Another chapter of this travel blog commences!
Monday morning, after a brief final trip up McGraw Tower with Eli, Harry, Josefin, and Rachel, I packed up the last of my belongings still in 106 West Ave., loaded them into my family's car, and brought them back to 309 Salem Drive with the help of both of my parents. Although my main task throughout Monday afternoon involved unpacking my bags and putting my clothes and books back in storage, I ended up cleaning out large portions of my room, especially my desk. I realized that I needed to begin to remove the piles of detritus that have accumulated over the years as a result of my laziness in deciding what to do with so many of my possessions. I ended up finding old postcards and caches of foreign currencies that I had forgotten, or had believed were lost. I found three years' worth of High School student IDs, as well as the journal that I kept during the months that I lived in England at the end of 8th grade. I never realized it before, but that journal was probably the earliest prototype of this blog. I wrote essays about the places I had visited, and the about things that I did, so that I could practice writing, and would be able to remember them after the fact. I found essays about the London Underground, the Tower of London, Kew Botanic Gardens, Shakespeare's Globe Theater, British cheeses (especially Wensleydale and Yarg), and more. The essays were shorter than my blog entries, and written by a middle school version of JD (who still went almost universally as "Jonathan"), but still recognizably my own.
On Monday night, I had finished unpacking all of the things that I had brought home from college, and proceeded to pack up many of them again, in a smaller suitcase, in preparation for my trip to New York City. For those of you who don't know, I'm spending this June studying at Drisha Institute, where I hope to familiarize myself with traditional Jewish texts, and to improve my Hebrew (and, if I'm lucky, my Aramaic). I'm planning to stay in the dorms at CUNY Hunter, which do not open until June 10th, so I'll be staying with my friend Victor's family in Summit, New Jersey until then. It will be a a moderately long commute to 37 West 65th Street by foot and train and then foot again, but I don't really have much of a choice. I'm extremely grateful to Victor, his mother, and his brothers for being such good hosts, and not just letting me sleep in their house, but also chauffeuring me, spending time with me, allowing me to use the Wi-Fi necessary to write and publish this blog post, etc.
First, though, I needed to get to New Jersey. That is why, on Tuesday afternoon, Eli Shaubi and I began the drive from Ithaca to Summit. Eli, who lives in the Five Towns in Long Island, was willing to give me a ride on his own journey back to the tri-state area. He even made a substantial detour in order to drive me right to Victor's front door, rather than simply dropping me off in New York City, and hoping that I could find my own way to Summit by train via Penn Station. For those of you who know the two of us, I'll just say that we spoke about exactly the things that you would expect the two of us to discuss on a 4-5 hour road trip. Sushi-making, the discovery of the Higgs Boson, Saint Augustine's Confessions, the advent of Judeo-Arabic, and problems in our respective theses that we'd like to correct were all topics of conversation. We made it to Victor's house rather late at night, not until around 9pm, so Eli ended up sleeping at Victor's house, too, in the bed next to mine.
After seeing Eli off in the morning, I spent a fair amount of today, Wednesday, reading my copy of The Landmark Herodotus, finishing all of Book I. The Landmark Herodotus is an exhaustively-annotated edition of the Greek historian's famous work; there's also a Landmark Thucydides (which I've read), a Landmark Xenophon's Hellenika (which I hope to read soon), and a Landmark Arrian (which I plan on reading sometime). I highly recommend these editions to anyone interested in delving into Classical Greek history. These editions give the reader extensive background information, confirmations and repudiations of the writers' claims, maps that help those unfamiliar with Mediterranean and Anatolian geography make sense of what is happening when and where, and relevant archaeological images. I also spent time today trying to find a Judaica shop that sold copies of the Babylonian Talmud. I was unsuccessful, although Victor did manage to find a mezuzah that he will need for his new apartment in Philadelphia, where he will be teaching high school chemistry and attending U Penn grad school next year. I was specifically hoping to find a copy of Tractate Sanhedrin, which I will be studying at Drisha, as well as Tractate Makkot, which I hope to be studying with a friend during the coming months.
Victor and his mother also took me out to a kosher vegetarian restaurant near their house, where I got a rather good falafel with Israeli salad and Spanish eggplant salad.
I'm very excited for my orientation tomorrow. My only two worries are that I will accidentally become lost on the way to class tomorrow and therefore be late, and that I won't have a chance to purchase a copy of Tractate Sanhedrin before I need to have one of my own.
Looking forward to class tomorrow, and (for a few of you) seeing you soon in NYC!
~JD
"If you think yourself an immortal and that you command an immortal army, no opinion of mine will mean anything to you. But if you realize that you are human and command an army of human beings, consider first that there is a cycle in human affairs, and as it goes around it does not permit the same person to enjoy good fortune forever" (Herodotus, Histories, I.207.2).
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Parallel Dialectics
Since beginning to study halakhah at Cornell, I've been surprised by the degree of similarity between rabbinic dialectics and scholarly historiographical dialectics. To those of you unfamiliar with the term "dialectic," I mean by it a method of transmission of information or argumentation. One dialectic that many of you may know is the Socratic Method. The speaker begins with a strong assertive statement (such as that each of the five virtues are distinct from each other, or that a poet's skill is his ability to speak well), and methodically asks simple, straightforward questions that eventually reduce the original statement to logical absurdity. The form of the Socratic argument was that of a dialogue.
The arguments by such Medieval philosophers as Thomas Aquinas, by contrast, are in the form of a treatise, in which the writer raises a question, brings all possible assertive and negative arguments to bear, and then unerringly answers each of his own contentions, in defense of his assertive thesis (such as that truth is the same as being).
For those of you unfamiliar with rabbinics, a typical lesson (shiur) leads readers through a series of sources (mekorot), typically arranged quasi-chronologically, that are all relevant to a particular law (halakha), such as the obligation to light candles on Shabbat, the prohibition on spreading rumors, etc. If there is a basis for the law in the Torah, or in the books of the Prophets (Nevi'im) of Writings (Ketuvim), this is typically brought first. If the passage has important commentary from the Rishonim (mostly Rashi, but also the Ibn Ezra, the Sforno, the Ramban, etc.), this is listed next. Next come the Rabbinic sources, such as the Mishnah, Tosefta, Babylonian Talmud, Jerusalem Talmud, Mechilta, Sifra, Sifre, the various Aggadic Midrashim, etc., which typically make up the core of the argument, and which are also sometimes accompanied by elucidating (or, occasionally, obfuscating) commentaries of the Rishonim, such as Rashi, the Tosafot, the Rif, and the Rambam's Mishneh Torah (which for most intents and purposes serves as an interpretation of Rabbinic sources). Following this is a list of how the law was interpreted in early law codes. The line between commentary and codification is sometimes quite blurry, but interpretations firmly in the category of codification include the opinions of the Rosh and the lawcode of his son the Ba'al ha-Turim. A part of almost any halakha shiur is Yosef Karo's Shulchan Aruch, the most influential and second most important book since the sealing of the Babylonian Talmud (c. 500 C.E.). The Shulchan Aruch, published in 1565, historically divides the Rishonim, the medieval commentaries, from the Acharonim. The Shulchan Aruch consciously cites varying opinions within the halakhic discourse, in contrast to such earlier works as the Mishneh Torah, which provide only one possible answer to each halahkhic question. Since the publication Shulchan Aruch, many of the major halakhic compilations have taken the form of commentaries and glosses to the Shulchan Aruch, and it is common for a shiur to include these commentaries near the very end of the mekorot. These sources include the Rema, the Shakh, the Pri Chadash, the Biur Halakhah and Mishnah B'rurah (same author), and the Arukh ha-Shulchan. Usually a shiur ends with the most recent (i.e. late 20th-century) commentaries, especially, in my experience, those of Rav Moshe Feinstein, Rav Ovadia Yosef, and the the Tzitz Eliezer. These last few sources tend to be quoted at length, and take up more space than any of the other sources, often because the authors feel the need to justify their opinions, and to supply detailed explanations.
Although much more drawn-out in length, historiography also sifts through generation by generation of scholarship. Primary sources are brought (from Thucydides to the Venerable Bede to Isaac Babel), and used to support or refute the thoughts of various historians and schools of historians since their times. Because shiurim are delivered orally with mekorot as study aids, whereas historiographical essays do not have separate oral and written sections, the oral components of shiurim often provide the commentary on original sources, while the bulk of a historiographical essay, is the explanation of why historians make the arguments that they do. Historiography isolates theses and innovations from the work or works of other historians, and although it makes use of direct citations, these usually make up a small minority of the text on a page. Usually, historiographers explain what led historians to particular conclusions. In the 1980s, for instance, American historians of the Soviet Union tended to explain the USSR in the context of how it had endured so long, because very few people (famous exception: Benedict Anderson's in his 1983 Imagined Communities) thought that the USSR's end was near. In the 1990s, historians tended to need to explain the reasons for the Soviet Union's recent collapse. These historians felt the need to explain the foundations of the whole Soviet political structure as fundamentally unstable, because the implosion of the USSR refuted, in their minds, the possibility that the Bolshevik experiment was sustainable. Likewise, historiographers take into account individual historians' political, socioeconomic, and personal prejudices. C.L.R. James wrote his (Marxist) account of the Haitian Revolution, Black Jacobins, in order to inspire leftist revolutions in Africa, and Sidney Fay's famous 1928 study of the origins of World War I was written in the spirit of interwar reconciliation (known by some as "appeasement"), and deliberately avoided placing too much blame for the war on Germany.
Likewise, no shiur would be complete without explaining why particular rabbis have adhered to certain ideas. A friend of mine had a teacher who argued, for instance, that all law codes and their commentaries are more a product and expression of their authors' own personalities than anything else. Historical context is also important. Certainly, Rambam's living in a Muslim-dominated society affected his opinions regarding women's modesty and the use of imagery in places of worship. Likewise, the rise of the Reform movement certainly influenced such 19th-century Orthodox figures as Rabbi Akiva Eiger and the Chatam Sofer in their writing. Historiography and rabbinics frequently remain highly conscious of these contexts, aware that the producers of history (and halakhah) are themselves products of history (and halakhah). Interestingly enough, there is even a rough similarity between the quasi-arbitrary time-frames assigned by historians and by rabbis to time periods. The Tannaitic and Amoraic periods (lasting until 500 C.E.), end at roughly the same time as the period of "ancient" history in the western world (lasting until a little bit after the crossing of the Rhine by German barbarians on December 31, 406 C.E.). The Gaonic period corresponds with the "early middle ages" or "dark ages," and the Rishonic period approximately ends (with the publication of the Shulchan Aruch in 1565) with the end of the middle ages and beginning of the Renaissance. Even more interesting is that the book that coined the term "Renaissance" to define the period of artistic and intellectual rebirth that occurred (mostly in Italy) in the 15th and 16th centuries, Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, was published only 15 years before the Shulchan Aruch, and only around 150 miles away. Place, I think, is even less of a coincidence than time.
Throughout these observations, it may seem as if I'm stretching comparisons, and deliberately making two of my interests seem more similar than they are. In fact, I think I'm being entirely honest, because, from my own experience, I know that there are other ways in contemporary scholarship in the humanities to analyze a text or series of texts (the main task of both historians and Jewish halakhic educators). For example, in the Classics Department, it would be theoritically possible to follow through the same multi-generational analysis, of, say, Homer's Odyssey, beginning with selections of the text, describing Roman analyses, followed by the great 18th- and 19th- century German literary critics, and ending with the 20th-century philology. However, this is not done; most frequently, I see 20th-century sources cited, and nothing seems more recent than the work of Perry and Lord. Likewise in analytic philosophy, I've never seen anyone ever, for example, line up the works of five or six canonical philosophers on a single subject. This was done in the Middle Ages; writers such as Rabelais loved to cited eleven different classical authors' differing opinions on some single obscure topic. There is a much greater emphases on contemporary scholarship in both philology and analytic philosophy, at least in my own experience.
Does this similarity in care and respect for traditional sources and chronology really reflect anything more significant, though? I think that it might. It seems to me that what history and halakhah share in common is their consciousness of historical change and historical continuity. This question of change and continuity is, of course, the main object of historical inquiry, and it is to the detriment to other fields that they sometimes lack this (see Gaddis's The Landscape of History for a very self-congratulatory essay on how historians write history). Anthropological studies are sometimes limited because they lack consciousness of historical change: Claude Levi-Strauss, for example, did not always take into account that a group studied in the 20th century was probably culturally very different in the 19th or 18th centuries, in the same way that Americans living in 2013 differ significantly from Americans living in 1913. Cultures change, generation by generation. The codification and formal ruling of halakhah, by contrast, requires consciousness of writers and movements of various past periods, consciousness of their schools of thought (or "traditions," as is more commonly used), and skepticism as to their validity and various levels of authority. Rabbi Akiva had a very different kind of authority than, say, the Chafetz Chaim. In the same way, nobody can say that the a secondary source can contradict all existing primary sources, because secondary sources are all based upon primary sources. It's of course a point of debate as to whether anything has changed in halakhah since the sealing of the Talmud in c. 500 C.E. That question, however, is for a different time.
Also, remember when I used to end all of my entries with quotes from books that I've been reading that don't have anything to do with the subject? I'm going to begin that again.
~JD
"Charlie. Please don't take this the wrong way. I'm not trying to make you feel uncomfortable. I just want you to know that you're very special... and the only reason I'm telling you is that I don't know if anyone else ever has" (Steven Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower).
The arguments by such Medieval philosophers as Thomas Aquinas, by contrast, are in the form of a treatise, in which the writer raises a question, brings all possible assertive and negative arguments to bear, and then unerringly answers each of his own contentions, in defense of his assertive thesis (such as that truth is the same as being).
For those of you unfamiliar with rabbinics, a typical lesson (shiur) leads readers through a series of sources (mekorot), typically arranged quasi-chronologically, that are all relevant to a particular law (halakha), such as the obligation to light candles on Shabbat, the prohibition on spreading rumors, etc. If there is a basis for the law in the Torah, or in the books of the Prophets (Nevi'im) of Writings (Ketuvim), this is typically brought first. If the passage has important commentary from the Rishonim (mostly Rashi, but also the Ibn Ezra, the Sforno, the Ramban, etc.), this is listed next. Next come the Rabbinic sources, such as the Mishnah, Tosefta, Babylonian Talmud, Jerusalem Talmud, Mechilta, Sifra, Sifre, the various Aggadic Midrashim, etc., which typically make up the core of the argument, and which are also sometimes accompanied by elucidating (or, occasionally, obfuscating) commentaries of the Rishonim, such as Rashi, the Tosafot, the Rif, and the Rambam's Mishneh Torah (which for most intents and purposes serves as an interpretation of Rabbinic sources). Following this is a list of how the law was interpreted in early law codes. The line between commentary and codification is sometimes quite blurry, but interpretations firmly in the category of codification include the opinions of the Rosh and the lawcode of his son the Ba'al ha-Turim. A part of almost any halakha shiur is Yosef Karo's Shulchan Aruch, the most influential and second most important book since the sealing of the Babylonian Talmud (c. 500 C.E.). The Shulchan Aruch, published in 1565, historically divides the Rishonim, the medieval commentaries, from the Acharonim. The Shulchan Aruch consciously cites varying opinions within the halakhic discourse, in contrast to such earlier works as the Mishneh Torah, which provide only one possible answer to each halahkhic question. Since the publication Shulchan Aruch, many of the major halakhic compilations have taken the form of commentaries and glosses to the Shulchan Aruch, and it is common for a shiur to include these commentaries near the very end of the mekorot. These sources include the Rema, the Shakh, the Pri Chadash, the Biur Halakhah and Mishnah B'rurah (same author), and the Arukh ha-Shulchan. Usually a shiur ends with the most recent (i.e. late 20th-century) commentaries, especially, in my experience, those of Rav Moshe Feinstein, Rav Ovadia Yosef, and the the Tzitz Eliezer. These last few sources tend to be quoted at length, and take up more space than any of the other sources, often because the authors feel the need to justify their opinions, and to supply detailed explanations.
Although much more drawn-out in length, historiography also sifts through generation by generation of scholarship. Primary sources are brought (from Thucydides to the Venerable Bede to Isaac Babel), and used to support or refute the thoughts of various historians and schools of historians since their times. Because shiurim are delivered orally with mekorot as study aids, whereas historiographical essays do not have separate oral and written sections, the oral components of shiurim often provide the commentary on original sources, while the bulk of a historiographical essay, is the explanation of why historians make the arguments that they do. Historiography isolates theses and innovations from the work or works of other historians, and although it makes use of direct citations, these usually make up a small minority of the text on a page. Usually, historiographers explain what led historians to particular conclusions. In the 1980s, for instance, American historians of the Soviet Union tended to explain the USSR in the context of how it had endured so long, because very few people (famous exception: Benedict Anderson's in his 1983 Imagined Communities) thought that the USSR's end was near. In the 1990s, historians tended to need to explain the reasons for the Soviet Union's recent collapse. These historians felt the need to explain the foundations of the whole Soviet political structure as fundamentally unstable, because the implosion of the USSR refuted, in their minds, the possibility that the Bolshevik experiment was sustainable. Likewise, historiographers take into account individual historians' political, socioeconomic, and personal prejudices. C.L.R. James wrote his (Marxist) account of the Haitian Revolution, Black Jacobins, in order to inspire leftist revolutions in Africa, and Sidney Fay's famous 1928 study of the origins of World War I was written in the spirit of interwar reconciliation (known by some as "appeasement"), and deliberately avoided placing too much blame for the war on Germany.
Likewise, no shiur would be complete without explaining why particular rabbis have adhered to certain ideas. A friend of mine had a teacher who argued, for instance, that all law codes and their commentaries are more a product and expression of their authors' own personalities than anything else. Historical context is also important. Certainly, Rambam's living in a Muslim-dominated society affected his opinions regarding women's modesty and the use of imagery in places of worship. Likewise, the rise of the Reform movement certainly influenced such 19th-century Orthodox figures as Rabbi Akiva Eiger and the Chatam Sofer in their writing. Historiography and rabbinics frequently remain highly conscious of these contexts, aware that the producers of history (and halakhah) are themselves products of history (and halakhah). Interestingly enough, there is even a rough similarity between the quasi-arbitrary time-frames assigned by historians and by rabbis to time periods. The Tannaitic and Amoraic periods (lasting until 500 C.E.), end at roughly the same time as the period of "ancient" history in the western world (lasting until a little bit after the crossing of the Rhine by German barbarians on December 31, 406 C.E.). The Gaonic period corresponds with the "early middle ages" or "dark ages," and the Rishonic period approximately ends (with the publication of the Shulchan Aruch in 1565) with the end of the middle ages and beginning of the Renaissance. Even more interesting is that the book that coined the term "Renaissance" to define the period of artistic and intellectual rebirth that occurred (mostly in Italy) in the 15th and 16th centuries, Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, was published only 15 years before the Shulchan Aruch, and only around 150 miles away. Place, I think, is even less of a coincidence than time.
Throughout these observations, it may seem as if I'm stretching comparisons, and deliberately making two of my interests seem more similar than they are. In fact, I think I'm being entirely honest, because, from my own experience, I know that there are other ways in contemporary scholarship in the humanities to analyze a text or series of texts (the main task of both historians and Jewish halakhic educators). For example, in the Classics Department, it would be theoritically possible to follow through the same multi-generational analysis, of, say, Homer's Odyssey, beginning with selections of the text, describing Roman analyses, followed by the great 18th- and 19th- century German literary critics, and ending with the 20th-century philology. However, this is not done; most frequently, I see 20th-century sources cited, and nothing seems more recent than the work of Perry and Lord. Likewise in analytic philosophy, I've never seen anyone ever, for example, line up the works of five or six canonical philosophers on a single subject. This was done in the Middle Ages; writers such as Rabelais loved to cited eleven different classical authors' differing opinions on some single obscure topic. There is a much greater emphases on contemporary scholarship in both philology and analytic philosophy, at least in my own experience.
Does this similarity in care and respect for traditional sources and chronology really reflect anything more significant, though? I think that it might. It seems to me that what history and halakhah share in common is their consciousness of historical change and historical continuity. This question of change and continuity is, of course, the main object of historical inquiry, and it is to the detriment to other fields that they sometimes lack this (see Gaddis's The Landscape of History for a very self-congratulatory essay on how historians write history). Anthropological studies are sometimes limited because they lack consciousness of historical change: Claude Levi-Strauss, for example, did not always take into account that a group studied in the 20th century was probably culturally very different in the 19th or 18th centuries, in the same way that Americans living in 2013 differ significantly from Americans living in 1913. Cultures change, generation by generation. The codification and formal ruling of halakhah, by contrast, requires consciousness of writers and movements of various past periods, consciousness of their schools of thought (or "traditions," as is more commonly used), and skepticism as to their validity and various levels of authority. Rabbi Akiva had a very different kind of authority than, say, the Chafetz Chaim. In the same way, nobody can say that the a secondary source can contradict all existing primary sources, because secondary sources are all based upon primary sources. It's of course a point of debate as to whether anything has changed in halakhah since the sealing of the Talmud in c. 500 C.E. That question, however, is for a different time.
Also, remember when I used to end all of my entries with quotes from books that I've been reading that don't have anything to do with the subject? I'm going to begin that again.
~JD
"Charlie. Please don't take this the wrong way. I'm not trying to make you feel uncomfortable. I just want you to know that you're very special... and the only reason I'm telling you is that I don't know if anyone else ever has" (Steven Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower).
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