My Bucket List

I was asked to participate in Torah on Tap because of my eclectic taste in reading. What I deliver is a stream of consciousness based on bits and pieces of this and that. I call it “the weave.” I’m going to describe the thought process that goes into developing these soliloquies. This might drive you insane, but forewarned is forearmed.

I’m not sure I’d heard about a bucket list until the movie came out, but there have always been some things I’d like to do before shuffling off to Olam Habah. For starters, I can imagine diddling a few super models – at least one.  Seems a little farfetched. I’m not Tiger Woods. I didn’t inherit hundreds of millions of dollars. My charm and good looks will only take me so far. What’s worse: my wife is usually on board with my various goals, but she’s just not down with this one.

It might be fun to get in touch with my inner adrenaline junkie and try some skydiving or bungee jumping, but I’m just too much of a girlie man. Jump rope and hopscotch are more in my wheelhouse.

I’ve always thought about leaving some great intellectual accomplishments in my wake. I dreamt of being a great mathematician, like Pythagoras, Euclid, or maybe even Jimmie Neutron. Perhaps I’d develop formulas that would make time travel or warp speed possible. But not so much.

I haven’t given up on leaving some mark on this life. That’s what these talks are about: some clever insights, delivered with a coy panache, and then posted to a blog that no one reads.

Except it turns out that I do get an occasional click. Just a few weeks ago, I got a request to add a link about choosing the right nursing home. I’m not sure what this says about my audience, but hey, Tel Aviv wasn’t built in a day.

Leaving aside all this hamantaschen in the sky stuff, I do have an actual bucket list. It’s a spreadsheet of sorts, containing books I’d like to wade through. Yes indeed. I want to spend the rest of my life reading to make up for a life of not reading. And I’m sure it shows. Anytime I’ve said something particularly incisive, or made you wonder what the hell I was talking about, it was probably some obscure fact I picked up in my literary wanderings.

Now that I have you all at the edge of your seats, let me tell you a little about my bucket list. But before I do, a quick aside.

My son, you know, the one who works for NASA, would probably tell you that I can be a little longwinded. What do you expect? He’s never had a good role model. I suppose he might be onto something. I do tend to take the long way around the shul, but I eventually get to my point, even if it doesn't make any sense. So bear with me. Or not.

My bucket list has several rows, covering a wide variety of mostly Jewish topics. One row contains fiction, with a lot of translated Yiddish and Hebrew, but also plenty of English. Another row focuses on Jewish women. Recently, while reading about Hadassah, I was thrilled to find a few paragraphs written by one of our shul’s Torah readers. There’s a row with nothing but scripture, and not just the canonical stuff.  It has Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, and some lost but recently discovered works. A few weeks ago, one of our brothers mentioned the Book of Enoch. Did you know that there are at least three extant versions of it,  each one more cryptic than the next?

There’s a row for miscellaneous tangents – I don’t know a better way to describe it. As clannish as Jews can be, we intersect with the rest of humanity in many ways. I like to read about Jewish impact on other cultures, and vice versa. Sometimes there’s no overlap to speak of, even if there are common experiences.

For example, I’ve always been interested in Gypsies, who have been persecuted as outsiders through much of history. Sound familiar? Although fewer Gypsies than Jews were annihilated in the Shoah, it’s likely that a larger percentage of the Gypsy population was wiped out.

The Samaritans also caught my attention.  We share the Pentateuch with them, although with some important differences. Their Book of Joshua is completely different from ours. I remember my very enlightened Hebrew school teachers dumping on them, and that’s a plus for the Samaritans in my eyes.

Conspiracy theorists have had it in for the Freemasons almost as much as for the Jews. I figured that we must be in cahoots with them somehow, but I couldn’t find any sort of collusion. My father’s father, he should rest in peace, was an avid Freemason. Alas, he never let me in on any of their secrets.

I first read about Esperanto many years ago in some science fiction story. It’s an invented language that was supposed to undo the damage done at the Tower of Babel. And yes, it has Jewish roots. Its creator, Ludwig Zamenhof, was from a family steeped in Haskalah, also known as the Jewish Enlightenment. Zamenhof was an early Zionist, although he grew disenchanted with the movement. He turned his sights on improving communication throughout all humankind and tried to sell the world on Rabbi Hillel.  Fun fact: in Mein Kampf, Hitler accused the Jews of trying to control the world through Esperanto. Zamenhof’s three children were murdered by the Nazis.

A few years ago, I took a class with Chabad which focused on conflicts in Jewish history, and wouldn’t you know it, but the Lubavitcher were on the right side each time! The course discussed one group which I hadn’t heard of before: the Karaites. Like the Sadducees, the Karaites rejected oral law as understood by the Pharisees. Although there were some practical disputes, at least part of the schism was due to sour grapes when one family member lost out to another on an appointment as Exilarch. The fault line is still  relevant. Karaites believe that instead of relying on the decisions of some dead rabbis, we should all look directly into the Torah and decide for ourselves.  In other words, do your own research.

Now for something completely boring. One row of my spreadsheet rows has just two entries on it: Graetz and Baron. Who were these fine gentlemen?

Heinrich Graetz was a German Jewish historian back in the 1800’s. He wrote one of the first modern  Jewish histories. Some of his analysis is antiquated, but that’s part of his appeal for me. I get both history and a nineteenth century perspective on history.  It’s like reading two books at once. Some of his gentile contemporaries felt that he focused too much on Christian anti-Judaism. I suppose dissing Martin Luther was a little brat back then in Bavaria, but all I can say is, you go girl!

I don’t know as much about Salo Baron. Back in the 1960’s, he published an enormous “Social and Religious History of the Jews.” These tomes are no doubt on finer Jewish bookshelves everywhere, even if they don’t get read.

I am about halfway through the six volume Graetz history.  When I’m done with that, I’ll start on the twelve volume Baron history. Since I typically juggle eight or nine books at a time, it will take me another three or four years to get through both.

So what is this all about? For now, just put a pin in this: Graetz and Baron.

Now, back to my bucket list. It has a row for Orthodox books. This is important since many of my attitudes are quite heterodox, and I need some balance. But I am reminded of a warning that my mother, she should rest in peace, gave me about Orthodox sources. Once, I showed her a passage in a book which was handed to me by some Chassid in Manhattan. It had a particularly clumsy attack on evolution. Mom scolded me. She felt I was using that bit of nonsense to inflame my emotions against the Orthodox. Well, the sun rises in the east, the sky is blue, and my mother was right. I still need to guard against that.

There is a tremendous amount of wonderful Orthodox material to choose from. One of the finest is Artscroll’s “Introduction to the Talmud”. It’s not a light read, but well worth the time. It has four or five hundred pages on the rabbis who compiled the Talmud, and at least four or five pages about women. That’s not to say that I didn’t have issues. It seemed that when the sages weren’t arguing about who was to be more honored, they were arguing about who was humbler. What is it with these dead rabbis?

I just finished another book from the Orthodox world: “The World of the Yeshiva” by William Helmreich. It starts a little slow, and is a bit hagiographic – you know, the yeshiva world is so wonderful. Still, it doesn't pull punches, describing aspects that aren’t so wonderful. There’s a lot of conflict between the Strictly Orthodox and the Modern Orthodox. The former avoids virtually all secular learning and looks down on college as at best a distraction and at worst an expressway to apostasy. The Modern Orthodox are also a bit suspicious of too much modernity, but they do see the value that professional training can bring to earning a livelihood.

Helmreich’s book focuses mostly on yeshiva bochurs in their late teens or early twenties. For many of the students, it’s the first time living away from families. Since they’re packed in with their fellows for between twelve and sixteen hours a day, some develop strong feelings for new friends and worry about becoming homosexual. On a similar note, onanism can be a problem, with a lot of them spanking the monkey and wasting all that seed. Fortunately, counseling is provided for these kinds of deviance.

The book mentions yeshivas for women but doesn’t go into much detail. It was once explained to me that halacha is not as harsh regarding lesbianism.  And of course, there is no issue with wasted seed. But are they tracking menstrual cycles? Maybe they’re ahead of their time.

I wasn’t surprised that yeshivas had rules about what students can read.  But I was amused when I came across this:

“Well-known scholarly works such as Salo Baron’s ‘A Social and Religious History of the Jews’ and Heinrich Graetz’s ‘History of the Jews’ are similarly accused of ‘lacking in proper Torah hashkofos [perspectives].’ Once a book is so classified, almost no one in the community will even glance at it.”

Remember that pin I mentioned? I guess yeshiva is not for me.

Proponents of these types of restrictions will correctly point out that Talmud is a broad and complicated field, and anything other than total intellectual commitment is unacceptable. For example, someone wishing to become a medical doctor will also need to rigorously study to the possible exclusion of all else life has to offer.

Except, is it that much of a concern if an internist reads up on acupuncture or some type of New Age healing? Helmreich doesn’t address that question, but he’s quite honest about the need for conformity in the yeshiva. Young minds might be led astray by the slightest temptation.

I don’t buy that. Torah is not such a fragile edifice that it will collapse like a succah of cards with the slightest disturbance. I’m also concerned about what type of group think festers in any closed society. For example, is it okay to throw rocks at women riding bicycles through your neighborhood? Or spit at young girls whose dress you disapprove of? Or disowning and ostracizing family members whose sexual orientation or gender identity disturb you? Or shielding predators who ruin young lives or mohels whose botched circumcisions leave babies maimed or dead?

This is probably where I should remember what Mom said about inflaming my own emotions.

The yeshiva world is not the only place that restricts reading, and I’m not talking about banning “And Tango Makes Three” from school libraries. The Catholic Church used to maintain an “Index of Prohibited Books.” For example, a good Catholic was not allowed to read John Calvin, Rene Descartes, or Baruch Spinoza. As far as I know, this is no longer enforced. But many Catholics and other Christians still want to burn “The Last Temptation of Christ,” both the book and the movie. For what it’s worth, I thought the movie was mediocre, but the book was awesome.

Jews, even non-Orthodox Jews, are sometimes tempted to do a little burning of their own. Take “The Passion of the Christ”, directed by the well-know philosemite Mel Gibson. That was startling torture porn portraying the Jews gleefully ripping the Nazarene to shreds before crucifying him. Jews were concerned that the movie would lead to antisemitic violence.

Similarly, some Christians were concerned that “The Last Temptation of Christ” would lead to antisemitic violence. And why is that? The book was not written by a Jew, nor was the movie directed by a Jew, but the Yids control Hollywood. It doesn’t make sense to me, but at least we have some common ground on antisemitic violence.

About a year ago, I bought a book by an Orthodox rabbi that also hits on group think, although the author did not use that phrase. Dr. David Berger of Yeshiva University focuses on Chabad in “The Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference.” Before he died, there was much speculation that Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, he should rest in peace, would shortly reveal himself as Moshiach, the Messiah. Well, maybe I should omit that “rest in peace” business, because some of his followers don’t believe he died. What’s more, according to Berger’s book, a growing number of Lubavitcher believe that the Rebbi is G-d.

Goodness. Over the years, I’ve spent many hours explaining to well-meaning supersessionist Christian friends that we Jews just don’t accept this whole man as G-d thing. One delightful young woman once responded that surely G-d could become a man if He so chose. It’s hard to argue with that, and I didn’t.

Where did this Chabadniks pick up this idea? It seems to be related to something in Cabala. Just before the Almighty created the universe, He had to draw back some of His Presence to make room for everything else. I understand this as the computer programmer I was before lapsing into indolent retirement. Inside the devices that make our lives so much easier, it comes down to bits and bytes. All those calendars, browser histories, and porn preferences are made up of ones and zeroes.

Now, picture, if you will, a sheet of graph paper. Fresh out the pack, all those white boxes are zeroes. Then, take a number two pencil, fill in a couple dozen boxes, and that’s you. Along comes the Almighty, and all the boxes get filled in. You go poof. We frequently read that man cannot behold G-d’s presence and live, and I guess that’s why. Even Moshe had to be shielded in some cleft just to see the Almighty’s backside.

How did the Rebbi pull off this trick? He managed to negate all aspects of his own personality. With all his boxes blanked out, that leaves nothing but G-d. Or something like that.

Berger’s book describes his worry about a schism in Orthodox Jewry, and his efforts to fight it. He had little luck talking to the Lubavitcher Chassidim about this. It’s not hard to see why. Many of these folks recite the Yechi everyday: “Long live our master, our teacher, our rabbi, king messiah, forever.” In their schools, they have the Rebbi’s picture hanging right next to the Mizrach, a plaque indicating the direction Jews should face while praying. It’s not hard to imagine how someone immersed in these communities might be resistant to any outside influence, even coming from an Orthodox Jew.

Berger tried sounding the alarm in the larger Orthodox world. Although he found many sympathetic ears, these folks were reluctant to go public. Some said that the Lubavitcher were in deep mourning over the recent death of their leader, and they should just be given time to come around. That sounds familiar.

I often wonder how much I’ve fallen for group think. Have I been taken in by any conspiracy theories? As Stephen Colbert once said: “Facts have a well-known left-wing bias,” and that makes me susceptible. For what it’s worth, I get most of my news from the mainstream media, or as Sister Sarah puts it, the lamestream media. I also trust two fact checking sites: PolitiFact – that’s the one with the “pants on fire” rating for egregious lies; and the Washington Post Fact Checker – which has “Pinnochios.”

But the mainstream media sometimes gets it wrong. Take, for example, the Associated Press. You can’t get any more mainstream than the AP. Shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration, there was some sort of event in the White House East Room.  The AP reported that Martin Luther King’s bust had been removed, and this factoid exploded all over the news. Except, the bust had not been removed. The administration complained, and the AP issued a retraction.  Which is as it should be. You make a mistake, you admit it, and you move on.

It used to be that when a politician was called out by a fact check, he or she would just mumble something and not say whatever it was again.  But no more. Which led the Washington Post Fact Checker to add the “Bottomless Pinnochios” rating for lies that were just repeated over and over again. Another fun fact: Trump has earned over 4723 “Bottomless Pinnochios.”

So what about me and my biases?

I’m a proud Zionist. Before I go any further, let me emphasize that there can be no justification for the October 7th atrocities committed by Hamas. The same goes for attacks on Israel by Hezbollah and the Houthis. Don’t get me started on the government of Iran. They suck.

My son, you know, the one who works for NASA, patronizes a halal shawarma truck owned by an expat Gazan who hates Hamas for stealing his family’s money. I buy bagels at a deli run by an Arab immigrant. Days after the attack, the owner was quite angry with the celebrations being shown on television.

Do I lose any Zionist cred by expressing empathy for these two gentlemen? No matter what they think about Hamas, they are surely furious with Israel right now. In their place, I might feel the same way. That’s hard for me to admit. Why is that?

Part of the answer is tribalism. I don’t want my shul mates spitting at me while I lead P’sukei D’zimra. More importantly, I am an American Jew safe in my American living room. Israel is at war. I recognize the need to speak responsibly. I would be mortified if someone pointed to my blog and said: “See? Even that Jew Ahar Ha’am blames Israel.”

There’s also the issue of a quid pro quo in this zero-sum conflict. A day or so after the attack but before any real Israeli response, protesters were already blaming Israel for whatever happened next. I can’t do much with that. If I say, “I might have been a little bit wrong”, I’d like to hear “That goes for me too.” But not in this space. It’s almost always “Any attack on Israel is sacred and justified, and anything Israel does is genocide.” Not a lot of room for any back and forth.

I do not support Bibi – no surprise there. But most of my opposition is due to his policies before this horror started. For what it’s worth, I mostly approve of the way he is conducting the war – I doubt that any other world leader in the same position would be doing anything differently.

Still, “mostly approving” is not the same thing as “totally approving.” There have been credible reports of mistreatment of detainees, even forcing them to lead the way into tunnels which are possibly booby-trapped. Even worse, the government has not done enough to stop Israelis rampaging through Arab villages. To be sure, what Hamas has done in the past year is immeasurably worse, but it doesn’t help Israel to make that comparison.

Getting back to my bucket list, there’s also a row for the Holocaust. I just finished a fascinating book from that row – “Explaining Hitler” by Ron Rosenbaum. It has an adorable picture of little Adolph as a toddler on the cover. It’s about 400 pages addressing the question: “how did this cute little kid turn out so bad?” But Rosenbaum does not do the explaining. The book is a survey of various attempts by others to explain Hitler. For example, why did he hate Jews so much? Perhaps he caught syphilis from a Jewish prostitute? Or maybe because his father had been sired by a Jew, possibly one of the Rothschilds, who then abandoned his grandmother? That last tidbit was started in the 1920’s by the Austrian Secret Police. What about that whole missing testicle business? Did he really believe all that bile coming out of his mouth or was it just to rile up the crowds? I guess there really is nothing new under the sun.

There’s a chapter about Claude Lanzmann, the director of the nine-and-a-half-hour documentary “Shoah.” The film was a tour de force, featuring testimony from survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators. It won him many accolades – deservedly so – but he seems to have gotten high on his own supply. He’d taken to policing what others say about the Holocaust and goes ballistic if anyone tries to explain why it all happened. He sees any such attempt as excusing or even justifying the evil.

Rosenbaum provides a lot of context in his book, occasionally explaining why a particular theory can’t be borne out by the facts. He wasn’t judgmental about the historians he reviewed, but he did make an exception for Lanzmann. I got the impression he thought Lanzmann was a bit of a dick. For starters,  Lanzmann tried to duck scheduled interviews, and then blamed Rosenbaum for any mix ups. But more importantly, Rosenbaum related the following:

Dr. Louis Micheels was an Auschwitz survivor who hosted a panel discussion at a meeting of the Western New England Psychoanalytic Association. The topic was a Dutch film about Nazi doctors at Auschwitz: why did some show occasional decency while others went as far as participating in selections? At Micheels’ invitation, Lanzmann attended and brashly labeled Micheel a Holocaust Revisionist. Let that sink in. Lanzmann accused a Holocaust Survivor of being a Holocaust Revisionist.  I suppose that’s better than calling him a Holocaust Denier, but: Whiskey! Tango! Foxtrot! It’s rather like a draft dodger insulting a Gold Star Parent or a former prisoner-of-war.

I don’t know if Rosenbaum would agree, but Lanzmann strikes me as a bullying blowhard.

One last thing: the Rabbinical Assembly’s Lev Shalem edition of Pirkei Avot was also on my bucket list. This is from Chapter 1 Mishna 3:

“Antigonos of Sokho received [it] from Shimon the Righteous. He used to say: Be not servants that serve their master with the expectation of receiving a reward but be rather as servants that serve their master with the expectation of not receiving a reward. And let the fear of Heaven [ever] be upon you.”

It’s been pointed out that Antigonus is almost certainly a Greek name. What should be made of that? The Talmud is dripping with disdain for anything and everything Hellenistic. I’ve read about rabbinic attempts to ban even the study of the Greek language. And even an apikores like me knows that the Children of Israel are to be praised for keeping their Hebrew names during the centuries of bondage in Egypt.

In answer to my question, I don’t really know what to make of it, except that I thought it was so cool I ordered a custom t-shirt with “Antigonos of Sokho” emblazoned across the chest, in Hebrew, of course.

So, to make a long story even longer, I wore the shirt on a trip to Shoprite, and this landsman asked me about it. I was happy to explain, and we had a nice little chat. I mentioned Torah on Tap, where we discuss these sorts of issues.

He then said that he had just written 90 pages eviscerating DEI and CRT, and did I know any publishers?

I hadn’t heard the phrase “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” until recently, when quite a few completely unracist Republicans called Kamala Harris a DEI candidate. But I did know something about “Critical Race Theory.” My last talk focused on distortions in argumentation, and CRT is a prime example of that.

No one is teaching CRT to schoolchildren. Rather, this acronym refers to studies at the post-graduate level. These courses focus on the role of race in law. The first thing that comes to mind is redlining, which restricted Blacks to impoverished neighborhoods with crappy schools. The bank loans were structured in a way that made it nearly impossible to build up home equity. And just as bad, borrowers could not take advantage of the home mortgage interest deduction. Blacks were shut out of one of the most important aspects of the American Dream.

What’s that you say? You’re sick of hearing about White Privilege? Slavery and Jim Crow are all in the dark past. Oddly, that reminds me of folks can’t believe that Jews are still complaining about the Shoah. Assuming it really happened.

Getting back to Shoprite, I didn’t say any of this. I just answered that I didn’t know any publishers. We exchanged contact info, I told him that all are welcome at Torah on Tap, and I gave him the link to my blog, you know, the one that no one reads.

Except it turns out that he did read it, or at least skimmed it. I got an email telling me that we don’t agree much. I responded, but I haven’t heard from him since. I guess my clever insights, delivered with a coy panache, might have scared him off.

I don’t know if the Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs maintains an Index of Prohibited Books, but perhaps my blog should be added to it.

The best complement I’ve gotten for my talks was from one of our brothers, but he made it sound like a complaint.  He said that listening to me made him think. Well, S****, I’m sorry I made you think.

As Mark Twain once said: “History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

Now, go and study.