A Truly Wonderful Thing

30 05 2011

It has recently come to my attention (thanks to a post at Hirhurim) that the entire Soncino English translation of the Babylonian Talmud is now available online. It can be found at Halakhah.com¹, and comes complete with introductions by Rabbi Dr I. Epstein, as well as forwards by Maurice Simon and former Chief Rabbi Dr J.H. Hertz. For the quality of translation, I still prefer Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz’s monumental achievement, and am especially in awe of his ability to undertake it singlehandedly. If you are looking for a translation into English, however, the matter-of-fact and formally-equivalent Soncino translation runs rings around the overpriced, misleading and unfaithful translations by Artscroll.

Certainly, nothing can possibly take the place of the actual text, but for those who find translations a useful form of “commentary”, the DafYomi Advancement Forum constitutes an excellent supplement to one’s translation of choice. I cannot even estimate the number of times that I have consulted this incredible site in order to get the basic sense of a sugya and save myself three hours of frustration. I do miss having the time to sit and shteig, as they say, but for the moment it’s all about covering ground.

¹ Surprisingly, the considerably more apt domain name “halakha.com” appears to be available. Anybody interested?


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Categories : Jewish Tradition, Translation

Yom HaShoah 5771

1 05 2011

Over 2008 and 2009, Rav Tamir Granot wrote a comprehensive analysis of the different approaches that various contemporary Torah scholars have taken to the Holocaust. You can read the series in its original Hebrew here, or in Kaeren Fish and Meshulam Gotlieb’s excellent English translation here.

One of the individuals who appears in the series is Rabbi Kalonymos Kalmish Shapira. Known as the Piaseczno Rebbe, Rabbi Shapira lived in the Warsaw ghetto until its liquidation in 1943. The discourses that he delivered over that time were collected together and subsequently published under the title, אש קדוש. An English version exists, entitled Sacred Fire: Torah from the Years of Fury 1939-1942 (trans. J.H. Worch; ed. D. Miller; New Jersey: Jason Aronson, 2000).

A hallmark of Rabbi Shapira’s discourses is his emphasis on the ephemerality of suffering. Like a person who wanders barefoot through a field of thorns and briars, the tribulations that he endures are surely ameliorated if he but meditate upon the fact that they cannot continue any further than the field itself. All suffering, he insisted, is there to teach us a message, and it is a message best appreciated with an awareness of its ultimate brevity. In truth, as the suffering being endured by Rabbi Shapira and those around him reached heights beyond any reasonable expectation, the determination of that message became more and more difficult. At the close of Pesach in 1941 (Sacred Fire, 182-187), Rabbi Shapiro asks, “What can be learned from pain?” His answer, drawn on analogy with the fact that the Israelites were only redeemed from Egypt after various additional tribulations, is that one learns faith in God, and that even the little acts of piety yield a future reward commensurate with the suffering endured in this world. While it is a faith that I do not share, I find his closing words to be tremendously powerful:

Now at this time, when our troubles are bitter beyond belief, God should have mercy on us and save us in the blink of an eye, when we continue to believe. Our belief creates an image of God that is a revelation above and below, and in God we will find strength, and we will believe, and we will hope, and in a moment he will save us. Amen.

- Sacred Fire, 187.

No matter the dizzying and unprecedented heights of Nazi savagery, Rabbi Shapira clung to the notion that salvation would be immediate, that God had not hidden his face in any objective sense, and that there was a divine method that underscored the brutality of everyday existence in occupied Poland. That the Nazis were to claim almost 3,000,000 Jewish lives in Poland alone seems beyond human comprehension; by emphasising the necessity to remain Jewish and to maintain hope in salvation, Rabbi Shapira not only allowed himself to keep going but brought much comfort to those who were around him as well.

Rabbi Shapira was murdered in a field near Lublin during the “reaping festival” of 1943. Some of his disciples survived the Holocaust and moved to Israel.


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Categories : Jewish Tradition

Digitised Manuscripts Online

27 04 2011

Wow. The Jewish National and University Library is digitising its entire collection of rare and out-of-print monographs. For the list of 1100 texts that have already been uploaded, see this site. I haven’t spent much time with it, although I know that I will be playing with it a great deal in the next few days, but am already most impressed with the list of works under the Rabbinic Literature tab. I plan on going absolutely nuts on “Karaitica” as soon as possible.


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Categories : Literature

Fest

27 04 2011

How far would you go for a pie?

Recently, driven on the winds of hunger, I drove 775km for one of the best pies in the world. Large chunks of real beef, drenched in gravy and blanketed in thin, crusty pastry…

Fortunately, the annual Blues and Roots Festival happened to be on while I was in Byron Bay, so I also managed to see several acts, including Fishbone, Indigo Girls, Jethro Tull and Bob Dylan. For the last one, I can only say that the times, they are a-catching up. And when I was not at the festival, walking on the beach, hiking through the bush, nor gazing at the horizon from the vantage point of Australia’s eastern-most tip, I was irritating anybody who came within earshot by reading the first two tractates of the Mishna aloud in an effort to cement them before moving on to the third. I should certainly have brought the first of my new thirteen-volume Mishna with Kehati with me, the better to correct my inevitable comprehensive lacunae.

It is so good, at the end of a long, two-day drive, to be again home. It is so wonderful to be back in my book-lined room, to which I have recently added not only those volumes of the Mishna (only $100, if you can believe it, from Pomeranz Books), but a full set of Steinsaltz Babli, and an impressively comprehensive four-volume analysis of Jewish Law by Menachem Elon, former justice on Israel’s supreme court. I have so much reading to get through, so much marking that has to be done, new courses that need to be prepared, a talk on the history of Palestinian Judaism that needs to be given, and a thesis that I need to write. It’s good to be back.


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Categories : Personal Reflections

The Good, the Bad … and the Ugly

1 04 2011

I was very pleased to discover the other day that Professor Jim Davila had again mentioned me on his popular blog, PaleoJudaica. I know this because a friend alerted me to the fact and because my blog stats magically tripled overnight. The series of posts that Jim had kindly publicised were written by me in 2005 (although added to this blog a year later), and although I don’t think that there is anything too egregious about them, I spoke with a confidence that belied my level of familiarity with the literature. The same can be said for other posts from the same time, and this blog has been a two-edged sword in that regard. While providing me with an opportunity to write about issues that interest me, it also serves as a record of the various things that I have thought and believed in the years since its inception in 2006. There are things that I can erase if I wish, and things that I sometimes do, but something published online cannot ever be eradicated completely.

The single most popular post on this blog was from July 2008, after having just returned from the SBL International Meeting in Auckland, New Zealand. A summary of Prof. David Clines’ paper on Psalm 23, “The Lord is my Shepherd” has received a total of 13,265 views – that’s only 2,000 more than the second-most popular post on this blog (a review of a truly awful Hebrew tattoo that won me the unpaid job of translating tattoos for people), but around 10,000 more views than the third-most popular post. Had I known that so many people were going to be reading it, I almost certainly would have thought a little more about what I wrote.

There are some posts of which I am particularly proud, like my translation and commentary of the Shimon bar Yochai narrative in Shabbat 33b-34a, and my overview of the development of the Halakha at the end of last year. Others, of which I am less proud, don’t need any advertisement, but I am always flattered by those who find them and hate them less than I do. Few generate genuine discussion, for which reason I have sometimes chosen to publish my posts on Galus Australis instead, where the discussion is frequently feisty. Good discussions have occurred once or twice on this blog too, as on my review of Tolkien’s translation of Jonah, although it has generally been because I posted on an issue of political significance, like the closing of Sheffield’s undergraduate biblical program, or my rejection of atheism.

Some posts have generated discussion offline as well, whether through email correspondence or when somebody approaches me and tells me that (s)he reads my blog. That’s always a strange feeling and, while it’s certainly not unwelcome, it does make me wonder just what they’ve been reading, and whether I should have been careful with what I wrote. Likewise, when I occasionally see my blog on the Biblical Studies Carnival, the excitement quickly gives way to a concern that I should be choosing my words with more care, that I should have possibly opted for a pseudonym, or that it’s high time that I go offline and do some real work for a change. When John Hobbins invited me to a dinner for bibliobloggers in New Orleans, all of those hours spent editing my rants paid off, and I wish that opportunities to meet other bibliobloggers existed in the real world more often. I also wish that I could write more.

As of today, I now teach almost every day of the week (Friday and Sunday are the only days on which I don’t have regular classes, and many Sundays are an exception), and as I am trying to get my PhD submitted before the end of 2012, I really do have very little time to contribute anything of substance. When I noticed the increased traffic coming from PaleoJudaica, my first thought was to quickly write something that might generate discussion. Instead, while I thank whoever is reading this for their kind patronage of my blog, I must regretfully indicate that my next post is unlikely to be any time soon, is doubtless going to be fairly superficial, and will be born of a desire to procrastinate above all else. I do, however, look forward very much to writing for you again when I have the time to do so properly.

For those of you who are in the least bit interested, this is the very first post that I ever wrote, only two posts before the commencement of the series that Jim Davila linked to. That was over four years ago now, and I hope that in four years from now I am still here – but not still doing this @&!# PhD.


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Categories : Personal Reflections

Pity for the Enemy

12 03 2011

In Matthew 5:43-44, Jesus is quoted as having made a rather brazen statement. “You have heard,” he says, “that you should love your neighbour and hate your enemy. Well I say that you should love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you.” In Berakhot 10a, Rabbi Meir is talked by his sensible wife into praying for the repentance of “bandits” (countryfolk, to be linguistically precise), but to suggest that somebody should go so far as to actually love the ones who threaten them might be a bit much. In fact, show me somebody who genuinely has compassion for those who endanger the lives of his children, and I’ll show you somebody who shouldn’t have any. But that’s only one of two reasons as to why this statement is a brazen one. The other, less obvious, reason is that nowhere is it said that you should hate them in the first place.

In fact, Jesus’ assertion (if we might take at face value that it was his) is renowned for going so much further than the statement attributed to Hillel before him: that which is harmful to you, do not do to another; that is the whole of Torah (Shabbat 31a). Like Rabbi Akiva, who in later years was to suggest that “Love your neighbour as yourself” (Lev 19:18) was the most important mitzvah (cf: Sifra 19:45), Jesus seems to be drawing on this principle in citing his modified ruling. Yet where does the Torah ever stress the corollary, that one should hate his enemies? Nowhere does the verb √שנא (nor the nouns שנאה or אימה), appear within the context of an imperative, commanding us to hate anybody or anything. There are ample passages that testify to an enmity for certain nations, people, animals, objects and practises, but nothing that says that you must actually despise those things. At least, not in the way that Jesus appears to be suggesting.

It strikes me that Jesus is employing a rather exclusionary interpretation of the word רעך, which I have above translated as “your neighbour”, but which more properly means “your friend”. I do not suppose that anybody (leastways, nobody who pretends to live in accordance with this principle) would suggest that it is referring to anything so exclusive as the individual who you would consider your actual companion, but it is through intimating that it is only those people whom one is required to love that Jesus derives the implicit corollary: those who are not your friends, you are required to actually hate. That is going a bit far for my liking, but then it is Matthew 5 that we are talking about.

Be that as it may, I was teaching my weekly Shabbat morning class on Isaiah this morning, and we were reading chapters 15 and 16. This lengthy oracle against Moab provided me with a wonderful opportunity to present also the Moabite Stone, and compare it (on a surface level) to the war between Moab and Israel, Judah and Edom in 2 Kings 3. Considering the generally polemical nature of all texts that concern Moab (and it is the exceptional character of Ruth that proves the rule), it is no surprise that Isaiah’s oracle (not unlike all of Isaiah’s oracles in this section) should be so gratuitously violent. Indeed, I even suggested that those sections in which he expresses sincere grief for the misfortune of the Moabites were anything but that, and that the Israelite poet who composed this particular oracle wanted nothing more than to crow bombastically over the annihilation of his foes. And yet… there is something strange about 16:3-4.

Having immediately followed on from the threat of destruction, levelled against even those few who escape God’s immediate wrath (15:9), the prophet now admonishes us to show mercy to their refugees, to hide their escapees, and to be a general refuge for them. That the editors of the NRSV noted the incongruence of this passage might be demonstrated in the fact that they enclosed it in quotation marks. Somebody is saying this, but it is evidently neither the prophet himself nor God. In a footnote to the New Jerusalem Bible, the assertion is made that this is the Moabites who are speaking. That might make sense, and may be what the NRSV is meaning to suggest. But is that what the Hebrew actually says?

יגורו בך נדחי מואב הוי סתר למו מפני שודד

I would translate this as “Let the Moabite refugees dwell among you; be a hiding place for them from the despoiler”. If I were to vocalise it, in other words, I would render it as yaguru vakh nidchei mo’av hevei seter lamo mifnei shoded. Yet I was most intrigued to discover that this is not how it is actually vocalised in the MT. On the contrary, there it is vocalised as yaguru vakh niddachai mo’av hevei seter lamo mifnei shoded. In other words, “Let my refugees live among you, O Moab; be a hiding place for them from the despoiler”.

I think that it is safe to say that this reading makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Instead, I would suggest that it is a symptom of exegetical discomfort over the possibility that Isaiah is here exhorting the Israelites to have compassion for their foes. While I can understand the Masoretes having had a problem with this possibility, I find it difficult to understand why certain Christian translations would find it problematic, especially when it occurs in what is widely referred to as the fourth gospel.


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Categories : Bible, Hebrew

Centre Stage

11 03 2011

Charlie Sheen is many things, it seems, and there are very many things that he is not. While the blogs are abuzz with questions regarding his antisemitism (for the record, he is as antisemitic as I am), I recently encountered a rather curious allegation. In addition to all of the various other things that Charlie Sheen is not, he is also, it would seem, not filial. No, not one bit.

The article in question, which appeared in China’s Global Times, stresses some key truths about the nature of the US media. Rather than quietly and sensitively deal with one man’s car crash of a life, what people want the most is to see the individual behind the wheel, front and centre stage, while he drives into a wall. Again, and again, and again. When he should be receiving appropriate treatment for his psychiatric disorder, he is instead allowed free reign to advocate the worst elements of his decrepit lifestyle. I won’t join the bandwagon and get indignant about his mistresses living together, but only because I am jealous. I will, however, suggest that his continued advocacy for drug use (“dyin’s for fools”) is disturbing, and irresponsible on the part of everybody who has helped to give him a microphone.

But while this is all very important, the chief focus of the Chinese article (as its title suggests) is Charlie’s relationship with his distraught father. While the author makes a connection between that and his relationship with his immoral fatherland (this is, after all, a Chinese paper), it is their condemnation of his lack of filial propriety that draws their greatest ire. And so I feel that it is worth mentioning at this point that the article in question either suffered a rather unfortunate lacuna on its way towards publication, or the editor is an idiot.

In the second-to-last paragraph, before declaring (the fact) that “Sheen is a disgrace”, the author – a Mr Hao Leifeng – makes the following claim:

He ignored his own father’s advice to keep quiet, who was once the president of the US.

Is China so starved for information about the outside world that people think The West Wing was a documentary? Did the article originally add something along the lines of “… in an award-winning NBC drama”? Or has it suffered, perhaps, in translation? Am I missing, in English, vital clues to the effect that this piece was supposed to be a lampoon, and that Charlie is only playing the fool, in much the same way as his father played Josiah Bartlet?

I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that if you’re going to complain about somebody standing centre stage while they make a fool of themselves, you should probably not make a fool of yourself when you do.


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Categories : Current Events

Hysterical

1 03 2011

Don’t get me wrong: Glenn Beck is an ignorant fool. But nothing irritates me more than the vultures at the Anti-Defamation League, who sit around scratching themselves all day, until somebody uses the word “Jew” in a sentence and gives them something to shriek about. Now that Glenn Beck has made the appalling comparison (gasp!) between Reform Jews and “radicalised Islam”, the heroic ADL has leapt to the rescue of Jews everywhere. Never missing a beat (unless it’s a non-Jew taking the beating), the ADL has released an official statement to the effect that nothing can be more offensive than comparing good, honest people to Muslims.

Well, that’s not exactly what they said, but you can read it for yourself. Comparing Reform Jews to radical Islamists, well… that just hurts our feelings. And because antisemitism is so very frightening, it makes sense that those of us who devote our careers to hunting it down should begin to see it everywhere we look. This is a survival mechanism after all, and if Jews are going to survive in a country with the largest Jewish population, within which there is no history of organised antisemitism, where Jews have the ear of the president, top the nation’s rich list and run the entertainment industry, it’s clearly going to be by complaining as loudly as possible whenever a drunkard, a drug-user or a twit says something about Jews that falls short of adoration.

Who knows? Maybe one day we will rid the world of antisemitism, and our children can look back on our obsession with it and see it for what it was: a pathological disorder, no less rank than antisemitism itself.


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Categories : Current Events

Fear

25 02 2011

Quite some time ago, I wrote a post about an interesting difference between the Masoretic Text (Genesis 42:1) and two of the Aramaic translations: Targum Pseudo-Jonathan and the Peshitta. What interested me about them was that they had both understood the word תתראו as תתיראו: “[you pl.] looking at one another”, vs. “[you pl.] are afraid”. It seemed to me, if not to others, that the Aramaic/Syriac version was superior to the version in the Hebrew, which never really satisfied me in context. Turns out that there’s another instance, very similar to that one!

Almost exactly one year ago, Dov Bear wrote a post about Exodus 32:5, in which he indicated his confusion over precisely what it was that Aaron is said to have seen. In this instance, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan keeps the same Hebrew verb as we find in the Masoretic Text (although he does add details that concern what Aaron saw), but the Peshitta, again, renders this as √דחל, “to fear”. In this instance, however, the anonymous translator would not have had a text that featured an additional letter, but was merely vocalising differently those letters that he had.

This all reminds me of the fact that I really should read more of the Peshitta. I wonder how often it renders “look” as “fear”? The root √ראה turns up almost four hundred times in the Torah alone, and as I don’t have the Peshitta on my copy of Accordance, I expect that this experiment might take more time than I am prepared to commit. Until I update my hopelessly outdated software, I wonder if anybody in possession of a newer version would like to take a stab at this? Does the anonymous translator of the Peshitta specifically have a thing for the horror genre?


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Categories : Bible, Semitic Languages

This is going to hurt me a lot more than it hurts you…

11 02 2011

Today’s xkcd, titled “(“, presents what I am guessing to be one of Randall Munroe’s pet peeves.

Can’t say that I agree. I find far more infuriating the lone closed parenthesis, without any indication of where the parenthetical statement might be said to have begun.)

See?

(All jokes aside, when I was in yeshiva, we were once learning a ma’amar by the fifth Rebbe of Lubavitch (who was known as the Rebbe Rashab) entitled “Kuntres haTefillah” (קונטרס התפילה, “or “Tract of Prayer”). The discourse concerned the elevation of prayers through the various supernal realms, and constituted an apt meditation before “davvening Shacharis” in the morning. A great fan of parenthetical statements, the Rebbe Rashab used to drive me nuts with his subordinate clauses within subordinate clauses, and I would be constantly flicking back, counting parentheses, to ensure that we had closed them all and were not still dwelling within a tangential remark.

I do not know if this could specifically be said to be a feature of Ukrainian Hassidut (I am being a little tongue in cheek: I suspect that it cannot), but the Rebbe of Breslov, Rebbe Nachman, was himself a great fan of embedded clauses, and his stories are a testimony to that. Most confusingly, they do not always end back on the surface level. (Those who are particularly interested in texts that embed subordinate clauses, without providing “an exit strategy”, would do well to read Douglas R. Hofstadter’s erudite Gödel, Escher, Bach. It comes highly recommended. The section on subordinating narratives can be found in §5 (“Recursive Structures and Processes”), but most especially in its introductory narrative, “Little Harmonic Labyrinth” (pp103-126))


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Categories : Random Musings

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