Folks Haven’t Been Reading Their Bibles

Now, I don’t have any words at this very early juncture about the presidency of the US and all that, but dang, does Barack Obama have something to tell us. I hope he doesn’t shut up any time soon if he’s going to keep talking like he did in this speech. It’s good enough that I even forgive him the highly problematic phrase “Judeo-Christian.” It’s a year and a half old, maybe you’ve all seen it already, but I just discovered it. Some choice bits:

…the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms. Some of the problem here is rhetorical - if we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice.

Imagine Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address without reference to “the judgments of the Lord.” Or King’s I Have a Dream speech without references to “all of God’s children.” Their summoning of a higher truth helped inspire what had seemed impossible, and move the nation to embrace a common destiny.

Our failure as progressives to tap into the moral underpinnings of the nation is not just rhetorical, though. Our fear of getting “preachy” may also lead us to discount the role that values and culture play in some of our most urgent social problems.

After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten point plan. They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness - in the imperfections of man.

…because I do not believe that religious people have a monopoly on morality, I would rather have someone who is grounded in morality and ethics, and who is also secular, affirm their morality and ethics and values without pretending that they’re something they’re not. They don’t need to do that. None of us need to do that.

But what I am suggesting is this - secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Then he stops talking to progressives and digs in on the religious right:

While I’ve already laid out some of the work that progressive leaders need to do, I want to talk a little bit about what conservative leaders need to do — some truths they need to acknowledge.

For one, they need to understand the critical role that the separation of church and state has played in preserving not only our democracy, but the robustness of our religious practice….

Moreover, given the increasing diversity of America’s population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.

And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson’s, or Al Sharpton’s? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount - a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let’s read our bibles. Folks haven’t been reading their bibles.

This brings me to my second point. Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

Happy Sylvester

…that’s what they call it around here, since the New Year already happened in September, natch.

It seems that the Israelis got the name from the Germans–it comes from the 4th c. pope (Silvester I) who knew Constantine–though evidently the story that he baptized the king is not believed to be true–and was represented at the First Council of Nicaea. He died on (and thus his feast day is) December 31. Anybody who knows more about it that that is welcome to enlighten me in the comments.

Anyway, it’s going to be a quiet one over here. I was invited to a party by friends, but have had just enough of a bad cold the last week or so to know that staying out late (and this thing is called to start around the time I’d be ready to go home already) is not the cleverest thing I could do. And frankly, at my advanced age, the idea of staying in and drinking tea sounds just as good.

Word Counting

Time for another update, I reckon.

Chapter 7 is almost done, except that I’m still trying to track down some information to help me rework a few paragraphs. If you work in cognitive psychology or cognitive science or have a PhD in psych or something vaguely related, shoot me an email through the “contact” link above, K? I’ve got some queries out to a few folks, but no bull’s eye yet re: the data I’m hoping to find.

I’ve also added what I’ve got of the intro and afterword to the word count totals, here, since I started noodling with them in my hours of dire avoidance of the big mean chapter.

54,379 / 80,000 (68.0%)

I broke the seal on Ch. 8 yesterday. Hopefully it’ll be easier going (though there seems to be a point in every chapter where I’m convinced that it’s trying to kill me, so easy is relative, I guess.) At the very least, this one has a lot more description and color in it, which should be kinda fun to hammer out.

Yesterday, I also had a quick read-through of the first five chapters. From my cursory glance, I noticed a bit of overload on certain words and phases, and that there are plenty of weak bits that’ll need to get totally reworked in the editing stage. But that’s later. For now: onward. After 8, there’s still 9 and 1 to be battled.

Snow II

The view from my kitchen:

The view from inside my freezer:

You can’t really see the pipe poking out of his mouth (aka a match). You can see that his eye is kind of messed up. He’s kind of like Pirate Mini-Snowman. Arrrr!

Snow in Jerusalem

The weather reports were right, it did really snow today. There was nasty, nasty rain all day, and then 2:30ish or 3ish it started coming down in big, fat, wet, fluffy white flakes. Then it turned into hail, then rain, then snow again, and then hail again. Go figure.

I’m from Chicago, I’ve seen snow before. But it was fun to see the little kids freaking out. The best thing about any winter anywhere is the moment when it actually starts to snow. It’s the three weeks later when it’s bitter and icy and stuff that are less exciting.

This photo isn’t from today–I snagged it from some internet person’s snow blog from some other year, since I didn’t bring my camera with me today and the news sources don’t have photos up yet, and there had to have some sort of illustration!

A Little Princess

Peggy Orenstein has a very interesting piece in the NYT from a couple of days ago about the the aggressive marketing of “princess” culture to very young girls. I don’t agree with all of her analysis, but it’s definitely worth reading.

ETA: Oh, dang him. Micah is making me think more about this essay, and I’m liking it less and less as our conversation goes on. I had already cringed at the assumption that her daughter should have a Prince Charming and babies (what happened to feminism = choice? Or, you know, not assuming heterosexuality? Transference, anyone?) and felt that she was a little too apologetic about the lure of the mass-marketed princess model and its impact, but Micah has rightly observed that Orenstein’s own ambivalence, fuzziness and confusion about what healthy, strong models for her daughter would look like has really weakened her argument. It’s not enough, in this day and age, to say, “Not this.” If not princesses in the classic form then… what? Can we reinvent this archetype in a way that’s less toxic? (Xena: Warrior Princess? Is she our role model? Do we need to cloak everything in femininity in order for it to be palatable, as opposed to just telling girls that they can be martial arts masters or chemists or entrepreneurs or sculptors whether or not they wear lipgloss? Why are we clinging to the “princess” label at all? I mean, Buffy, right?) What else can we give young girls and young women to show them what they can do in this world?

Here’s one thing (for girls a little older than Orenstein’s) Here’s something else (ditto, but these are web resources, so hey. Hope the 3 year-old isn’t online.) There’s this and this–well, this is all stuff I found within five seconds of searching, I’m sure y’all know even better resources and directions.

Anyway. It’s still an article worth reading, partly because she makes some good points, and partly because it’s worth pausing to consider how we (feminists) got here (princess culture for our daughters) and to think, maybe harder than Orenstein did, about what resistance might look like. A few excerpts:

There are no studies proving that playing princess directly damages girls’ self-esteem or dampens other aspirations. On the other hand, there is evidence that young women who hold the most conventionally feminine beliefs — who avoid conflict and think they should be perpetually nice and pretty — are more likely to be depressed than others and less likely to use contraception. What’s more, the 23 percent decline in girls’ participation in sports and other vigorous activity between middle and high school has been linked to their sense that athletics is unfeminine. And in a survey released last October by Girls Inc., school-age girls overwhelmingly reported a paralyzing pressure to be “perfect”: not only to get straight A’s and be the student-body president, editor of the newspaper and captain of the swim team but also to be “kind and caring,” “please everyone, be very thin and dress right.” Give those girls a pumpkin and a glass slipper and they’d be in business….

“Playing princess is not the issue,” argues Lyn Mikel Brown, an author, with Sharon Lamb, of “Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers’ Schemes.” “The issue is 25,000 Princess products,” says Brown, a professor of education and human development at Colby College. “When one thing is so dominant, then it’s no longer a choice: it’s a mandate, cannibalizing all other forms of play. There’s the illusion of more choices out there for girls, but if you look around, you’ll see their choices are steadily narrowing.”…

The infatuation with the girlie girl certainly could, at least in part, be a reaction against the so-called second wave of the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s (the first wave was the fight for suffrage), which fought for reproductive rights and economic, social and legal equality. If nothing else, pink and Princess have resuscitated the fantasy of romance that that era of feminism threatened, the privileges that traditional femininity conferred on women despite its costs — doors magically opened, dinner checks picked up, Manolo Blahniks. Frippery. Fun. Why should we give up the perks of our sex until we’re sure of what we’ll get in exchange? Why should we give them up at all? Or maybe it’s deeper than that: the freedoms feminism bestowed came with an undercurrent of fear among women themselves — flowing through “Ally McBeal,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” “Sex and the City” — of losing male love, of never marrying, of not having children….

ETA again: Hmm. When I read the story originally, I assumed that the “perks of our sex” comment was ironic, and that she was being critical of the ways in which princess culture is part of a feminist backlash. Now I’m not so sure. Could an intelligent woman (like Orenstein) who’s done some worthwhile work on gender really not get that femininity (and fun, and lipgloss, and frippery) is grand but that it doesn’t have to go irretractably with femaleness, and vice-versa masculinity and maleness? She seems to have not yet gotten the memo (which I’d label as reflective of a Third Wave ethic, but feel free to disagree) that feminism can mean lipstick or no lipstick, babies or no babies, partner or no partner, whoever wants to pick up the dinner check can and whoever wants to open the door can–but that tying certain behaviors to one’s gender in that way is where we get stuck.

Now I’m just really confused.

Full story here.

Bad Wordpress!

Despite the fact that it’s supposed to send me an email every time I have a comment waiting for moderation, the Wordpress Bot has been remiss in its duties as of late. Not sure what’s going on (the correct check boxes are checked), but I just discovered a whole big pile of comments sitting in the moderation queue. It made me feel quite loved! Comments good! Just know I meant no disrespect if you’ve been wondering why yours haven’t been showing up on the site.

Merry Christmas to all the good Christians out there!

Whoa

I just realized I only have 4 or 4 1/2 months left here, out of my 2 1/2 year (3 years, minus 6 mos in the US of A last fall) tour of duty. Crrrrrazy.

What would I want to do (or do again) before I go? Luckily I have family coming right before I leave, so there’ll be some chances to do some of the touristy stuff that’s not part of my routine. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t spend as much time as possible now at favorite haunts, or doing stuff that I’d never gotten around to before. Hmmmm.

ETA, As Long As We’re Here: OK, So. I have to get back to Mea Sharim at least once–there’s probably one more book-buying binge in my future, plus picking up stuff like a tallit and some of those amazingly kitchy Rebbe-themed children’s games. I get to the Old City once a month-ish (Women at the Wall, natch, though I’ve missed the last couple), that’s generally way more than enough. I should hit my favorite restaurants often, and get that Timol Shilshom Friday AM brunch at least once, and check out that Turkish place I keep meaning to get to. I should haul my butt to the minyanim I like but are just so faaaaaar to walk on a Friday evening, and go to one or two new places (the kinds with women’s galleries that I hate but gorgeous music) on principle. I have at least 2-3 weekends out of Jerusalem and a couple of day trips on my schedule. And a lot of just doing the things I already do, ’cause my life is pretty great, frankly. And anyway, I have this book to write, and a couple of mid-week hevrutot. That’s keeping me plenty busy as it is.

Montgomery, AL on the Number 2

Well, this is totally horrifying, if not surprising. I’m very proud of and grateful to the woman in question. Hopefully this will make it to the High Court and we can get some “legal clarification”, as they say, on the issue of people being able to sit wherever they want on the &%^$ bus.

A woman who reported a vicious attack by an ad-hoc “modesty patrol” on a Jerusalem bus last month is now lining up support for her case and may be included in a petition to the High Court of Justice over the legality of sex-segregated buses.

Miriam Shear says she was traveling to pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City early on November 24 when a group of ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) men attacked her for refusing to move to the back of the Egged No. 2 bus. She is now in touch with several legal advocacy and women’s organizations, and at the same time, waiting for the police to apprehend her attackers.

In her first interview since the incident, Shear says that on the bus three weeks ago, she was slapped, kicked, punched and pushed by a group of men who demanded that she sit in the back of the bus with the other women. The bus driver, in response to a media inquiry, denied that violence was used against her, but Shear’s account has been substantiated by an unrelated eyewitness on the bus who confirmed that she sustained an unprovoked “severe beating.” …

“Every two or three days, someone would tell me to sit in the back, sometimes politely and sometimes not,” she recalled this week in a telephone interview. “I was always polite and said ‘No. This is not a synagogue. I am not going to sit in the back.’”

But Shear, a 50-year-old religious woman, says that on the morning of the 24th, a man got onto the bus and demanded her seat - even though there were a number of other seats available in the front of the bus. …

Throughout the encounter, Shear says the bus driver “did nothing.” The other passengers, she says, blamed her for not moving to the back of the bus and called her a “stupid American with no sechel [common sense.] People blamed me for not knowing my place and not going to the back of the bus where I belong.”

Full story here.

(Hat tip to JewSchool.)

Why I Love Living in Jerusalem, Parts 5460684 and 5460685

1) Having an appointment Tuez. right by the shuk and buying a gigantic carton of figs. Gigantic carton of figs!

2) Having already eaten myself sick on figs and still having a ton left that I feared would go bad soon, I just made fig jam. Fig Jam! Fiiiiig Jaaaam!!!!!

The only problem is, there don’t seem to be any lids to go with the empty, clean glass jars in the cupbord. Somebody better finish that peanut butter, quick.