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I just recorded a new podcast (12 minutes and change) exploring the idea of play and playfulness and the Passover seder. It’s available here.

Some of us with young children are blessed with the opportunity to be wide awake and preparing breakfast on a Sunday morning at 6:30 a.m. Such is my life. For the uninitiated: At that hour, NPR in Chicago airs funky documentaries on a program called Re:Sound, part of the Third Coast International Audio Festival. This is the stuff that will one day become Ira Glass, but which is today oftentimes just out there, in both senses of the phrase.

Lo and behold, this morning (or yesterday morning, by the time many of you read this), they’re airing a documentary interviewing what sounded like a bunch of American World War II vets. I tuned in mid-way through. They’re telling their stories about their ship being stopped, something about the British and the French and the Germans. I wasn’t paying much attention. I was more focused on brewing my coffee. But then my ears perked up, as they mentioned they were on a ship full of Jewish refugees bound for Palestine. Slowly but surely, it turned out they were telling the story of the ship Exodus 1947, made famous by Leon Uris and Paul Newman. So of course they got my attention.

The story is worth listening to. (Here it is.) What I found particularly interesting, however, was the short interview afterwards with the creator of the documentary. Specifically, he wound up dwelling on the question of whether or not any of these young men were aware of what they were getting into when they signed up. Most of them claim they were, but one of them says the others are mis-remembering, that in fact none of them knew that they were going to be attempting to run a British blockade and be part of a story that would turn the tide of history. The producer reflects on the way in which we tell our stories, and how our narratives don’t always jibe with history, even though they are true to us now.

One reaction is to point out the poetic symmetry between this moment of mis-remembering and the more famous conversation around the fallibility of Holocaust testimonies, which Daniel Mendelsohn explored in his book Lost. What does it mean, and what does it matter, to say that this kind of thing is counter-factual? It doesn’t do a great deal to the story itself, but it tells us a tremendous amount about the human psyche. At the same time, it calls into question our notions of objective historical truth in ways that may be troubling.

Related to this is the broader question of the relative value of history and memory, a timely question as Passover fast approaches. In his seminal book Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi makes this very distinction (he was an emininent historian at Columbia), arguing that it is memory and not history that preserves the Jewish people. I have reflected on this before in relation to the Exodus (from Egypt, that is): the historical question (did the Exodus really happen?) is not nearly as meaningful as What can we learn from the story of the Exodus? As anyone who has read the book of Exodus knows, it is an account full of gaps and questions–the stuff of midrash. And as anyone who has read the Passover Haggadah knows, we don’t even read the story of the Exodus at the seder! Instead we cut straight to the gaps and questions and midrash. (As the Mishnah tells us: “One begins in shame and ends in praise. And one expounds–creates midrash–on the passage [from Deuteronomy 26] ‘My ancestor was a wandering Aramean’ until its conclusion.”)

We are too close to the events of Exodus 1947 to stop being interested in the facts. They matter too much for present-day politics. But as the producer of the episode said, he aimed to sidestep those questions for the purposes of this story, and instead chose to focus on the enduring human questions within the story as it is told by its participants. This is an essential move for a twenty-first century consciousness–for those of us drawn to religous narrative and all of us striving to be human.

One of the difficulties presented by the system of sacrifices which we begin to read about in this week’s Torah portion, Vayikra, is that sacrifices run against the grain of some of our key modern sensibilities. They seem a bit magical, as though by killing and burning parts (or all) of an animal, we balance our accounts with God. We can resort to symbolic or allegorical forms of interpretation, but behind the scrim of those approaches lies the observation of philosopher (and former Northwestern faculty member) Charles Taylor, one of the most significant thinkers about religion and modernity today:

Modern Westerners have a clear boundary between mind and world, even mind and body. Moral and other meanings are “in the mind.” They cannot reside outside, and thus the boundary is firm. But formerly it was not so. Let us take a well-known example of influence inhering in an inanimate substance, as this was understood in earlier times. Consider melancholy: black bile was not the cause of melancholy, it embodied, it was melancholy. The emotional life was porous here; it didn’t simply exist in an inner, mental space. Our vulnerability to the evil, the inwardly destructive, extended to more than just spirits that are malevolent. It went beyond them to things that have no wills, but are nevertheless redolent with the evil meanings.

Taylor argues that this distinction, between inner thought and outward reality, lies at the heart of modernity. And there’s no question that, to use his phrase, it marks an inescapable framework of our experience. While our ancestors might have said that God resides in the Temple, that He literally spoke to Moses from the burning bush, or that the ashes of a red heifer literally made someone clean, today we would call people who made these claims crazy. Of course, we have ancient sources–beginning even as early as the book of Deuteronomy–that begin to make the inner-outer distinction. But Taylor would argue that it is in modernity that such formerly marginal thoughts become central, the basic frameworks of our thinking. And that’s what makes Leviticus so challenging for so many.

One of the other places where the ancients were perhaps ahead of their time was in Rabban Gamliel’s statement about Passover: “In every generation each individual is obligated to see him/herself as though s/he personally left Egypt.” As I have written about elsewhere, the key point in this sentence is “as if,” which demonstrates the Rabbis’ awareness of the symbolic nature of the seder. It presupposes historical distance: we are not literally leaving Egypt, we are remembering something that happened a long time ago. Like Civil War re-enacters, we can put on the costume and play for a while, but at the end of the day we will go back to our homes in our own space and time.

This “as if” awareness is instructive for us today. Few of us are likely to become mystics, shedding the idea of separation and individualism so fundamental to our modern situation. But we also don’t have to reject the idea that our relationship with the past, with the world, and with each other is devoid of mystery, either. The feminist Catholic theologian Susan Ross provides a helpful insight in this regard, as she explores the ideas of “expressive ambiguity” and “symbolic complexity.” Both, she writes are “ways of suggesting that symbols be understood in their capacity to open new ways of seeing reality, not so much to close them, to restrict possible meanings.”

The seder, which we will enact in less than two weeks, is just this kind of ritual, with this approach to symbolism. We uncover the matzah, and we talk over it. We use the symbols of the seder plate to open up conversation, discussion, and reflection. While we maintain our historical distance when we eat the matzah and maror, we also move somewhere in time as well. As Ross adds, ““Symbolic thinking is marked by an ability to hold together multiple ideas and meanings without collapsing them into an either/or dichotomy, and a willingness to enter into a world of meaning that is neither purely material nor utilitarian.”

To quote one of my teachers, who I’ve quoted before, “It’s religion, it’s supposed to be spooky.”

This article was the most-emailed yesterday on the Times website, and essentially asks the question: what has MBA education wrought, and is it time to rethink how it’s done? Specifically, has the focus on bottom-line and profits at many business schools undermined a sense of social responsibility? Put more bluntly: what responsibility do our business schools have for the problems in corporate culture that led to the financial mess?

Now I don’t think it’s fair to blame business schools for the whole financial mess. But at the same time, they were eager to take credit for the success of the economy in good times, and should be willing to shoulder some of the load during the bad.

For me, the question extends further. Ask undergraduates at Northwestern, and they’ll tell you that the Kellogg School of Management–located on prime real estate in the dead center of the Evanston campus–radiates an aura that permeates much of undergraduate life. One in eight NU undergraduates is an economics major, and those students walk the halls of Kellogg for their classes. The sense communicated to undergrads seems to reinforce the notion that college education is meant to be pre-professional, that success involves making money and entering the culture of Wall Street and finance. (One NU staffer I know keeps a collection of letters from students who had been involved in global do-gooding, and who ultimately took jobs in the financial industry.)

One more layer: My employer, Hillel, has emphasized MBAs as the model for Hillel directors. Business principles, including a focus on measurement (how do you quantify a ‘meaningful Jewish experience?’) and an emphasis on the financial bottom-line, have definitely influenced the culture, just as they have at the university.

The questions in all of this are many. But the biggest one is this: Will the university–and by that I mean academe in general–have the courage to seriously evaluate its values, goals, and culture?

A short exploration of the relationship of work to rest, and the workweek to Shabbat, tied to this week’s Torah reading. Click here to listen.

I promise my blog isn’t devoted to Roger Cohen. As I’ve written previously, I genuinely like his writing–most of the time. But each of his columns in the last weeks about Iran and the Jews has been progressively more and more off-key. This morning, he blows it completely, in my view. Over the weekend, he relates, he went to Los Angeles at the invitation of Rabbi David Wolpe to meet L.A.’s large Persian-Jewish community. He writes:

Earlier, Sam Kermanian, a leader of the Iranian Jewish community, said I had been used, that Iran’s Jews are far worse off than they appear, and that my portrayal of them was pernicious as it “leads people to believe Israel’s enemies are not as real as you may think.” He called the mullahs brilliantly manipulative: “They know their abilities and limitations.”

On at least this last point I agree. Just how repressive life is for Iran’s Jews is impossible to know. Iran is an un-free society. But this much is clear: the hawks’ case against Iran depends on a vision of an apocalyptic regime — with no sense of its limitations — so frenziedly anti-Semitic that it would accept inevitable nuclear annihilation if it could destroy Israel first.

The presence of these Jews undermines that vision. It blunts the hawks’ case; hence the rage.

So he agrees that the Iranian leadership is manipulative, but then chalks it up to American/Jewsh apolocalypticism and neurosis? He goes on to talk about how pragmatic Iran has proven to be since the revolution, and how we can count on that pragmatism in the future. Roger, if we could count on level-headedness and pragmatism, how do you explain the presidency of George W. Bush? Just because people have shown–occasional–good sense in the past does not mean you should rely on that in the future. Here Reagan was right: If you’re going to trust, you also have to verify. The testimony of the Iranian Jews you met undermined Cohen’s argument, yet he didn’t draw any lessons from it.

Finally, in the last paragraph, he bought the anti-Israel view of Chas Freeman’s withdrawal, the refutation of which I showed in a previous post.

I really want Roger Cohen to be right. I don’t like the idea of a clash of civilizations, and I do believe that moderation is possible. But this column finally convinces me that when it comes to Iran, Roger Cohen is being played.

William Damon has been writing about character education for a long time. The current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education features an interview with him, which is worth reading (he talks about big questions, integrative educational experiences, and other stuff near and dear to me).  An excerpt:

Q: How do you see your work in the context of the school-reform movement?

The message of my work is that schools need to give students a better understanding of why they are in school in the first place — that is, how the skills students are learning can help them accomplish their life goals. That is the only way to really motivate students in a lasting way. And if you ask any teacher what the major problems in schooling these days are, I’m sure that student motivation will be at the top of the list.

Now in order to help students understand what schooling can help them accomplish, they must be given opportunities to reflect on what they want to do with their lives. What are their ultimate concerns, their highest purposes? What kinds of people do they want to be? Those questions should not be asked or answered in a vacuum. Good schools can provide students with rich historical and literary knowledge about how such questions have been addressed by thoughtful people throughout the ages.

Present-day school-reform movements tend to focus on basic skills, especially ones that can be measured by standardized tests. The skills are important, and the test scores can be useful as indicators of learning. But the skills and the scores are means to an end and not ends in themselves, and they should be presented to students in that way.

Students learn bits of knowledge that they may see little use for; and from time to time someone at a school assembly urges them to go and do great things in the world. When it comes to drawing connections between the two — that is, showing students how a math formula or a history lesson could be important for some purpose that a student may wish to pursue — schools too often leave their students flat.

If you visit a typical classroom and listen for the teacher’s reasons for why the students should do their schoolwork, you will hear a host of narrow, instrumental goals, such as doing well in the course, getting good grades, and avoiding failure, or perhaps — if the students are lucky — the value of learning a specific skill for its own sake. But rarely (if ever) will you hear the teacher discuss with students broader purposes that any of these goals might lead to. Why do people read or write poetry? Why do scientists split genes? Why did I work hard to become a teacher? How can schools expect that young people will find meaning in what they are doing if they so rarely draw their attention to considerations of the personal meaning and purpose of the work others do?

While the dramatic highlight of the Torah portion of Ki Tissa is Israel’s sin in creating the Golden Calf, the theological and human highlight comes in its aftermath. First we have violence, as Moses leads the Levites and those who are “on God’s side” in a civil war to rid the Israelite camp of the wrongdoers. In the wake of that violence, Moses seeks God’s forgiveness (for the Golden Calf, though one could propose a more radical reading and say that the forgiveness sought was also for the killing of 3,000 fellow tribesmen).

Moses pleads on behalf of the people. God would rather wipe out the people and start over with Moses, but Moses tells God that he wants no part of such a plan. “You can erase me from your book” if you do this, he says. So God relents, and grants a pardon. Moses’s advocacy on behalf of the Jewish people  sets the tone for all future prophets of Israel, and is distinguished from the behavior of Elijah, the subject of the traditional haftarah reading for the Torah portion. Elijah chastises the people, and does not seek their forgiveness from God. Perhaps this is why we traditionally say that Elijah is present at ritual circumcisions and at the Passover seder–the two most serious positive commandments in the Torah. It is as though we are constantly reminding Elijah of our faithfulness to the covenant, a faithfulness that he questioned, but which Moses deeply believed in.

Moses then has a forty-day sojourn on Mount Sinai–his second trip up the mountain–during which God reveals as much of God’s essence as possible to a human being. “You will see my back, but no man can see my face and live.” Moses is altered by this encounter, to the point that his face radiates with light when he descends. Here again he offers us a lesson: While at first the people recoil from him, the Torah gently says “He talked with them.” Moses reaches out to his fellow Israelites, and he begins the 3,000 year conversation of Torah study that we continue up to the present moment. We can distinguish his reaction this time from his reaction before: rather than employing violence to achieve his ends, he engages in teaching and learning. We learn here that Torah must be a tool and a process of reconciliation. Or, in the words of Maimonides: “Words of Torah are not meant to bring upon the world vengeance, but mercy, lovingkindess and peace.” (Laws of Shabbat 2:3)

Finally, after he has finished teaching, Moses dons a veil, which he would remove only to talk with God. This is a remarkable, evocative image, bringing to mind the veil of a bride at her wedding, which signifies her intimate relationship with her husband. It also evokes the veil of W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk, which he used to describe the double-consciousness of African-Americans, inhabiting multiple worlds simultaneously. The veil can create a beauty of intimacy, and a danger of division. While Moses’s veil was unique, we all wear a veil all the time (see my dvar Torah from last week about clothing and identity). How and when we remove our veil, and how we relate to the rest of the world, constitute the enduring questions of Jewish consciousness.

Shabbat shalom.

In case you were thinking that Chas Freeman’s withdrawal from the National Intelligence Council directorship was due to an over-exertion of the Jewish community’s muscle, pause a moment and read this editorial from the Washington Post, which is worth quoting in full:

FORMER ambassador Charles W. Freeman Jr. looked like a poor choice to chair the Obama administration’s National Intelligence Council. A former envoy to Saudi Arabia and China, he suffered from an extreme case of clientitis on both accounts. In addition to chiding Beijing for not crushing the Tiananmen Square democracy protests sooner and offering sycophantic paeans to Saudi King “Abdullah the Great,” Mr. Freeman headed a Saudi-funded Middle East advocacy group in Washington and served on the advisory board of a state-owned Chinese oil company. It was only reasonable to ask — as numerous members of Congress had begun to do — whether such an actor was the right person to oversee the preparation of National Intelligence Estimates.

It wasn’t until Mr. Freeman withdrew from consideration for the job, however, that it became clear just how bad a selection Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair had made. Mr. Freeman issued a two-page screed on Tuesday in which he described himself as the victim of a shadowy and sinister “Lobby” whose “tactics plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency” and which is “intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government.” Yes, Mr. Freeman was referring to Americans who support Israel — and his statement was a grotesque libel.

For the record, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee says that it took no formal position on Mr. Freeman’s appointment and undertook no lobbying against him. If there was a campaign, its leaders didn’t bother to contact the Post editorial board. According to a report by Newsweek, Mr. Freeman’s most formidable critic — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — was incensed by his position on dissent in China.

But let’s consider the ambassador’s broader charge: He describes “an inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for U.S. policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics.” That will certainly be news to Israel’s “ruling faction,” which in the past few years alone has seen the U.S. government promote a Palestinian election that it opposed; refuse it weapons it might have used for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities; and adopt a policy of direct negotiations with a regime that denies the Holocaust and that promises to wipe Israel off the map. Two Israeli governments have been forced from office since the early 1990s after open clashes with Washington over matters such as settlement construction in the occupied territories.

Owing to my previous post about Roger Cohen’s recent Iran columns, I feel obliged to make clear that his column this morning is way beyond anything I’m comfortable with. Cohen today advocates talking with not only Hezbollah and Iran, but Hamas, without preconditions beyond renouncing violence–not even recognizing Israel. Okay, that’s a tactical call and plenty of Israelis have called for the same thing. (And it’s inevitable: At a recent lecture at Northwestern, Prof. Elie Rekhess made multiple Freudian slips in referring to Israel’s refusal to talk to “the PLO.” Elie laughed about it each time it happened, pointing out that Israel has previously been in the position of refusing to talk to a potential negotiating partner on principle, only to ultimately negotiate.)

But what’s really difficult is this part of the column:

One view of Israel’s continued expansion of settlements, Gaza blockade, West Bank walling-in and wanton recourse to high-tech force would be that it’s designed precisely to bludgeon, undermine and humiliate the Palestinian people until their dreams of statehood and dignity evaporate.

The argument over recognition is in the end a form of evasion designed to perpetuate the conflict.

Israel, from the time of Ben Gurion, built its state by creating facts on the ground, not through semantics. Many of its leaders, including Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni, have been on wondrous political odysseys from absolutist rejection of division of the land to acceptance of a two-state solution. Yet they try to paint Hamas as irrevocably absolutist. Why should Arabs be any less pragmatic than Jews?

Of course it’s desirable that Hamas recognize Israel before negotiations. But is it essential? No. What is essential is that it renounces violence, in tandem with Israel, and the inculcation of hatred that feeds the violence.

Speaking of violence, it’s worth recalling what Israel did in Gaza in response to sporadic Hamas rockets. It killed upward of 1,300 people, many of them women and children; caused damage estimated at $1.9 billion; and destroyed thousands of Gaza homes. It continues a radicalizing blockade on 1.5 million people squeezed into a narrow strip of land.

At this vast human, material and moral price, Israel achieved almost nothing beyond damage to its image throughout the world. Israel has the right to hit back when attacked, but any response should be proportional and governed by sober political calculation. The Gaza war was a travesty; I have never previously felt so shamed by Israel’s actions.

Yes, that’s a read. But it utterly fails to take into account Israel’s good-faith negotiations with the PLO and its withdrawal from Gaza, or the fact that there is a good deal of diplomatic activity taking place in the wake of the Gaza offensive. (Do bear in mind, however, that I agree that Israel did more harm than good to its  own cause in the Gaza war.) Furthermore, it doesn’t address the serious dilemmas presented by Hamas. I agree with realpolitik up to a point, but diplomacy can’t abandon all sense of principle. Don’t official statements mean anything? The Israeli government has, for fifteen years, officially worked for a two-state solution and negotiated for it. Hamas rejects a two-state solution. Who are the moderates here?