One of the things I still enjoy from social media is the book recommendations, either directly from friends or from reviews I see shared. Every now and again I get exposed to books or authors whom I otherwise would never have encountered, and this exposure has helped me expand my knowledge and perspective about many topics.
Since I enjoy book recommendations, a few years ago I started compiling my favorite books from the previous year, initially as a Facebook post, then a Twitter thread, and now that the blog is back up and running, I decided to start posting them here.
The following isn’t a comprehensive list of books I’ve read or even a ranking of the “best” books. Rather, these are the books I enjoyed reading the most. This does not even mean I agree with everything in these books, only that for various reasons I found myself more engaged and generally appreciated the experience of having read these.
Even from my distant vantage point of living in Israel, I believe it is obvious that the Trump presidency has either created new divisions within the Jewish community or at least expanded the existing ones. One of the biggest points of divergence is over policies pertaining to Israel, where divisions have been growing steadily for decades. A recent poll by the American Jewish Committee helpfully quantifies the current extent.
The gap between American Jews and Israelis regarding President Trump’s approach to Israel is profound. While 77% of Israeli Jews approve of how the president is handling U.S.-Israel relations, only 34% of American Jews do. A majority, 57%, of U.S. Jews disapprove, while only 10% of Israelis do.
On the U.S. decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move its embassy there, 85% of Israeli Jews, compared with 46% of U.S. Jews, support the decision, while 7% of Israelis and 47% of U.S. Jews oppose it.
Single-issue voters may continue to support Trump if they view him favorably on that single issue despite deep disagreements over any (or all) other policies. This single-mindedness may seem incomprehensible to others considering how much else needs to be overlooked or dismissed.
Journalist Julia Ioffe not only blamed Trump for the attack, but also called out American Jews.
The implication here is that supporting a president for policy in one area may have disastrous consequences for people in another area. In this case, support for moving the US embassy to Jerusalem comes at the cost of American Jewish lives.
Writing in The Atlantic, Franklin Foer calls for a variant of excommunication of Trump supporting Jews because their doing so puts other Jews at risk.
Any strategy for enhancing the security of American Jewry should involve shunning Trump’s Jewish enablers. Their money should be refused, their presence in synagogues not welcome. They have placed their community in danger.
Can Jews really be this apathetic or willfully blind towards the physical danger of fellow Jews? I suggest the answer is sadly yes, with ample evidence from Israel.
Many readers may be familiar with Shira Banki, the sixteen-year-old who was murdered at the Jerusalem Pride Parade in 2015. Her murder was met with an outpouring of support and tributes not only in Israel but in the US as well (one person I knew even wrote a song dedicated to her).
In contrast, I suspect few will recognize the name of Hallel Yaffa Ariel, a thirteen-year-old who was murdered in her home in 2016. But because Hallel was a “settler” even those who bothered to acknowledge her death felt the need to include qualifiers and disclaimers.
The reality is that even if we recognize that all human lives are of value, certain deaths or tragedies affect us emotionally more than others. But I suspect that people notice whose deaths are mourned, or more precisely, those who are worthy of mourning, and those whose are not.
For as complicated as Israeli/Palestinian politics may be, if we are going by Foer’s criteria for exclusion that, “They have placed their community in danger” then it would not be surprising for Israelis on the ground to be less sympathetic to those who have pushed for a Palestinian state as currently constructed (as opposed to a liberal democratic Palestinian state). Those who have excused totalitarianism when others are threatened should not be surprised when those same others are less than sympathetic to their moral alarmism.
In other words, when you see comments that certain Jews only care about their ideology even as other Jews are living under attack, consider that maybe this has been going on for a while now with the roles reversed. This should not be taken as a justification, but I believe how people have reacted to drastically different lived experiences may explain much about why the Israel/Diaspora relationship is as strained as it is.
Over the summer of 2018, I resuscitated this site and undertook a personal writing project to finally address in long-form1 several topics which I feel have been intentionally oversimplified, in some cases to the point of distortion. The result is what I call the “Sacred Slogan Series,” including PDF source sheets, collected below for convenience.
Introducing “Sacred Slogans” The introduction explains what I mean by “Sacred Slogans” and why I feel they are so important to explore in greater detail. I also define my methodologies and goals.
Tzelem Elokim / Imago Dei / Image of God The idea that all human beings are created in the image of God is a core tenet of faith for universalist approaches to Judaism, but for Biblical and Rabbinic sources it’s far more complicated.
Ohr Lagoyim / “Light unto the Nations” Aside from the dubious origins of “Light unto the Nations” as a slogan, this entry addresses the extent to which Torah is concerned with how Jews are perceived by gentiles.
“A Jew is a Jew” – Identity vs. Inclusion This entry addresses a modern-day Sacred Slogan in order to differentiate between one’s immutable status of being a Jew and one’s acceptance in Jewish communal life.
“Love the Stranger” – The Ger in Jewish Society While the Biblical commandment to “love the stranger” is often invoked in the context of immigration and refugee policy, Torah comes with its own regulations.
Tikkun Olam Tikkun Olam is the most ubiquitous of the Sacred Slogans. This entry discusses how Tikkun Olam was implemented by the tradition which coined the term.
Of the Sacred Slogans we have addressed so far, none are as socially significant as “tikkun olam.” Tikkun olam literally translates to “repairing the world,” which is ambitious as it is open to interpretation. Despite the fact that there is no commandment mandate anywhere in Biblical1 or Rabbinic literature for Jews to undertake tikkunolam,2 some have understood it as a universalist mandate for the Jewish people. For example, according to Mordechai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, “We cannot consider ourselves servants of the Divine King unless we take upon ourselves the task ‘to perfect the World under the Kingdom of the Almighty.”3 Nearly 60 years later, R. Richard Hirsch asserted, “God has chosen us for a sacred mission: Tikkun Olam, to complete the universe. This concept of Tikkun Olam as the collective mission of the Jewish people has permeated every movement in Jewish life.”4
To illustrate the pervasiveness of “tikkunolam,” Andrew Silow-Carroll and Jonathan Krasner both used Google’s NGram Viewer to find the frequency of “tikkunolam” in published books and found a huge spike in its usage starting in early 1980’s and continued with a consistent upward trend that continues to this day.
With the extensive literature discussing tikkunolamconstantly growing, a discussion of how the term has evolved would be a worthy study in its own right.5 However, my focus here is what did the idiom mean in its original context, with a focus on its practical implementations.
As debates over US immigration and refugee policy continue, activists have taken to citing the Biblical commandments to love and protect the “ger,” popularly translated as the “stranger,” as the moral basis for their respective positions. Those who do not recognize Biblical authority can dismiss these commandments as easily as they would for anything else in the Bible. But for Jews, or at least those Jews who accept the Bible as representative of divine will, the Biblical commandments to protect the stranger ought to carry religious significance. Jewish activists who invoke the “stranger” in the context of immigration or refugees are thus asserting that the Biblical protections ought to be applied in such cases, and therefore Jews have a religious obligation to support (or oppose) government policies that run counter to God’s commandments.
Setting aside the question of if Jews should demand that civil policies follow Biblical (or Rabbinic) law, Torah has more to say about the relationship between the “stranger” and society than an unconditional obligation to provide support to whoever demands.
Let me state explicitly that I have no desire to debate immigration or refugee policy as these complicated subjects are well beyond my expertise. The specific point I am addressing here is that if it is appropriate to extend the Torah’s model of the “stranger” to immigration and refugees, then we ought to consider more of the Torah’s laws and values to see if such analogies are truly warranted.1
Not long after he accepted chairmanship of the Jewish Agency, former Israeli MK Isaac Herzog referred to intermarriage as a “plague” that required a “solution.” One might expect this sort of rhetoric out of an Orthodox rabbi, but not from the head of the Jewish Agency, whose mission is “to connect the global Jewish family.” Herzog subsequently clarified, “A Jew is a Jew is a Jew, no matter which stream he belongs to, if he wears a skullcap or not.”
While “a Jew is a Jew” does not appear in that exact form in traditional Jewish texts, the Rabbinic analogue can be found in the Talmud. Commenting on Joshua 7:11, R. Abba b. Zavda says, “even though he has sinned, he is still ‘Israel’”.1 Meaning, a Jew who sins is still part of the Jewish people. This is a fundamental concept for Jewish outreach among those who try to ignite the latent “Jewish spark” within all Jews.
At the same time, “a Jew is a Jew” hits at the core issues of inclusion and exclusion in the Jewish community. This is a particularly contentious issue in Israel where non-Orthodox denominations lobby for official recognition and legitimacy in the Jewish state. As discussed at length in a previous podcast series, the politics of exclusion has been a constant theme throughout Jewish history. And as we will see in this post, certain people may be halakhically Jewish, but may still be excluded from society due to their actions. The point of this entry is to differentiate between the status of one’s Jewish identity and one’s role in a Jewish society, in that the former does not guarantee the latter.2
Much of the Torah is particularistic, that is, for or about Jews exclusively. For example, we find particularistic sentiments such as like the Jews being chosen by God to be a treasured nation over all others1 or God giving the Torah to the Jewish people to the exclusion of gentiles.2 At the same time, there are also expressions of universalism, where the scope of Torah extends to the entire world beyond the Jewish nation such as Isaiah 2:1-4.3
Following in a universalist mindset, there are those who claim that Jews have a national mission to become exemplars to the rest of the world, however defined. The sacred slogan behind this claim is that the Jews ought to be, “ohrlagoyim” / “a light unto the nations.”
This post addresses two Sacred Slogans frequently employed in the name of pluralism. The first is that there are “70 faces of Torah,” referring to the multiplicity of possible interpretations, seen as the inspiration for religious blog names on Patheos and HuffPost. The second is “eiluva’eiludivreielokimhayyim” – “these and those are the words of the living God.” Both of these Sacred Slogans are typically invoked to praise the institution of debate and to affirm that multiple – and sometimes contradictory – viewpoints can be equally valid.
When we examine the sources of these idioms we will find some affirmation of debates, but more significantly, we find their limitations.
The idea of tzelem elokim,1 also known as imago dei, posits that humanity is created in the image of God. The primary source for this idea in Judaism comes from a creation narrative in the book of Genesis.2 There is a long fascinating tradition of Jewish philosophers and theologians speculating on the nature of what it means to be created in the image of God, which is beyond the scope of this essay. My present concern is tzelem elokim’s usage as the foundation for a universal/humanist conception of Judaism, to what extent this conception is compatible with Torah, and if we should take tzelem elokim at face value.
I am excited to launch a new series in which I will analyze what I call “Sacred Slogans.” By “Sacred Slogans,” I refer to phrases or idioms from Torah which have been appropriated to promote various agendas.1 Like all slogans, these are pithy, memorable, and easily repeatable. But slogans which are taken from sacred texts are automatically infused with the cultural weight of religious authority.
