Sometimes There Should Be a Poem

Questions About Angels
by Billy Collins

Of all the questions you might want to ask
about angels, the only one you ever hear
is how many can dance on the head of a pin.

No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time
besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin
or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth
or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.

Do they fly through God’s body and come out singing?
Do they swing like children from the hinges
of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?
Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?

What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,
their diet of unfiltered divine light?
What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall
these tall presences can look over and see hell?

If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole
in a river and would the hole float along endlessly
filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?

If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive
in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume
the appearance of the regular mailman and
whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?

No, the medieval theologians control the court.
The only question you ever hear is about
the little dance floor on the head of a pin
where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.

It is designed to make us think in millions,
billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse
into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:
one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.

She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.

Gig

For those of you who are in the area and interested, I’ll be giving a talk on Judaism and sex at the Hillel of San Diego this Thursday (November 1st) at 7pm. It’s at 5742 Montezuma Rd. in SD. Come if you’re around!

Historical Nugget of the Day

My friend Justin is reading The Travels of Rabbi Pesachia of Regensburg, the travel writing of a 12th Century Ashkenazi rabbi who journeys from Prague to the Mediterranean and Middle East. He sent me the following excerpt, which I thought might be of interest to some of y’all:

ורבי שמואל, יש לו ספר היחס שלו עד שמואל הרמתי בן אלקנה: ואין לו בנים אלא בת אחת: והיא בקיאה בקרייה ובתלמוד. והיא מלמדת הקרייה לבחורים דרך חלון אחד. והיא סגורה בבנין. והתלמידים בחוץ למטה ואינם רואים אותה. וכל ארץ אשור ובדמשק בערי פרס ומדי ובארץ בבל אין להם דיין אלא מי שמוסר רבי שמואל ראש ישיבה…וחותמו הולך בכל הארצות ובארץ ישראל.

Rabbi Shmuel has a book of geneology going back as far as Shmuel the Ramathean, son of Elkanah. He has no sons but, rather, one daughter. She is an expert in Scripture and Talmud. She gives instruction in Scripture to young men by way of one window. She is within the building, and the students are below outside, and they do not see her. And in all of the land of Assyria and Damascus, in all the cities of Persia and Media, as well as the land of Bavel, they have no judge other than those appointed by Rabbi Shmuel, head of the academy…..His authority is acknowledged in every country, and also in the land of Israel.

It’s a great tidbit–this 12th Century daughter of a very, very important Baghdad rabbi was expert in and a teacher of Jewish text. They solved any issues of possible impropriety by placing a building between her and her students (this understandable given the time and place), but nobody seemed to quibble about her ability to drop knowledge. There are a scant handful of women who are known to have been Torah teachers in the ancient and medieval world; I always love when another one comes to light.

File Under “Good To Know”

I learned last week that if you are not feeling well, it is permitted to nurse from (but not actually milk) a goat on Shabbat.* That’s right, you must suckle the goat itself.

In less benignly creepy, more genuinely worrying and scary news, here’s a GoogleMap of the Southern CA fires, updated, evidently, on an ongoing basis. Pray for rain, please.

*Chapter 5 of Ketubot, forget the actual page.

We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident

The NYT reports on the latest activities of the American justice system:

A German citizen who said he was kidnapped by the Central Intelligence Agency and tortured in a prison in Afghanistan lost his last chance to seek redress in court today when the Supreme Court declined to consider his case. The justices’ refusal to take the case of Khaled el-Masri let stand a March 2 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va. That court upheld a 2006 decision by a federal district judge, who dismissed Mr. Masri’s lawsuit on the grounds that trying the case could expose state secrets.
…
The ordeal of Mr. Masri, who is of Lebanese descent and was apparently the victim of mistaken identity, was the most extensively documented case of the C.I.A.’s controversial practice of “extraordinary rendition,” in which terrorism suspects are abducted and sent for interrogation to other countries, including some in which torture is practiced…

Oh, by the way, here are some of America’s complaints against Britan in the Declaration of Independence. It’s a pretty interesting read in general. I find the last three paragraphs to be particularly compelling, myself.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
…
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

[He has also given assent]
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

Full NYT story here.

What Glass Ceiling?

Christina of ElegantHack has a frustratingly on-target post up now about the ongoing gap between men’s and women’s pay, promotions, and abilities to break into the highest echelons of the business world. She quotes an article from Harvard Business Review with some very disturbing data:

That there is a problem is not in doubt. Despite years of progress by women in the workforce (they now occupy more than 40% of all managerial positions in the United States), within the C-suite they remain as rare as hens’ teeth. Consider the most highly paid executives of Fortune 500 companies—those with titles such as chairman, president, chief executive officer, and chief operating officer. Of this group, only 6% are women. Most notably, only 2% of the CEOs are women, and only 15% of the seats on the boards of directors are held by women….

Although most variables affected the wages of men and women similarly, there were exceptions. Marriage and parenthood, for instance, were associated with higher wages for men but not for women. In contrast, other characteristics, especially years of education, had a more positive effect on women’s wages than on men’s. Even after adjusting wages for all of the ways men and women differ, the GAO study, like similar studies, showed that women’s wages remained lower than men’s. The unexplained gender gap is consistent with the presence of wage discrimination.

Similar methods have been applied to the question of whether discrimination affects promotions. Evidently it does. Promotions come more slowly for women than for men with equivalent qualifications. One illustrative national study followed workers from 1980 to 1992 and found that white men were more likely to attain managerial positions than white women, black men, and black women. Controlling for other characteristics, such as education and hours worked per year, the study showed that white men were ahead of the other groups when entering the labor market and that their advantage in attaining managerial positions grew throughout their careers. Other research has underscored these findings. Even in culturally feminine settings such as nursing, librarianship, elementary education, and social work (all specifically studied by sociologist Christine Williams), men ascend to supervisory and administrative positions more quickly than women.

You’d be well advised to check out the whole post here.

None of this is news in my field, either generally, or more specifically speaking. For every “25 Most Influential People on the Web” article (with 3 women out of 25) to get in Christina’s craw, we’ve done 1/6 less and gotten 5 out of 50 women included in the latest big listing of “top” rabbis.

This? Continues not to be OK.