted in a concept of ethno-racial identity. By 1989, human rights trumped all, and its simple and inexorable power broke through the wall and brought down the Soviet Union. In the ensuing decades, neoliberalism–vaguely defined as a non-dogmatic commitment to democratic and capitalist ideals worldwide–became the  norm, leaving little room for ethno-racial-religious notions of identity. Economics would unite everyone, and walls would continue to come down. At least that was the idea.

Of course, these narratives form the backdrop to the wall that gets the most attention in the world these days, the wall that separates much of Israel and the West Bank. And the questions of these two moments–of November 9, 1938 and November 9, 1989–linger. As Sergio Della Pergola, the noted Israeli demographer, said in a talk yesterday here at NU Hillel, the state of Israel has to choose between three values, of which it can only actually have two: Jewishness, democracy, and geography. It can be Jewish and on the land, but it cannot be democratic; it can be democratic on the land, but not be Jewish; it can be Jewish and democratic, but not on the land.

By the logic of human rights, we have to pay attention to the demographic reality that within a matter of months, 50% of the population between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River will be Arabs. By the logic of ethno-religious identity, the Jewish State and the Arab state (as they were termed in UN Resolution 181) need to, deserve to, and pragmatically should exist. What walls need to be broken, and what walls need to be erected and protected, to bring about peace? That, to me anyway, is the true question of November 9.

 

How do we read these tea leaves?

So the United Jewish Communities “Jewish Hero Awards Contest” has announced its 20 semifinalists. Conspicuously, nearly half of the names are Chabad shlichim (emissaries).

Granted that this is a popularity contest and therefore of no empirical value, it’s still worth asking the question: What does this suggest? There are a lot of possible ways to read these tea leaves:

From a game theory (sort of) angle:

- Chabad shlichim disproportionately inspire a deep connection with their communities, resulting in greater motivation on the part of those communities to nominate them for something like this.

- Chabad shlichim inspire deeper connections with a small number of people who themselves feel inspired to make a significant effort to get the shlichim nominated.

From a PR angle:

- Chabad as an organization was smarter about leveraging this PR opportunity than other organizations (Hillel did nothing to my knowledge, for instance, while Uri l’Tzedek did a great job, and therefore got Shmuly Yanklowitz on the list).

Do we want to go further? There’s lots to be said, but I feel like most of it has said before, and frankly these results don’t surprise many of us. I guess the real question–as usual–is what might the rest of us learn from these events?

 

Weddings, Music, and Fusion

Snapshots from a weekend:

1. This afternoon we attended a wedding of two Jews. Backyard, simple, classy. Casting straight out of a Hugh Grant movie. The ceremony was performed by a judge. Beforehand the mother of the groom explained how the couple had “personalized” their wedding–everything from the huppah to the food to the music was their concoction, with a little help here and there from parents. Sheva Brachot, the traditional seven nuptial blessings, were recited later on. There was a ketubah, though it took the form of vows rather than a traditional Jewish marriage contract. Lots of men wore kippot.  After the ceremony the couple “spent a few moments together in yichud,” or seclusion.

My mother in law asked me afterwards if it was a kosher wedding, and I responded that according to halakha it wasn’t–there was no point at which the groom gave the bride a ring and said, “With this ring you are consecrated to me according to the law of Moses and Israel” in front of two sabbath-observant witnesses; the ketubah was not technically a ketubah. Yet the fact remains that, in these times, this was a pretty Jewish wedding.

2. One of the relatives coming to the wedding relayed the following story: Her flight from New York was delayed on Friday for hours and hours. An Orthodox-looking woman and her child were to get on the flight, and were clearly getting worried about whether they would make it to their destination for Shabbos. They get on the plane when it’s time to board, and as they are taxiing to the runway, they realize that they won’t make it. They ask the flight attendant if they can be let off the plane. Amazingly, the flight attendant says yes. The plane taxis back to the terminal, they are allowed off the plane, their luggage is removed, and the plane now has to get back in line to take off. It adds an hour to the flight, which itself was not direct–many people missed connections.

 

The End of Jewish Day Schools?

I have been slow to respond to Gary Rosenblatt’s important column from two weeks ago. The whole thing is worth reading, but here is the key nugget:

We need to think on a communal level which values and lifestyles we are willing to sacrifice and which are most important to keep.

Now my wife would say that I am given to imagining apocalyptic scenarios. But of course I also predicted a major financial collapse in the U.S. for a while now, so my prognostications have to be worth something. Gary is right of course: We are at a moment of reckoning, and old assumptions for all our nonprofits, and particularly our day schools, have to be reassessed and addressed honestly.

As one of my teachers told me years ago, “You send your kids to school to be socialized. Anything you really want them to learn, you have to take responsibility for yourself.” Now I don’t quite believe that. I do think my kids actually learn stuff at school, and I have great confidence in their teachers. But having seen many products of expensive Jewish day school educations in my current work, I can testify that all of them come out with fine college prep in secular studies; but many, if not most, have been allowed to neglect their Jewish studies. Indeed, for many, their Jewish courses don’t even show up on their transcripts. To me this is a serious indictment, and it reinforces my teacher’s point: Many people send their kids to day school as a way of socializing them with other Jews, but not in an effort to develop a serious engagement with Torah.

I find something pernicious in the idea of having the state pay for “secular studies,” since that means they can never be integrated with religious studies. But I find something even more problematic in our rigorous approach to secularism in this country–which Gary addresses in his column. At the same time, as a product of public schooling myself, I think there’s something to be said for a public school education coupled with a rigorous commitment to Torah study and rich informal Jewish education.

Like Gary, I don’t have the answers. But I do see the writing on the wall, and it’s about time we had a community conversation about what we want, what is possible, and what our priorities are.

 

Stanley Fish on Terry Eagleton’s Getting Religion

From Fish’s blog at the NYT:

Eagleton acknowledges that the links forged are not always benign — many terrible things have been done in religion’s name — but at least religion is trying for something more than local satisfactions, for its “subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself, in relation to what it takes to be its transcendent source of life.” And it is only that great subject, and the aspirations it generates, that can lead, Eagleton insists, to “a radical transformation of what we say and do.”

The other projects, he concedes, provide various comforts and pleasures, but they are finally superficial and tend to the perpetuation of the status quo rather than to meaningful change: “A society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized politics and consumerist economics is unlikely to cut to the depth where theological questions can ever be properly raised.”

By theological questions, Eagleton means questions like, “Why is there anything in the first place?”, “Why what we do have is actually intelligible to us?” and “Where do our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility come from?”

The fact that science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation can not ask — never mind answer — such questions should not be held against them, for that is not what they do.

Okay, I say a lot of the same things. But I also think that the rest of this column reinforces my contention that both the critics of the new atheism and the new atheists themselves are still talking about religion in essentially Protestant terms. (Or, as I would say, the idea of religion itself is a Protestant notion.) Jewish life can’t be broken out this way, and while Jewish thought and ritual are certainly animated by some of the same questions of other traditions, I think it’s really important to avoid the “all religions are essentially the same” trap. They’re not. Each tradition is its own language, with its own ways of understanding the world that are difficult, if not impossible, to translate.

Still, I’m always happy to see thoughtful intellectuals taking on Ditchens.

 

A New Pardigm: AskBigQuestions

This morning’s Daily Northwestern writes about the development of an initiative I founded last year called AskBigQuestions. The article focuses in particular on ABQ’s growth from being exclusively sponsored by Hillel to becoming an independent entity with sponsoring organizations from a variety of religious and scholarly communities.

This piece (see page 67), which I wrote last spring, tells a bit of the history of AskBigQuestions. What has changed since that time is that we have figured out one of the central conundrums of the initiative, namely: How does it relate to Hillel’s mission of inspiring students to make an enduring commitment to Jewish life? The Big Questions of ABQ are questions common to all human beings, regardless of one’s background. That’s precisely what makes it attractive to so many students. Yet it’s also what makes it difficult to explain to Jewish organizations and funders, who have often asked: “Why should we support something that brings together Jewish and non-Jewish students for discussions about topics that aren’t necessarily Jewish?” In other words, ABQ doesn’t promote Jewish particularism, it promotes humanism, and that’s not  necessarily part of Hillel’s agenda.

In moving ABQ outside of Hillel, while retaining a key sponsoring role for Hillel within a larger multivocal conversation, we’ve solved a key piece of this problem. The critics are right on this score: getting students in touch with life’s Big Questions is not solely Hillel’s challenge; rather, it is a challenge for the entire university community, of which Hillel is but one member.

Yet the key point remains: Hillel needs to be a leader in this effort, because we still believe in the fundamental value proposition that it is good for all students to ask these questions–including Jewish students. Our hope is that as all students engage the Big Questions of life, they will engage in the journey of self-discovery and engagement that leads to exploration of where they come from and development of their identity. My hope would be that through AskBigQuestions, Catholic students will explore their Catholic roots; Muslim students will explore their own beliefs and traditions; secular humanist students will look to the great philosophers; Jews will uncover Jewish ideas and texts; and all of these students will encounter one another. An image to represent this might be something like this:

This diagram represents what I think is the greatest aspect of AskBigQuestions:These questions are the common animating questions of the world’s great religious and scholarly traditions, and therefore they provide a common meeting point of conversation–or, what some of us would call the commons. By creating an environment in which we can explore, and not argue about, our multiple identities–secular, religious, ethnic, cultural–ABQ at once creates a universal humanistic common ground, and encourages particularistic expression. What we do with ABQ is redraw the line of religious and secular in a way that rejects the binary posited by so many in both religious and secular spheres, and instead includes them both in a common conversation about the meaning of human experience.

We don’t have to choose between being religious or secular, particularist or universalist. In today’s world, we have to be both: we have to go deeper in discovering our own identities at the same time as we go deeper in discovering what links us with one another.