Not bringing sexy back...please

Over on Salon, Tracy Clark-Flory declares that sexlessness (or at least articles about it) are officially a trend. Which strikes me as funny, because the article just below that one in the queue is all about the rise of non-monogamy (which together with Dan Savage's proclamations that people should consider non-monogamy and today's JTA headline that an Israeli group of Orthodox rabbis (c'mon, you knew this was coming!) is trying to bring back polygamy (a trend that even the Torah implicitly warns against while not forbidding) definitely qualifies as a trend.

So what to get to first? I'm impressed by the ridiculousness of Erica Jong's complaint. I'm not sure why Clark-Flory concludes that her complaint is that technology has taken over for the actual messiness and intimacy of sex - from what I can tell, her real complaint is that this younger generation prefers monogamy and childrearing to the raunch that she claims her generation championed. Look at the utter condescension:

Punishing the sexual woman is a hoary, antique meme found from “Jane Eyre” to “The Scarlet Letter” to “Sex and the City,” where the lustiest woman ended up with breast cancer. Sex for women is dangerous. Sex for women leads to madness in attics, cancer and death by fire. Better to soul cycle and write cookbooks. Better to give up men and sleep with one’s children. Better to wear one’s baby in a man-distancing sling and breast-feed at all hours so your mate knows your breasts don’t belong to him. Our current orgy of multiple maternity does indeed leave little room for sexuality. With children in your bed, is there any space for sexual passion? The question lingers in the air, unanswered.

Right. Just where does she think those babies come from... what, they were decanted from a tube? The irony is so thick - she seems to be arguing for people to uncouple sex and intimacy even while her subtext is that people are rejecting intimacy. I wonder if she actually remembers any of the people who were engaged in those wonderful open marriages? I'm- thankfully- nowhere near old enough to remember those times, but I have mentors who were, and their stories would make anyone seeking love and intimacy feel faint: men who wanted open marriage... for themselves only; men who wanted someone to raise the children... while they went out seeking younger, newer sexual partners... for whom they eventually left their wives; relationships in which one partner (of various genders) said okay to the other one's having sex with other people...because they loved them so much that they couldn't bear to stand up for themselves because their partner might leave them or feared being left impoverished with children) - even though the idea of sharing their partner sexual left them heartbroken day after day; relationships where there's no rest and no real intimacy, but ongoing competition, forever, because one or both partners aren't really committed to the relationship, but are settling for what there is... until they can find something better. Anyone who thinks the message of an open marriage to the partner is anything other than, "you're a commodity, and you're replaceable" is fooling themselves.

Polygamy makes perfect sense in a world where women are chattel and their purpose is serving their husband. In any world where women matter as anything other than breeding stock, it's vile. Open marriage and non-monogamous relationships only makes sense in a world where not just women but everyone is commodified (Although lets be honest: it affects women differentially - women are still the primary caregivers, they still bear the brunt of the effects of childbearing and rearing on their careers, they still earn less money for the same work, meaning that when Mr. open marriage ups and leaves for his next partner, the children and women's level of survival will drop. Ms. Open marriage leaving for her next conquest won't affect his actual health and life so much, just his heart). That's vile too.

Human beings are not commodities. As a rabbi, I am disgusted with these "trends." Admittedly, they are the logical outcome of several other trends in our society - the trends of treating everything as a fee for service exchange and the idea that all we are responsible for is our own individual self, and that our own pleasure in this moment is the only good worth valuing.

Although the Torah permits polygamy, it's pretty clear that it never has a good outcome. As we assume that nothing else in the Torah is accidental, I must insist that the comparison of the three families of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is also not accidental. God does not approve of open marriage, nor of polygamy. It is, at best, to be suffered. the failures of King David and King Solomon are traceable to the same failings that multiplied their wives.

Our tradition teaches that we are to increase the light: we move towards greater goodness, towards more equality, towards better understanding of God's desire for us. God models the behavior for us: God and Israel in one marriage together as expressed beautifully in the second chapter of Hosea: Israel runs after other gods, thinking that they will give her pleasure, but ultimately Israel will remember the love of her youth, and return, and on that day (with the verses that an adult Jew says daily as he or she puts on her tefillin in the morning) God and Israel are betrothed with tzedek, mishpat, chesed and rachamim -righteousness(and charitability), justice, gentle-lovingness and mercy; with faithfulness, "and you shall know the Lord." -And this is followed by a universal covenant with all creation - and to God, the Torah tells us, Israel will no longer say "Ba'ali" -my master, but "Ishi" - my partner.

that "And you shall know the Lord,: uses the language of da'at - knowing another being. Knowledge is the language of intimacy -sexuality is implied when it is used about humans. Intimacy comes from perseverance, steadfastness, faithfulness. Sexuality is a stripping bare of the self. To treat it like just another fun activity is sad. Sex should be pleasurable, but that's not all it is. It is the recognition of the divine in your other self - the half of adam that was stripped away at creation in order to create within us a longing for conjunction.

In the second chapter of the book of Genesis, when God says that it is not good for the adam to be alone, our midrash tells us that the adam (the word the Hebrew uses is "HaAdam," with a definite article) was not in fact a man, but a two-sexed creature which God split into male and female. The adam was imperfect, and to become a fit partner for God, needed -unlike animals- to have a sense of longing for another. When we find our partner, we find the other part of ourselves, and then we are fit partners for God, as well.

When we seek sexual pleasure as its own end, with no "knowing God," we cheat ourselves and our partners. Of course one-to-one partnership isn't always going to be easy: nothing worthwhile ever is. Having children isn't always easy, a career isn't always easy, doing the right thing isn't always easy: should we abandon children, careers, honesty and integrity?

I'm sure that between "Big Love" (feh), continued patriarchy and homosexism/heteronormativity and our American belief that the individual is more important than another human unit, there won't be an end to this "trend" any time soon, but Erica Jong is wrong about her daughter's generation. it seems to me that - at least as she explains it- they understand that sex is not only intimate, but private, and that far from being bloodless, human urges that are given boundaries are holier and more powerful. All human urges are boundaried by ritual - whether it's religious ritual, or secular ritual, it is part of being human to seek meaning. Getting rid of meaning doesn't make us free, it makes us amoeba.

Judaism without borders? Or Judaism without Boundaries?

Over the past several years, we have seen quite a number of Jewish or pseudo-Jewish practices picked up by non-Jews. While this isn't exactly a novel occurrence - Christians sort of invented it with the creation of their new religion not quite two millenia ago, and Christian "Passover seders" of various sorts have been going on for some number of decades- it's worth considering how Jews should react to the "democratization" of Jewish practices.

Whether it's the pseudo-Jewish kabbalah center (whose practices misrepresent kabbalah quite a huge amount) and its superstitious practices, or Justin Bieber saying the Shema before concerts, we can expect to see more of this kind of thing.

To a certain extent, a certain amount of syncretism is inevitable. We live in a culture that views religion through a Christian outlook - quite different than Judaism's: Judaism views religion as a system of practices, and primarily through a lens of communal practice for communal relationship,and salvation, insofar as Jews think about it, is a communal salvation. Christianity, on the other hand, views religion as primarily a belief-focused system (which is not to say that it doesn't have behavioral expectation, merely that behavior is the result of belief; in Judaism belief is necessary, but what one must believe is fairly limited: one must believe in one, undivided, disembodied God, who has never been and never will be embodied, also one must believe in some kind of reward and punishment system after death, details unspecified. That's it. All the rest is what you do: go and learn) and salvation is individual. There's a lot we could talk about here, in terms of how Jewish behavior and practices have been affected by the culture, but let's save that for another time, shall we?

The main point is that in a fairly philo-semitic culture, one in which religious affiliation has become extremely transient, and the average person changes affiliation at least once or twice over a lifetime, AND which is full of seekers, AND which views religious discipline as fairly boring, and spiritual fulfillment as something which is not entirely dissimilar from any other kind of consumable, it would be very surprising indeed if we did not see people experimenting with bits and pieces of various religious practices and attempting to grant them on piecemeal to create their own personal spiritual practice.

I already know - before I get a rash of comments saying so- that whatever I say about it here will have no effect on what people do. Jews aren't the only ones who have to suffer through this - Native Americans, and (subcontinental) Indians do as well (want to buy a dreamcatcher, or maybe some nice bindi?)not to mention a whole host of other religions of various stripes.

To begin with, maybe it's worthwhile to look at this from the other end, Jewish syncretism.

Jewish tradition tells us, (Pirke Avot,Chapter 4, Mishna 1)

"Ben Zoma said: Who is wise? He who learns from all people, as it is said: 'From all those who taught me I gained understanding' (Psalms 119:99). Who is strong? He who conquers his evil inclination, as it is said: 'Better is one slow to anger than a strong man, and one who rules over his spirit than a conqueror of a city' (Proverbs 16:32). Who is rich? He who is satisfied with his lot, as it is said: 'When you eat the toil of your hands you are fortunate and it is good for you' (Psalms 128:2). 'You are fortunate' -- in this world; 'and it is good for you' -- in the World to Come. Who is honored? He who honors others, as it is said: 'For those who honor Me will I honor, and those who scorn Me will be degraded' (I Samuel 2:30)."

In terms of"borrowing" from other traditions, I take this mishna as telling us a couple of things: First that it is fine to be aware of what other people do in the search for God and spirituality, and when it isn't inimical to Jewish tradition, that it's fine to use techniques that others have developed before us. Even within the Jewish tradition there are many ways to approach God, and some of them have been developed from seeing cultures around us use their own methods, and then using that kernel to develop a technique that works for Judaism.

In using techniques from other traditions as part of Judaism, the techniques need to be adapted - something that only happens over a long time- before they work, in the context of Judaism. More importantly, notice what I haven't talked about: importing wholesale rituals. Using techniques - meditation, song, additional restrictions on diet, etc- from other traditions, can over time, be brought into a generous spiritual practice fruitfully. But bringing in a specific ritual is unlikely to be a good idea: spiritual practices develop as part of whole disciplines, and one can't just take out a piece and expect it to help connect you to the universe.

Which is why learning from others isn't the only thing the Mishna talks about: it also warns us that we need to respect what we already have - until one actually has some decent knowledge of one's own traditions, running after others isn't going to be spiritually enriching, at least not in the long term. For one thing, taking bits and pieces out of context from other traditions denudes them of their power. Rituals - in all traditions, as well as Judaism- grow up in a holistic context. They are part of a system, and without the system, the pieces are merely magic, or even worse, products. Any spiritual practice requires discipline - doing things over and over, including things that might be difficult, or boring, until the parts come together to make you whole.

American culture has the unfortunate tendency to view everything as a product. If you spend your money, you should get something for it - and everything is for sale.

Buy a dreamcatcher, presto, you're a Native American Shaman (never mind that there are hundreds of nations each with their own traditions), buy some incense and beads, voila, you're a Hindu guru. But The hundreds of Native American traditions, Hindu spiritual practices, Voudoun, or whatever other religion- aren't products, and it's not enough to think that they're cool to get results from them.

Many Jews have decided that their own tradition is boring and needs to be tarted up with a little magic paint, but what they're missing is two things: first, that they probably don't actually know that much about their own tradition, and their decision that it's boring is a little premature.
When I was in college, I spent a lot of time thinking that Judaism needed to be rewritten here and there. I had the good luck that my temperament led me to do a lot of reading while I was busy working on this project. As I came to learn more about the extraordinary variety, various threads of tradition and how they work together, the tensions and richness of the incredible numbers of texts and commentaries that there are in Judaism, I came to see more and more that there was so much already there, that borrowing and changing from the outside wasn't really a project that needed to happen -sure, no tradition is perfect, but the seeds of renewal are already inside Judaism.
Second, that simply dropping your own traditions to go haring off after someone else's doesn't solve your problem: that you bring you with you. Spirituality isn't magic, and anyone who tells you that you can just run your finger over a string of letters and you'll be protected from harm is a charlatan, who may understand the desire that people have for easy answer and not putting much effort into something, but does not understand God.

Finally, the last part of the mishna offers, "Who is honored? He who honors others." The final thing is that we should honor the traditions of others. But using them without understanding their place in the system they come from is not honor. To the contrary, it's essentially telling the followers of that practice that their spiritual system is just a grocery store for you- you can go in, pick out what you like, and buy it and leave.
"Honor" is to respect that different religions have spiritual meaning, and to learn from them and honor them means to let those who are deeply embedded in them tell us their experience, explain their systems and meanings, and when invited, to participate as a guest. Each tradition may have things to tell us about the way the world works, or should work.

When I think of what wisdom Judaism can bring to people who are not Jews, I think of teaching, for example, Jewish textual traditions on how workers and employers are obligated to one another: In Jewish terms, mitzvot, obligations to other people, delineated carefully and thoroughly are spiritual practices just as much as lighting candles on Friday night, or praying in a minyan (group of ten Jewish adults). There are many kinds of things that Judaism can offer as learning to others without having them say the Shema. Respect and honor -for those who are interested in Judaism, but are not interested in being Jews- would be to learn about Judaism - perhaps attend a seder, but attending a seder is different than a non-Jew having a seder and attaching their own meaning to the event. Seders and the Shema are Jewish practices, not Jewish techniques.

Now, I don't think that Justin Bieber is a bad kid - in fact, I think it's sweet that he respects his manager enough to pay attention to the fact that he has a different religion, and to try to take some of it on. In my opinion, what he's doing is slightly different than some of the other reported celebrity syncretism that we hear about: Bieber does not appear to be seeking anything - he just wants to find some religious common ground. Nevertheless, while his motivation is purely sweet, I'm not sure that the way he's found to carry it out is a respectful one (unintentionally, I'm sure). For millenia, Jews have said the Shema not only as part of our daily prayer, but also in bad times, while being tortured or killed by people who were trying to force us to accept other religions. For a non-Jew to take on saying this prayer that declares the unity of God (by a practitioner of a religion that holds that God is not a unity, but a trinity) is problematic, and I can't say that I'm comfortable with it.

If non-Jews want to learn from Judaism, the same thing applies to non-Jews as to Jews looking to enrich their own experience - first of all, learn your own tradition better - you may find that it has what you are looking for within it already. Judaism tells us that the righteous of all nations have place in the World to Come, QED.

Secondly, if you still want to honor Judaism, or use it in some way in your own practice, borrow the techniques, not the rituals: learn about the Jewish idea of obligation as spirituality, think about how Judaism uses mitzvot, obligations, to make every (allowable) mundane thing you can do holy - there's a blessing for not just eating, but for elimination of waste (do I have to elaborate here?) -think about that! (Almost) anything can be made holy. The idea of separation- I could go on, but I'm sure you get the idea. (Justin, if you want something to do to include your manager during your prayers, or something you could do together, perhaps you could make a short prayer that isn't the shema, but which declares that you wish for all people to respect one another in their love for God).

Ultimately, while, I'm sure that people will go on borrowing practices whether I think it's a good idea or not, I would encourage people to think harder about what they are doing. Spirituality isn't there to make you feel good. In fact, sometimes it's there to make you feel bad. Doing someone's religious practice because it looks cool, is probably not a good way to develop spiritually. Religion is not a consumable, and you can't buy it. It is work, and you have to be committed to it.

The Future of Marriage

IN light of the recent upholding of Prop 8, I offer a few tidbits about marriage... first of all, a very interesting piece from the Cato Institute in which the author points out that historically marriage was more about land and property than love, that marriage gave little protection to most of the people engaged in the family - i.e. only men really got any benefit from it - women and children were essentially property dependent upon the good will of the patriarch- and that the idea of marrying for love appalled many people when that newfangled idea began to be more common.
In the 1970's even more changes began to take place -and major destabilization in marriage took place - divorce increased as people struggled to make marriage more equitable for all involved - a process we still have not yet completed even for those of us theoretically allowed government privileges associated with marriage.
But her main point is that marriage is no longer the only option for people - more people are delaying - or avoiding marriage altogether. Sexual initiation is no longer linked -for the majority of people, including religious ones- with marriage.
And marriage itself has changed:

Marriages used to depend upon a clear division of labor and authority, and couples who rejected those rules had less stable marriages than those who abided by them. In the 1950s, a woman’s best bet for a lasting marriage was to marry a man who believed firmly in the male breadwinner ideal. Women who wanted a “MRS degree” were often advised to avoid the “bachelor’s” degree, since as late as 1967 men told pollsters they valued a woman’s cooking and housekeeping skills above her intelligence or education. Women who hadn’t married by age 25 were less likely to ever marry than their more traditional counterparts, and studies in the 1960s suggested that if they did marry at an older age than average they were more likely to divorce. When a wife took a job outside the home, this raised the risk of marital dissolution.

All that has changed today. Today, men rank intelligence and education way above cooking and housekeeping as a desirable trait in a partner. A recent study by Paul Amato et al. found that the chance of divorce recedes with each year that a woman postpones marriage, with the least divorce-prone marriages being those where the couples got married at age 35 or higher. Educated and high-earning women are now less likely to divorce than other women. When a wife takes a job today, it works to stabilize the marriage. Couples who share housework and productive work have more stable marriages than couples who do not, according to sociologist Lynn Prince Cooke. And the Amato study found that husbands and wives who hold egalitarian views about gender have higher marital quality and fewer marital problems than couples who cling to more traditional views.

And this brings me back to prop 8. It is ridiculous at this time, to worry about marriage changing. It has changed, it has been changing for hundreds of years now, and perhaps it never really was a static system -it would be surprising if it were - nothing else has been.

Gay marriage will come because marriage is no longer really about just having children, or getting enough to eat because certain persons don't get paid for their labor, or even about building relationship with other family groups - we can do all of these things without marriage.
I come from a tradition that recognizes that marriage is companionate, but the truthis that marriage is not a finished product. There will continue to be changes - and it may be that while I speak of marriage in terms of sanctified companionship andthe raising of a family, there probably will be other ways to understand marriage, ones that I haven't thought of yet. Maybe I'll like them, maybe not, butthey're coming. And we can't stop them. Thank God for that.

And on that note, some good news

oh, yeah, and:

"Prop 8 - The Musical" starring Jack Black, John C. Reilly, and many more... from Jack Black

Learning to read?

Yahoo answers posts a heartening question from a student asking whether it's okay to do something "illegal." - She is, actually running an illegal lending library out of her locker at school. And this is where it gets interesting. Apparently she goes to a Catholic school which has banned a whole host of books that portray the Catholic church in some negative manner.
The girl was "appalled" to learn that many many classics appeared on the list. She provides a partial list which includes things like

The Perks of Being a Wallflower
His Dark Materials trilogy
Sabriel
The Canterbury Tales
Candide
The Divine Comedy
Paradise Lost
The Godfather
Mort
Interview with the Vampire
The Hunger Games
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Animal Farm
The Witches
Shade's Children
The Evolution of Man
the Holy Qu'ran
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Slaughterhouse-5
Lord of the Flies
Bridge to Terabithia
Catch-22
East of Eden
The Brothers Grimm Unabridged Fairytales.

She notes that Twilight was also on the list, but she didn't want to pollute her library. She writes, "Anyway, I now operate a little mini-library that no one has access to but myself. Practically a real library, because I keep an inventory log and give people due dates and everything. I would be in so much trouble if I got caught, but I think it's the right thing to do because before I started, almost no kid at school but myself took an active interest in reading! Now not only are all the kids reading the banned books, but go out of their way to read anything they can get their hands on. So I'm doing a good thing, right? Oh, and since you're probably wondering "Why can't you just go to a local library and check out the books?" most of the kids are too chicken or their parents won't let them but the books. "

So this dear girl is
learning about disobeying unjust laws
exposing her fellow students to literature
and
developing some great organizational skills.

Girl, you rock. Carry on.


Hattip neatorama

Who are we? Redux

Because I am personally opposed to ever agreeing with anyone, I find myself, often, embroiled in interesting discussions with all sorts of folks. Over at JCarrot, I am having an interesting comments thread with Ben Murane (our own KFJ) about (I think) the difference between who is Jewish, and what is Jewish. The difficult part of this, of course, is that it's not a completely separate question.
Who one is affects what one does, and the reverse, as well.
I recall a famous quote by (the eminently quotable) Kurt Vonnegut, Jr:

"To be is to do"--Socrates.
"To do is to be"--Jean-Paul Sartre.
"Do be do be do"--Frank Sinatra.

Er, I'm getting off-topic here. Anyhow, so Over at the NYT , there is what is apparently another discussion of the ongoing rift caused by the stringent versus loose approach to answering the question of "who is a Jew."

The question for me is pretty fraught: I do believe that being this exclusive is ultimately untenable -but at the same time, there does need to be a certain level of internal definition of who gets to be considered "in."
The question remaining, of course, as to who is in enough, or how in they have to be, in order to make such determinations.
That's why I'm less interested in talking about who is Jewish, than what is Jewish. If one can agree on the latter, at least in broad terms, than the former can be fixed in almost any case.

Professionally, of course, I have dedicated myself to a particular kind of Judaism, and I do think that meaning inheres in Judaism in particular acts, practices and disciplines, and that there is a teleological reason for doing these practices. This doesn't invalidate other kinds of doing, but it does mean that not all doing can be accepted as within the boundaries of Judaism. And in truth, I can't really believe that anyone truly believes that anything goes. No matter how loose your boundaries are, there must be some, otherwise names become meaningless. If everything is "within" then one simply ceases to be - in simply a logical sense.

Anyhow, I invite others to pop in on the conversation, here or there.


xp to Jewschool comments turned off here to consolidate there.

Giving Thanks

I know that everyone is very hyped on the now viral information that Thanksgiving is actually based on the biblical holiday of Sukkot. Nu, so gesuntaheit.
IN the meantime, I've been thinking for some time about some things for which I am thankful that people don't normally get to hear. Everyone, of course, is thankful for their imas and abbas (mothers and fathers) but how many people get to say that they're thankful for their mother and father in law?
I'm not claiming they change clothing to tights in a phonebooth or anything, but I think it's worthwhile to say that I am very grateful for all kinds of things about them - beyond the fact that they produced the guy whom I married almost 13 years ago. For example, I am grateful that my mother in law is interesting and often funny and tells great stories about her work. I am grateful that she is an unabashed liberal who puts her time where her mouth is defending girls who need an abortion and can't tell their parents and so have to go to court. I am grateful that both she and my father in law, while interested in my and DH's lives, have never tried to interfere with bizarre child rearing practices that I must do on fear of displeasure, nor have they expressed any opinion ever about how many children we ought to have - and I can't even imagine their doing so. I am grateful that my FIL is interested in genealogy, and that he likes to hang out with his GS. I am grateful that they both like to travel and send us postcards from wherever they go. And sometimes even when they don't go.

On an unrelated gratitude note:
I'm also grateful for my former classmates and now colleagues and all their love and support and friendship, which I continue to be blessed by years after we mostly all have moved to cities far from one another.

Happy thanksgiving, or perhaps we should call it Sukkot Sheni.
הודו ליי כי טוב
Turkey for God, because it is good! (or perhaps, give thanks to God, because God is good; polecat/woodkitty)

Movie Review of the day

Courtesy of the Onion's AV Club.
I don't usually do movie reviews, but this one has an appropriate Judaic reference. OK. Not really, but still. Hilarious:

Of course if a preeminent figure in my faith had a lucrative sideline writing ridiculous pulp fiction I’d probably downplay that aspect of his life and teachings. If, for example, Moses used his downtime writing the Torah to hastily compose a series of fantasy novels exploring the lives, loves and adventures of Thoretta, She-Ogre of The Barbarian Realm, I’d probably steer clear of publicizing his side-gig too aggressively. I certainly wouldn’t try to lure Bridgette Nielsen into starring in a feature-film adaptation of Thoretta, She Ogre Of The Barbarian Realm as a way of bringing converts to Judaism....

Battlefield Earth opens in a future dystopia where mankind has been defeated by a race of nine-foot-tall aliens from the planet Psychlo whose gnarled appearance suggests what Klingons might look like if they took their fashion cues from the leather daddies in Cruising. Humanity has finally shaken off the high-falutin’ plague of book-learning and stuff-knowing and lingers in a caveman-like state of superstition and ignorance. Rather than invoke the wrath of demons and monsters, men hide in caves and eschew all but the faintest traces of civilization. They’re like gullible souls waiting for a second-rate sci-fi writer to reveal all the mysteries of the universe to them in pseudo-religion form and charge them dearly for the privilege.

Kibbutz revival?

A few days ago, the New York Times ran an article describing the apparent renewal of kibbutzim in Israel. After years of decline, beginning inthe 1980's, recently, people are again lining up to get into kibbutzim.
The article points out a couple of interesting things, one of which is explicit: that the renewed kibbutzim are not quite (for the most part) run inthe way that traditional kibbutzim were run, but rather as, "a kind of suburbanized version of it."
The article continues, explaining,

On most kibbutzim, food and laundry services are now privatized; on many, houses may be transferred to individual members, and newcomers can buy in. While the major assets of the kibbutzim are still collectively owned, the communities are now largely run by professional managers rather than by popular vote. And, most important, not everyone is paid the same.

Now, granted the old, purely socialist system didn't really work all that well. We all know human nature, and in Israel, as anywhere else that this particular ideology was exercised, all kinds of unfortunate consequences resulted, the mildest of which is the obvious: that many people just didn't pull their weight. Not to mention all the later reported problems with the communal children's houses: the bullying and sexual abuse that sometimes resulted.

Nevertheless, I can't help but wonder about some things that weren't said: the recent changes in Israeli (following American) society such as the "greed is good" mentality of the 1980's resulting in the dismantling of Israeli social support systems - and how that process perhaps actually contributed to the current revitaization of the kibbutzim, as people tire of a society in which everyone is completely out for themselves, and the future is economically very uncertain. I also wonder if the suburbanization of the kibbutzim is any kind of success story. Aren't there other ways of attracting people into a community?
In some ways, it seems to me that this question is the exact same one facing Jews in communal institutions all over the place: how do you entice people into building communities in which people are actually part of a community and not just a fee for service relationship? The sad thing is, that this is indeed what most people are craving, but at the same time, our societies are currently so individualistic that we see any kind of responsibilty to others over the long term as inconvenient. And let's not even get started on the subject of intergenerational responsibilty. Of all the various shuls and independant minyans out there, how many are genuinely welcoming of people of very different backgrounds and places in their lives?

How have we come to this? -"young professionals" minyans, 20 something minyans, old fart minyans, whatever... where is the sense that we need to sacrifice having things our way some of the time? And I am not targetting any particular group when I say this. In my opinon, there is no one who isn't a culprit. From wealthy older folks holding onto services which barely anyone attends, to younger groups who are unwilling to make any kind of provisions for people who might not love the all-Carlebach channel. I suppose I could list on forever all the diferent niches who aren't talking to one another. And lest I leave it out, that includes the various "movements" as well.

I suppose I have wandered a bit astray from the point of the article, but I often wonder, when we talk about renewal, if the things we are renewing have the value and the solidity to really be communities for the long term, because what I don't see in many of these renewed communities, is obligation, love, or community.

xp to Jewschool

Science textbook disclaimers

From Colin Purrington at Swarthmore: Pro-science stickers tht mock the anti-evolution bias of some school districts attempting to present evolution as just one of a number of valid theories.



From his website:
Wording for the first disclaimer (top left) is taken verbatim from the sticker designed by the Cobb County School District ("A community with a passion for learning") in Georgia, which actually plagiarized Alabama's evolution disclaimer (view). Really, I'm not making any of this up. The other 14 are mildly educational variants that demonstrate the real meaning of a scientific "theory" as well as the true motivations of the School Board members and their creationist supporters. Ideally, the above stickers will deter other districts from using textbook disclaimers as a way to undermine the teaching of evolution. Please forward them to friends in school districts where disclaimers are likely to be discussed. Or make a big poster of your favorite and stick it on an easel in front of the school when nobody is looking. Or if you would like one of these on your car, bug Leighton over at Floating Point Digital Images, where you can get all sorts of pro-evolution stickerabilia. At the very least, print out the PDF version and send it to your kid's science teacher; if he or she is not amused, move immediately to another district, far, far away.

As of December 19th, 2006, the courts have upheld the initial ruling that the sticker was unconstitutional. The district is now on double-secret probation: it can't do anything that similarly undermines the teaching of evolution or that similarly supports the presence and activities of supernatural entities. Details can be had at the National Center for Science Education.

The website has lots of other nice things too. Visit here:
http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/cpurrin1/textbookdisclaimers/

Hattip to BoingBoing

Better pray for "the rapture..."

OK, I know mash-ups are now the hot thing, but still where else will you get to read a mash-up of marvel comics and one of those wacko Christian religious tracts (they also are good for sving and handing out to door-to- door political blatherers. And vice versa. REcycling is very important, and it clears out your doorway quick when you produce political materials for religious folks, too, just invite them in to hear your theory of why they need to vote for your favorite nutty local candidate, but I digress).
Just remember: Galactacus is coming!



(Tip o' the hat to BoingBoing)