Historian Hanne Blank has a very important history of virginity coming out in early 2007–the result of four years’ work digging everywhere from medical libraries and age of consent laws to medieval theology and Seventeen magazine. Lucky for you, she’s decided to put some of her outtakes online, here.
Other new reads on the gender/sexuality shelf include S. Bear Bergman’s Butch is a Noun (click the link for an excerpt) and Sarah-Katherine Lewis’ Indecent.
I’ve been doing a lot of Torah repair this month. I find repair work to be a lot more taxing, physically and mentally, than writing from scratch, and it occurs to me that this is a metaphor for Life. Merrily going along writing (or living, as it might be) is relatively simple, although you don’t necessarily know what it’s going to look like in twenty years’ time - but if your job is to go through from one end to the other, find every little thing which isn’t right, and repair it, well, that’s a whole lot harder. Nonetheless, the message of the season is precisely that - check things over, find the bits which are broken, and repair them, even if it is hard work.
On Rosh Hashana it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed:
How many shall pass on, how many shall come to be
Who shall live and who shall die
Who shall attain the measure of his and who shall not
Who shall perish by fire and who by water
Who by sword and who by beast
Who by hunger and who by thirst
Who by earthquake and who by plague
Who by strangling and who by stoning
Who shall be secure and who shall be driven
Who shall be tranquil and who shall be troubled
Who shall be poor and who shall be rich
Who shall be humbled and who exalted
But teshuvah, tefillah and tzedekah cause to pass over the evil of the decree.
The theology of the Unetane Tokef–which appears in both the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgy–has always troubled me–how can we accept that tefillah (prayer) and teshuvah (repentance) and tzedekah (acts of righteousness, usually translated as “charity”) are going to save us from earthquakes, car accidents, persecution? We know that lots of very good people suffer every day, and that many people who do horrible things prosper. One could write off the prayer as reflective of an era in which people found solace in trying to control their fate, but I think that’s unfair and dismissive of the liturgy.
I wonder if, instead, we should regard it as a collective imperative. The prayer is written more or less in the third person, with some second-person address to God. And when it’s written in the first person, it’s in the plural, as is much Jewish liturgy. Not I. We.
What if it weren’t about my individual repentance as it affects my individual fate? What if our repentance as a society (which demands that each individual do his or her part) is the thing that affects our collective fate? What if the reason a person gets cancer is not because he or she personally has done something wrong, but because we as a nation and a globe have poisoned our air, our water, and our food with toxic chemicals and negligence? Are the tsunami of two years ago and the hurricanes of last year a sign that entire sections of the world were filled with sinners, or a tragic by-product of global warming? Are the women killed by stoning–yes, today–in honor killings around the world guilty of insufficient prayer, or should we assign responsibility to everyone who perpetuates a culture in which this is considered acceptable? Are the war refugees (like those fleeing the genocide in Darfur or the Lost Boys of Sudan) who sometimes fall to wild beasts personally responsible for their situation, their fate? Of course not.
I’m not sure that I believe that, were we a perfect world of perfect souls, nobody would ever die young or suffer for any reason. That’s naive, and, in any case, I personally don’t conceive of God as a guy up in the sky with a roll of dice (or a “good” and “bad” list, like Santa Claus). But I do think that the Unetane Tokef prayer points at the ways in which we are–as a collective–responsible for our own suffering or for preventing it, for impacting the degree to which evil besets us. We can’t change the decree itself, but perhaps we can avert its severity.
We need teshuvah–literally, “returning”, to return to God–to face the reality of who we are, how far we have strayed from where we need to be in relationship both to God and other people. We need tefillah (prayer) to align our wills with the Divine will, to remember that we are on this Earth to serve, not to please ourselves. We need tzedekah (charity, righteousness) to enact, in part, this service–by caring for others we care for God.
It’s not necessarily about saving our individual selves. We’re not in control of that, really. The liturgy continues:
The human’s origin is dust and his end is dust, at the risk of his life he earns his bread, he is like a broken vessel of clay, like withering grass, a fading flower, a passing shadow, a drifting cloud, a fleeting breath, scattering dust, a transient dream….
Which isn’t to say that there is not individual responsibility. The Talmud (Shabbat 54b) teaches that “Whoever can forbid his household [to commit a sin] but does not, is considered liable for [the sins of] his household; [if he can forbid] his fellow citizens, he is considered liable for [the sins of] his fellow citizens; if the whole world, he is considered liable for [the sins of] the whole world.” It’s not enough simply not to sin. We must take active steps in preventing others from causing harm–else, their transgression becomes our own.
What will do you do help avert the evil sure to be present in the coming year?
Happy, healthy, fruitful, love-filled and joyus new years to you all.
May there be, finally, this year, peace and justice and safety and happiness for everyone. And a Democratic Congress would be good too–but hey, let’s start with world peace.
Some of you are going to love this and think it’s the coolest thing ever. Others of you will snark and call it hillul hakodesh. Me? I’m just a little confused.
Aviv Geffen translated Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” into Hebrew, and this woman (Maya Rothman?) sang a version on the Israeli “American Idol”-type series.
Oh, good: vanity and fakery all in one nice package! Hewlett-Packard now has a digital camera with the unintentionally hillarious “slimming function”. Gag me with a spoon.
As an antidote, I offer you some recent quotables from historian and activist Hanne Blank from an interview she just gave on skinny, fat and culture:
What would I tell women who are worried about whether they are fat? I’d tell them to repeat after me: ‘I’m not here to decorate your world.’
Look, we’ve got millions of fat people in this country. Of course fat people are having sex, where do you think all those fat people CAME FROM? I’m here to tell you, we cannot be purchased at Costco.
I can’t think of many more effective ways to paralyze women and make them ineffective than to tell them dozens of times a day that the single most important thing about them is the size and shape of their bodies, and that if they do not have perfect control over the size and shape of their bodies they are worthless. Think of the millions and millions of hours of women’s hard work, of women’s blood and sweat and tears that have been wasted on worrying about whether their thighs are too fat when they could have used that time and that energy changing the world. Our culture teaches women to hate their bodies because our culture hates women AND their bodies, and because our culture is terrified that women who weren’t paralyzed by self-hatred might, God forbid, CHANGE THINGS.
Moses said, “Please show me your glory.” And He said, “I will make all My goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name, God. And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But,” He said, “you cannot see My face, for man shall not see me and live.” And God said, “Behold, there is a place by Me where you shall stand on the rock, and while My glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with My hand until I have passed by. Then I will take away My hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.”
…God descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of God. God passed before him and proclaimed, “God, God, a Deity merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.” And Moses quickly bowed his head toward the earth and worshiped.
Aaargh. Starting a new chapter is always rough, and today is no exception. Yesterday’s activity was mostly about organizing all of the quotes for the rest of the book (I have this screwy system; yesterday mostly involved reading through all the notes I’ve taken for all the books that I’ve read or re-read for this project–quite a few, really–and organizing them by chapter instead of by author. (I’m no dummy, don’t worry, it’s not like I deleted the “by author” docs.) Bleary but necessary.
Today, however, is supposed to be the first day of writing, and as is typical, I can’t quite succeed to get off and running right away. It’s like that bird critter in Harry Potter to which you have to bow and approach slowly before it will let you get close to it. So I’m nodding and curtseying, and at some point in the next day or so, once I wrap my head around what it is I’m supposed to be doing now, I’ll really get into the groove of things. The first few days are always a struggle.
In other news, I have a hevruta! Yay! I’m going to be learning once or twice a week with a friend, in the early evenings. We met a couple of days ago, and it was so nice to be back in a busy beit midrash. Everybody was all bushy-tailed and enthusiastic, it was great. As much as I love the seminary beit midrash and the kinds of conversations that happen there, there really is a different kind of an energy when it’s more of a yeshiva thang. It’ll be a nice change of pace for me, I think, and in any case, it’s good to be studying again. It’s only been about 3 months, but it feels like it’s been much longer. Hooray for Talmud Torah!