Segulot and Other Fallacies: A Call for Intolerance

Please see my essay in the Jewish Link, "Segulot and Other Fallacies: A Call for Intolerance."

An Inconvenient Text

First appeared in The Jewish Standard.

Imagine discovering that someone you trust -- a colleague, mentor, close friend or relative -- has been less than honest with you. Even if it was a minor deception, you would feel hurt and angry. Imagine further that you gather up the courage to confront the person. But when pressed to explain, he offers a patronizing and somewhat sanctimonious defense: “My actions were completely justified. I had my reasons. Yes, I could have been more transparent, but why wouldn't you trust me? If you must have an explanation, here it is . . .”

The explanation is lawyerly and contrived. Still, you hold out hope that this was a lapse in judgment by someone generally trustworthy. But as you examine this individual's past behavior, a pattern emerges of deliberate omissions and half-truths.

This scenario may sound familiar to followers of an unfolding chapter in the world of Jewish books.

ArtScroll Publications is releasing an updated version of “Mikraot Gedolot” (the Pentateuch with commentaries). The new edition features vowelized and punctuated versions of the most important medieval commentaries, such as Rashi, Abraham Ibn Ezra, and Nahmanides, making them more accessible to general readers.

In at least one instance, however, ArtScroll’s editorial reach extended beyond formatting. As Marc B. Shapiro recently revealed on the Seforim Blog, the publisher deleted comments by Rabbi Samuel ben Meir (Rashbam) -- without alerting its readers -- and later defended the move.

Rashbam was a grandson of Rashi. Like Rashi, Rashbam belonged to the eleventh and twelfth-century school of exegesis centered in Northern France, which was inclined toward “peshat” or simple reading of Scripture, and de-emphasized the deeper but less contextual midrashic style (“derash”). But while Rashi tends to present peshat alongside derash, Rashbam was dedicated exclusively and almost fanatically to peshat, often criticizing his grandfather for veering too far from the plain sense of the verse.

The lines missing from the ArtScroll edition are from Rashbam’s commentary to Genesis 1:4-5, on the phrase “and there was an evening, and there was a morning, one day.” The Talmud cites these words to support the halakhic view that the day begins at sundown. But Rashbam reads the peshat as follows: “There was an evening (at the conclusion of daytime) and a morning (at the end of night), one day”; that is, the day begins in the morning and lasts until the next daybreak.

It goes without saying that Rashbam did not intend to undermine Jewish practice (he was a leading Talmudist and known for his extreme piety). Still, Ibn Ezra -- a contemporary of Rashbam -- wrote a scathing critique of this exegesis, motivated largely by sectarians who actually began the Sabbath in the morning.

In a written reply to inquiries about the apparent censorship (see Seforim Blog), ArtScroll claims that what they removed was inauthentic. They offer some unconvincing technical reasons for this conclusion, but the thrust of the argument is ideological: If Ibn Ezra considered the interpretation heresy, how could Rashbam have authored it?

As Shapiro shows, no serious scholar questions the authenticity of the deleted passages. In fact, several great Jewish thinkers -- the Lubavitcher Rebbe among them -- grappled with this Rashbam without dismissing it as a forgery.

(On the subject of heresy, note that Ibn Ezra himself was roundly condemned for his non-Talmudic interpretations and accused of providing fodder for heretics; he was Spinoza’s favorite exegete.)

ArtScroll’s erasure of Rashbam’s words can only be described as ideologically motivated censorship.

For all its great accomplishments, it turns out that ArtScroll has a history of blatant censorship and subtle misrepresentation.

Several years ago, Artscroll published a translation of Ha-Moadim Ba-Halakhah, Rabbi Shlomo Yosef Zevin’s popular work on the festivals. At one point in the book, the author made an offhand remark expressing gratitude for the State of Israel. ArtScroll excised this line from the translation and, when challenged, publicized a bizarre statement claiming that Rabbi Zevin ultimately changed his opinion about the state (the evidence shows otherwise).

In its translation and commentary on Song of Songs, ArtScroll misrepresents Rashi. Rashi reads the Song allegorically, in traditional fashion. But in the introduction to his commentary, Rashi explicitly promotes a two-tiered approach to the book which first addresses the plain-sense, contextual peshat – an approach he implements in his commentary. Drawing support for their unusual translation – said to be "allegorical, based on Rashi's commentary" -- ArtScroll quotes nearly all of Rashi’s introduction, but omits the most critical section, about the peshat underlying the Song’s allegory. Reading ArtScroll’s rendition of the Song, you would never know about the peshat layer in Rashi’s commentary.

By taking such editorial liberties, ArtScroll undermines its own credibility and underestimates its readership. I am confident that most of its readers prefer to judge primary texts for themselves before they end up on the cutting room floor.

There is much more at stake here than the integrity of Rashbam's commentary. Weighing the truth against its own perception of piety, ArtScroll chose the latter. It now asks its readers to do the same. But no religious person should ever be put in that position. The dichotomy between religion and reality is a false one, and the idea that one must choose between truth and piety violates both.

None of this minimizes ArtScroll’s major contributions to the Jewish community. But it can do better. ArtScroll’s readers deserve better. We can handle the truth.

History or Heresy

First appeared in The Jewish Standard.

Students of the Talmud may encounter some strange and troubling passages, especially within its aggadic sections. And this is hardly a new phenomenon. Skepticism regarding Talmudic realia -- scientific, historical, and other non-legal observations recorded in the Talmud -- far predates the modern period. The reliability of Talmudic medicine, for example, was questioned by the Geonim of Babylonia as early as the tenth century.

Much of this material can only be understood in historical context. When the ancient sages commented on nature they drew on popular beliefs or utilized the limited observational techniques of their age. In fact, the rabbis acknowledged their own scientific shortcomings; they conceded, for example, that Gentile astronomers had bested them in a debate about the sun's path at night.

Talmudic superstition can be especially unsettling. Again, our response must be to invoke history. It should go without saying that references to demons, witchcraft, evil spirits, the evil eye, incantations, amulets, magic, and astrology that are scattered throughout the Talmud and Midrashim derive from ancient Near Eastern or Hellenistic culture, and that these phenomena have no basis in physical reality.

Ironically, the premium that the Talmudic rabbis placed on contemporary reality is on full display where they struggle to reconcile once-popular, but now debunked, ideas -- the realities of their time that are today considered superstitious or pseudoscientific -- with traditional Jewish values.

Tractate Shabbat records a debate on the question of astrological influence over the Jewish people. Despite the pervasiveness of astrology in the ancient world -- as real to them as the rising and setting of the sun -- the rabbis were palpably uncomfortable with the moral implications of astrological determinism. But they could not merely dismiss astrology as nonsense. After examining both sides of the issue, and citing proofs in both directions, the Talmud arrives at a compromise position: Although the nations of the world are indeed subject to the influence of the stars, the nation of Israel is apart: "Israel is free from astrological influence.” The impact of astrology was limited and the moral freedom of the Jewish people was left intact.

Demons have frequent cameos in the Talmud. Near the end of Pesahim we find a lengthy digression on demons and witches, once thought to inhabit the margins of society (one demon was familiar enough to be known by his name, Joseph). But the Talmud’s bottom line on the subject is explicitly subversive: Yes, demons are out there, but they harass only those who pay them too much attention. The rabbis arrived at this conclusion because they regarded demonology to be largely at odds with Judaism. Short of denying their existence, which was not an option in the Talmudic era, they made demons essentially irrelevant.

Rather than cause for embarrassment, I find such Talmudic discussions inspiring. These passages grapple honestly with contemporary cultural issues and demonstrate a refusal to disengage from evidence and facts.

The sages transmitted a timeless tradition, but they did not live outside of time. They did not float above history. They lived and breathed the realities of their environment -- a sign of spiritual and moral courage rather than weakness.

Despite a persistent anti-rationalist tradition within Jewish thought over the centuries, the greatest Jewish thinkers and halakhists from Maimonides to Samson Raphael Hirsch, and beyond, insisted that Talmudic science was a product of its time, rather than a binding part of the Oral Law.

This bears emphasis and repetition because it is currently under attack as heresy.

An increasingly vocal school of thought claims that all unqualified scientific statements of the sages were divinely inspired and must be accepted as truth. A corollary to this position is that modern science is transitory and unreliable compared to the divine wisdom of the sages. Its proponents maintain that those who say otherwise are disloyal to Jewish tradition.

This new Talmudic fundamentalism is a major departure from mainstream traditional Jewish thought. Whatever its motivation, it is an ideology that is tragically out of touch with the realities of both Jewish intellectual history and modern life. It also smacks of intellectual insecurity and desperation, as if to say that observant Judaism had better hang on for dear life to the divinity of the entire Talmud -- including its realia -- or it will slide down the slippery slope to assimilation.

History is the attempt to uncover the realities of the past. Fearing that history will not only explain tradition but explain it away, reactionary elements within our tradition, past and present, view history as its natural enemy. But denying history is no longer an option, especially after so many of our own intellectual luminaries have successfully married history with tradition.

Despite those determined to drive a wedge between tradition and reality, there is cause for optimism. We can be certain that "truth shall spring up from the earth," even when it occasionally finds itself underfoot.

ArtScroll's Assault on Truth

Mesorah's ArtScroll publications tend to elicit strong and diverse reactions.  Their multiple imprints encompass a vast range of translations and original works by numerous authors, so the content and writing quality naturally varies considerably.  More fundamentally, however, ArtScroll's substance and tone often reflect a particular religious outlook which will either attract or irritate, depending on the reader.  

But anyone who values truth and integrity -- regardless of any other consideration, including communal affiliation and religious ideology -- must protest ArtScroll's latest transgression in a now-familiar pattern of editorial dishonesty. 

First, there was the misrepresentation of Rashi's commentary on Song of Songs.  Rashi takes a hybrid approach to Shir Ha-Shirim, interpreting the text both literally and allegorically.  But ArtScroll truncated Rashi's introduction to his commentary, in which he clearly outlines this methodology, and ignored entirely his commentary's literal layer.  Anyone who uses the Stone Chumash for an English translation and commentary on the Song of Songs is a victim of ArtScroll's distortion of Rashi.

Then came the blatant censorship of R. Shlomo Yosef Zevin's Ha-Moadim Ba-Halakhah. Rabbi Zevin made an offhand remark expressing gratitude for the State of Israel.  The line was excised from ArtScroll's translation.

Most recently, in a shameless act of textual fraud and an insult to the intelligence and integrity of bnei Torah (and to Rashbam himself), ArtScroll has released a censored version of Rashbam's commentary on the Torah within their new punctuated edition of Mikraot Gedolot.  As Marc B. Shapiro has shown, ArtScroll concluded that parts of the commentary are unworthy of publication, no doubt for ideological reasons.  For example, they censored sections of the commentary to Gen. 1:4-5, in which Rashbam argues that night follows day in the plain reading of the verses.  No explanation was provided for the omissions.  

In the financial world, fraud results in regulatory fines, bans from the industry, and sometimes imprisonment.  Should we hold those who publish fraudulent versions of religious texts to a lower ethical standard?

Please contact ArtScroll to request an explanation and to demand that this fraud be corrected in the next printing.

Postscript:

ArtScroll responded to what must have been several complaints.  Here is Marc Shapiro's analysis of the response.

Past Imperfect

First appears in The Jewish Standard.

For traditional communities, the past is normative. The past, rather than the present, is the guide to daily life. As a standard-bearer of the past, the traditionalist may even question the very legitimacy of the present: Leaving aside technological advances, what moral or spiritual value can modernity offer compared to the timeless legacy of the past?

Religious traditions especially, which are by nature highly conservative, judge new trends by their conformance to time-honored ways of life. Intellectual innovation, to be sure, may be encouraged, as long as it remains within the boundaries of tradition. In our own society, for example, a hallmark of Talmud scholarship has long been the ability to formulate novel legal analyses. But their implications are normally theoretical. Regarding practical matters, custom rules (there are notable exceptions among halakhists of great stature; the Vilna Gaon, for example, often ruled against common practice based on Talmudic sources).

Still, we have been able observe the evolution of attitudes toward religious tradition, and changes to the tradition itself, within a single lifetime. Over the last few decades, while its religious observance has become stricter, Orthodox society has increasingly turned to texts, rather than prevailing custom, for guidance. This trend has been thoroughly defined and interpreted in Haym Soloveitchik's 1994 Tradition essay, “Rupture and Reconstruction.” Soloveitchik contrasts the pre-war European Jewish religious culture -- a “mimetic” society where behavior was transmitted by example and imitation -- with the more recent text-based culture. While previous generations absorbed the rules of Jewish observance from the home, street, and synagogue, much of Orthodox society has now come to rely on books, thought to be more authoritative and reliable sources of Halakhah. Among other factors, this represents a desire to restore the more religiously authentic world of Europe before the Holocaust, based on a reconstituted image -- supposedly captured in halakhic texts -- of what it was really like.

It would seem that tradition itself should view this phenomenon favorably. After all, what we are describing is an ostensibly deeper and more meticulous commitment to tradition. What could be truer to the traditionalist than a religious life restored to its original state, to a period of history unweakened by dislocation and acculturation? In a religious context, how could the old-world ways of our great-grandparents and grandparents not be superior to those of our parents, which were often diluted by compromise?

But some of these assumptions do not hold up under scrutiny. What many perceive as restoration -- a more rigorous observance derived from the past -- may be, in fact, religious innovation.

In “Minhagei Lita: Customs of Lithuanian Jewry,” the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel (Manuel) Poliakoff of Baltimore sets out to correct misconceptions about the yeshiva culture of pre-war Lithuania. Rabbi Poliakoff, a participant in that culture, studied at the Telshe Yeshiva during the 1930’s. He cites several modern religious practices wrongly assumed to have been followed in the great Lithuanian yeshivot and in their surrounding communities. For example, the wide adoption of the Upsherren custom (allowing a boy’s hair to grow uncut until the age of three) and the “glatt kosher” standard (based on a kosher meat stricture), he says, are recent innovations -- unknown in Europe or confined to particular communities -- that gained currency only after World War II. He also points to rulings of R. Israel Meir Kagan in the “Mishnah Berurah” -- today considered the most authoritative code -- which were never followed in Lithuania, or even in the author’s hometown, despite his great prestige.

If certain customs which appear restorative are in fact innovative, we are also witnessing in broad segments of Orthodox society the acceptance of practices which are undeniably new. Bat Mitzvah and Simhat Bat celebrations, for example, were unknown in Ashkenazic Orthodoxy a generation ago (Simhat Bat has some precedent among Sephardim). These innovations are drawn primarily from the present; they are the product of egalitarian notions of gender and greater public visibility of women -- both modern phenomena -- and regarded as consistent, if not continuous, with tradition.

Under the right conditions, tradition can successfully assimilate the best modern values. That is one way to leave our children a more perfect past.

Clouds of glory, clouds of honor

First appeared in The Jewish Standard.

That future generations may know that I made the children of Israel live in booths (sukkot) when I brought them out of the land of Egypt  -- Leviticus 23:43.

‘Booths’ --  clouds of honor (ananei kavod) -- Rashi.

Every year on the first night of Sukkot, I was taught from a young age that the Sukkah -- especially the sekhakh, the Sukkah's ceiling -- represents something otherworldly. The structure in which our family dined was meant to evoke the divine clouds that sheltered the Israelites in the desert.

But, in fact, the definition of “booths” was the subject of debate by the Tannaitic Sages. One opinion took them to be real huts, erected for shelter from the sun; the other, in a metaphorical reading of the verse from Leviticus, identified the booths with the biblical “cloud-pillar” -- also known in the Talmud and Midrash as “clouds of honor” -- that guided and protected the Jews throughout the exodus.

It may seem far-fetched to read “booths” as divine clouds. “Clouds” and “booths” are hardly synonymous. One could also argue, on the other hand, that the literal interpretation is undermined by the fact that this reference in Leviticus is the only explicit record of booth-dwelling by the Israelites. The heavenly cloud-pillar, in contrast, appears repeatedly in the Torah from Exodus onward.

In fact, the link between sukkot and ananei kavod is supported by two separate streams of textual evidence. First, there are several instances where the Bible uses the word sukkah -- literally, a covering or canopy -- in poetic references to God’s presence, hidden behind a screen of clouds. Furthermore, the phrase “when I brought them out of the land of Egypt” suggests some connection between the sukkot in this verse and events which took place during the early history of the Exodus. Sukkot, as it happens, is also a place name. As recorded in Exodus (13:20-22) and noted there by the Jerusalem Targum, Sukkot -- the Israelites’ first station outside of Egypt -- was where the divine clouds first appeared. So, in a non-literal but strongly suggested reading of Leviticus, the sukkot in which God sheltered the Israelites were none other than the divine clouds which first accompanied them at Sukkot.

If we dwell in booths on Sukkot to recall the divine clouds of the desert, the question becomes why this holiday is the appropriate time for such a commemoration.

Throughout the Bible, clouds are a common manifestation of God’s presence. At the revelation on Sinai, Moses disappears into a cloud on the mountain. In the desert, the cloud-pillar guides the Israelites and descends regularly either to speak with Moses or to mark the next station. God’s glory (kavod) appears in a cloud at the dedication of the Tabernacle and again at the dedication of Solomon’s Temple, in each case preventing entry into the sanctuary. This cloud is not an ethereal mist; it is a tangible presence that can be overwhelming.

But the word kavod has a dual meaning in the Bible; it is alternatively translated -- at least in the King James Version -- as “glory” or “honor,” depending on the context. Generally, “glory” is used to describe the divine presence, whereas “honor” denotes respect shown to humans. This is best illustrated in the KJV's rendering of a single verse in which kavod is used twice, in both senses: "It is the glory (kavod) of God to conceal a thing, but the honor (kavod) of kings is to search out a matter" (Proverbs 25:2).

The divine clouds of Sukkot -- identified by Rashi with the ananei kavod of the Sages -- are of a different nature than the clouds of glory. The Sages understood that there was not only one cloud-pillar, but seven -- six in each direction to shield the camp and one to lead the way forward. A midrash compares the clouds with a bridal canopy prepared by the groom, and goes so far as to associate them with imagery from Song of Songs (2:6) -- “His left hand was under my head, his right arm embraced me.” These clouds are intimate and nurturing; they envelop and protect as would a parent or a lover. The clouds of Sukkot are clouds of honor, rather than clouds of glory.

Sukkot is celebrated in the wake of the Days of Awe, a season of encountering divine glory. On Rosh Hashanah, we acknowledge God’s majesty over creation and His role in history. The shofar invokes the clouds of Mt. Sinai, where God’s glory was most clearly manifest; the shofarot prayer begins, “You revealed yourself in your cloud of glory on your holy mountain.” And on Yom Kippur, we confront the finitude of human life and contrast our physical and moral flimsiness with an infinite, glorious God.

When Sukkot arrives, our relationship with the divine is transformed. While we remain awestruck and thankful for the fruit harvest, yet another sign of divine glory, we are primarily preoccupied with immediate and distinctly human anxieties related to the imminent rainy season and the coming onset of the cold, dark winter. On Sukkot, we beg for human honor and human dignity -- not to be overpowered by divine glory, but to be sheltered under divine wings.  Under the Sukkah’s canopy, God honors man.

Good Neighbors?

Please see my essay on religion and science in the Jewish Standard.