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Wednesday, July 20, 2022

“Hump Day,” Wednesday, and Yom Revii l’Shabbos

The Torah content for these two weeks has been sponsored by Judah and Naomi Dardik in loving memory of Rabbi Moskowitz zt''l, who taught his students to pursue truth by asking questions, who modeled love of Torah and learning, and who exemplified living a life of the mind.

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Artwork: Sisyphus (cropped), by Jeffrey Hummel

“Hump Day,” Wednesday, and Yom Revii l’Shabbos

I was sitting in Starbucks when I heard a customer exclaim to the barista, "happy hump day!" For those who aren’t familiar with this American idiom, here’s an explanation from grammarist.com:

Hump day is an idiom that means Wednesday, a day of the week. The term hump day first appeared in the 1960s in North America, most probably in business offices. Hump day is based on the idea that the work week is a mountain one must climb. The general office work week is Monday through Friday, consisting of five days. This puts Wednesday in the middle, or at the peak or hump of the work week. Monday and Tuesday are the “climbing” days of the week, and are therefore psychologically difficult to get through. Wednesday is the highest part of this climb up a proverbial mountain. The thinking goes that if one can make it to hump day, then Thursday and Friday are an easy slide into the weekend.

Upon hearing the exchange in Starbucks, I immediately thought to myself, “Thank God I’m Jewish.” Allow me to explain.

In the Aseres ha’Dibros in Yisro, the mitzvah of Shabbos is introduced with: “Remember the Shabbos day to sanctify it” (Shemos 20:7). Although this is primarily a reference to kiddush, Chazal also say: “Do not count [the days of the week] as others count; rather, count in the name of Shabbos” (Mechilta d’Rebbi Yishmael, Shemos 20:7). In Judaism, we do not refer to the days of the week with proper nouns. Instead, we identify each day by its ordinal relationship to Shabbos. Thus, instead of saying, “Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc.” we say, “the 1st day [counting down] to Shabbos, the 2nd day [counting down] to Shabbos, the 3rd day [counting down] to Shabbos, etc.” Ramban (ibid.) provides several rationales for this:

According to the pshat (straightforward meaning), [the Sages] said that it is a mitzvah to remember Shabbos every day so that we neither forget it nor mix it up with other days, for by remembering it continually, we recall the creation every day and gratefully acknowledge that the universe has a Creator, and that He commanded us in this sign, as He said: “for it is a sign between Me and you” (Shemos 31:13), and it is a fundamental principal of our conviction in God.

In other words, this naming convention converts each weekday into a vehicle for remembering Shabbos. According to the Ramban, this accomplishes three things: (a) it reduces the chances of forgetting which day is Shabbos, (b) it reinforces the fundamental truth that Hashem created the universe, and (c) it prompts us to recall, with gratitude, that He commanded us in the institution of Shabbos, which not only preserves the truth of briah yesh me'ayin (creation ex nihilo), but also affords us the many benefits of a day of rest. And while most of us do not actually refer to the days of the week in this manner, we make sure to fulfill this daily recollection at the end of shacharis every morning when we recite the shir shel yom, which is preceded by mentioning the day of the week in accordance with this formula.

How different – and how superior – is our name for this day in comparison to “Wednesday” and “hump day”! According to Wikipedia, “Wednesday” is derived from the Old English Wōdnesdæg and Middle English Wednesdei, meaning “day of Woden,” which is the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the Norse god Odin. Although “Wednesday” is the term we use most often, its origin is undoubtedly pagan. Even if that isn’t halachically problematic, it’s not ideal from a Torah perspective. Calling Wednesday “hump day” underscores the burden of the workweek without any reference to what we are working towards or why we are working. In truth, “hump day” is actually a veiled complaint: “Finally we’re halfway through the toil of this week!” This idiom elevates our own feelings of annoyance and relief to the level of primacy.

In contrast to both of these, “yom revii l’Shabbos” (“the 4th day [counting down] to Shabbos”) is free from these negative associations. Instead, it brings to mind the halachic system, evokes a fundamental idea with far-reaching philosophical and ethical implications, and awakens feelings of gratitude to Hashem for the world we live in, the nation we belong to, and the mitzvos we have been given. That is why hearing “happy hump day!” made me thank God that I am Jewish. And now my hope is that the next time you hear the term "hump day," it causes you to remember Shabbos.

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Tuesday, July 19, 2022

Minhag Mythbusters: Does a Husband Sing Eishes Chayil for His Wife?

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Photo: Mishlei 31:10-14, Aleppo Codex 32-292-r

Minhag Mythbusters: Does a Husband Sing Eishes Chayil for His Wife?

There is a widespread minhag to sing Eishes Chayil on Friday night before kiddush. Many are under the impression that a husband sings this to (or for) his wife, as the English book Rite and Reason: 1050 Jewish Customs and Their Sources (1995) states: “[Eishes Chayil] contains praise for one’s wife who exerted herself and prepared the Shabbos delicacies.” But is this the actual reason why we sing Eishes Chayil? Specifically, is this the basis of the original minhag or is this a post-facto explanation? And if the latter, when and how did things change, and what are the implications for how we relate to the practice? These questions were posed to me, and I’d like to summarize my findings here.

Let us start with the text of Eishes Chayil itself, i.e. the final 22 pesukim of Sefer Mishlei. Could these pesukim apply to one’s wife? Certainly. But is that likely? No, it is highly unlikely. Says who? Says Shlomo ha’Melech in the opening pasuk of Eishes Chayil: “An accomplished woman, who can find? Her value is far beyond pearls” (Mishlei 31:10). In other words, a true eishes chayil is a rarity of rarities, and it would be extremely unlikely that every Jewish husband who sings this song was able to find and marry one. What if the husband who sings this to his wife is not doing so because she is an eishes chayil but because she aspires to be? That would be great! However, I doubt that most women hear Eishes Chayil and think to themselves, “My husband is telling me that these are the expectations I should live up to.” And if we take the allegorical reading – that Eishes Chayil is about Torah, or the psyche, or the soul – then it certainly wouldn’t be relevant to sing to one’s wife. And either way, what does Eishes Chayil have to do with Shabbos evening?

So, where did the minhag originate, if not from the pshat of the pesukim? Professor Yael Levin answers:

Contrary to popular opinion, the minhag to recite [Eishes Chayil] did not originate with [a husband] showing honor to his Jewish wife who toiled and worked to prepare Shabbos – which is an implication that developed over the years. Rather, the foundation [of this minhag] is a Kabbalistic ritual which developed in Safed (Tzfat) in the middle of the 15th century. Its recitation constituted a component of a symbolic wedding ceremony which began with the Kabbalists going out to the fields outside of the city several hours before the onset of Shabbos; there they would greet the [Sabbath] bride with the recitation of poems and chapters of Psalms – the most well-known of which is the poem "Lecha Dodi." At a much later stage, they stopped going out to the fields, and the minhag transitioned to the courtyard of the synagogue. Upon arriving at home, they would announce in a loud voice with great joy, "Shabbat shalom!" like a bridegroom greeting the bride with great joy and a smiling countenance. At an even later date, their minhag was to circle the table clockwise two times: first they would circle it in silence, and once they finished, they would take two myrtle branches - one in the right hand and one in the left - join them together, make a blessing on them, smell their fragrance, and immediately afterwards they would circle the table a second time. Nowadays they sing Shalom Aleichem and, in a beautiful melody while sitting, they sing the song of Eishes Chayil corresponding to the shechinah, "which contains 22 pesukim corresponding to the 22 heavenly pipes which are open at that time and empty out a flow of blessing from the heavenly wellspring from the head of all the crowns."

In other words, the minhag to recite Eishes Chayil had nothing to do with husbands and wives! The “eishes chayil” in the text was taken to be an allegorical reference to “the Sabbath bride,” and it wasn’t even recited in the home or on Shabbos itself! Only when the original significance of the minhag was forgotten did people take this to be about actual wives. Moreover, Eishes Chayil was only recited but wasn’t sung until the melody was composed by Benzion Shenker in 1946!

What are the implications of such findings? Do we embrace the current “folk explanation” as a “legitimate” post-facto reason for the minhag? Do we strive to raise awareness of the minhag’s true origins? Regardless of the answer, one thing is clear: it is better to know where a minhag came from than to not know.

One of the many aspects of Judaism I appreciate is the ability to conduct “halachic archaeology.” In other religions and cultures, asking, “Why do we do XYZ?” will often be met with a shrug – or worse, with the non-answer of “TRADITION!” In Judaism, there are always answers, and it is always possible to conduct research to find them.

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Monday, July 18, 2022

The Role of Episodic Memory in the Three Weeks and Tishah b'Av

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Artwork: Memory Leak, by Karl Kopinski

The Role of Episodic Memory in the Three Weeks and Tishah b'Av

Although this is technically 1-page long, I reference a bunch of other articles I’ve written. Ordinarily I wouldn’t rely on the reader’s familiarity with my previous content, nor would I expect them to read it. However, the goal of this article is to capture where my mind is at going into the Three Weeks. Since I find myself picking up where I left off, I have no choice but to reference these past ideas.

We have commenced the three weeks of mourning during which we reflect on the national flaws that led to the destruction of the two Temples and our present exile. Last summer I wrote a 1-page article about how the Three Weeks, the Nine Days, and Tishah b’Av are designed to induce “metaphysical trauma” on a national level. I wrote another 1-page article about how such trauma is necessary for national teshuvah. I wrote a third 1-page article explaining how the Tishah b’Av liturgy is designed to facilitate this type of teshuvah-from-trauma. I concluded by stressing the importance of allowing ourselves to really feel the unpleasant emotions awakened by our reading of Eichah and the kinnos in order to tap into the trauma which will “awaken our hearts and open the paths of teshuvah” (Rambam, Laws of Fasts 5:1).

This year I believe I have found a new way to induce the aforementioned trauma. This past week I wrote an overview of EFT (Episodic Future Thinking) and a follow-up article on how this technique can be integrated with halacha. Towards the end of Chapter 2 of Imaginable (pp.37-38), McGonigal introduces the following thought-experiment:

I want you to try one more time travel experiment with me. Imagination works both ways in time. So let’s take a ten-year trip in the opposite direction … I want you to picture in your mind’s eye a day more or less ten years ago today. Where would you have been on a typical day? What would you have been doing? Can you picture what you might have been wearing? Who were you with? What were you excited about ten years ago? What were you worried about? What life goal were you working toward, or what life problem were you trying to solve?

It might not be easy to recall all these details at first. Keep working at it. Like episodic future thinking, episodic memory also requires you to stretch your imagination – if only because you’re retrieving memories and reactivating thought patterns you haven’t used in a while … At the Institute for the Future, we call this technique “looking back to look forward.” It’s another excellent strategy for unsticking your mind. As the historian and activist Rebecca Solnit has written, “When you don’t know how much things have changed, you don’t see that they are changing or that they can change.”

As is true of all McGonigal’s exercises, the goal here is not to achieve factual accuracy, but to “learn to control your imagination” (p.33). By practicing episodic memory with your actual past, using your imagination to recall those lived experiences in rich detail, you will become proficient in simulating future experiences with a higher degree of realism.

Halacha obligates us to practice episodic memory on at least one occasion: Pesach night. “In each and every generation a person is obligated to see themselves as though they, themselves, left Egypt” (Hagadah). As a source for this injunction, Rambam (Laws of Chametz and Matzah 7:6) cites: “you shall remember that you were a slave” (Devarim 5:14). In other words, we are commanded to remember events that didn’t actually happen to us as if we lived through them. The intellectual objectives of the Pesach seder cannot be achieved without this use of the imagination.

Likewise, the vividly horrific descriptions of the tragic events depicted in Eichah and the kinnos are also designed to facilitate episodic memory – provided we are willing to take that extra step. For instance, instead of merely reading Kinnah #17 and reacting to the depiction of Jewish women being forced to cannibalize their own children, we should use our imagination to simulate what it might be like for us to live through a time of such starvation and desperation that we are forced to engage in the unthinkable. Will this exercise be traumatic? Yes. And that is precisely the point.

The final chapter of Eichah begins with a plea: “Remember, Hashem, what happened to us; look and see our disgrace” (Eichah 5:1). We know that Hashem sees everything and never forgets anything. Thus, when we beseech Him to remember and see, He expects us to do the same. And unless we do so on a visceral level, then we will not be moved to national teshuvah.

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Friday, July 15, 2022

17th of Tammuz Reflections on Waikiki

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This is a photo I took of the sunset at Waikiki on the 17th of Tammuz last year.

17th of Tammuz Reflections on Waikiki

I wrote this as a Facebook post during the summer of 2021 (Tammuz 5781) but didn’t post it on my blog until now. I’ve made some changes and additions here and there, but most of the article remains the same.

The 17th of Tammuz is a commemorative day of fasting on which we don't eat or drink anything from dawn until nightfall. This fast kicks off the period of The Three Weeks, during which we mourn the greatest tragedies that have befallen our people. All of these events are centered around the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem: the First Temple by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E., which was followed by the 70 year exile in Babylon, and the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E., which was followed by the present exile, which has lasted for 1,951 years and counting (and now 1,952 years).

I'd have to check past calendars to be sure, but I'm fairly certain that we've spent every 17th of Tammuz for the past 12+ years in Honolulu, with the obvious exception of 2020 (and now, in 2022).

Spending this fast day in Honolulu is always strange. It's strange because I am so far away from any major Jewish community, and it's even stranger because the majority of people I see walking around are in "vacation mode." Yet, here I am, spending most of the day indoors, not eating or drinking, reflecting on the national flaws of myself and my people and the catastrophes that resulted from these flaws throughout the ages. And there, on the beach and in the streets, are the non-Jews: going about their vacation, dining and drinking, dancing and partying. The feeling of being in exile is real.

This year my experience of the 17th of Tammuz was greatly enhanced by my reading of Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006), by Jonathan Lear. The book is about Plenty Coups, the last chief of the Crow Nation, who witnessed the end of his people's way of life, but who was able to lead them to adapt and preserve their culture – something that no other Indian nation was able to do with such great success. I’d like to share just one small insight from this book that was on my mind as I took a walk along Waikiki just now, with a few hours remaining in the fast.

First, some background. The Sun Dance was a religious ritual that was integral to the Crow Nation's warrior culture. It was "a prayer-filled ritual asking for God's help in winning military victory." Lear uses it as an example of the dilemma faced by a people when its way of life suddenly comes to an end. In this case, intertribal fighting had been outlawed. He writes:

What is one to do with the Sun Dance when it is no longer possible to fight? Roughly speaking, a culture faced with this kind of devastation has three choices:

1. Keep dancing even though the point of the dance has been lost. The ritual continues, though no one can any longer say what the dance is for.

2. Invent a new aim for the dance. The dance continues, but now its purpose is, for example, to facilitate good negotiations with whites, usher good weather for farming, or restore health to a sick relative.

3. Give up the dance. This is an implicit recognition that there is no longer any point in dancing the Sun Dance.

I'm currently rereading Hawaii (1959), which is one of James Michener's epic novels. Last night I finished the section entitled "From the Farm of Bitterness," which follows the story of a group of missionaries who settled in Maui in the first half of the 19th century. Already by that time, the native Hawaiians had begun to suffer the destruction of their people and their culture, through death, through assimilation, and through the many abuses and encroachments of settlers, traders, and colonizers.

So much of the Hawaiian tourism industry thrives on tenuous, artificial, and (to be frank) piteous attempts at #1 and #2. For all intents and purposes, there is no actual living Ancient Hawaiian culture left to speak of. The historical Hawaiian culture - which lasted for centuries, if not longer - fell prey to option #3. The pale vestiges of Hawaiian culture I see when I walk down Waikiki are shadows of what was once a vibrant way of life, but are now merely a source of artificial nostalgia for a Hawaii that was never experienced by anyone living. It is sustained only by popular imagination, and funded by commercialism.

But when I step back and look at Waikiki tourism itself – which, in many ways, has become Hawaii's modern culture – I realize that "this, too, shall pass." Ironically, Lear uses something like this as an analogy to illustrate what it means for a way of life to disappear:

Everything in tribal life was organized around hunting and war – but hunting and war have become impossible. There is a crucial ambiguity in this claim that is easily overlooked. When we say "It is no longer possible to go to war" or "It is no longer possible to hunt buffalo" we might mean either:

"Circumstances are such that there is no practical possibility of our performing those acts"

or

"The very acts themselves have ceased to make sense."

By way of analogy, consider a person who goes into her favorite restaurant and says to the waiter, "I'll have my regular, a buffalo burger medium rare." The waiter says, "I'm sorry madam, it is no longer possible to order buffalo; last week you ate the last one. There are no more buffalo. I'm afraid a buffalo burger is out of the question." Now consider a situation in which the social institution of restaurants goes out of existence. For a while there was this historical institution of restaurants – people went to special places and paid to have meals made and served to them – but for a variety of reasons people stopped organizing themselves in this way. Now there is a new meaning to "it is no longer possible to order buffalo": no act could any longer count as ordering. In general these two senses of impossibility are not clearly distinguished because they often go together. In the particular case we are considering, it is in considerable part because the buffalo herds were destroyed – and thus hunting them became impossible in one sense – that the Crow agreed to move onto a reservation and abandon their traditional way of life – and thus hunting them became impossible in this other sense.

When I see the throngs of tourists on Waikiki going to bars, dining in restaurants, luxuriating on vacation, etc. etc. I am struck with the recognition that even this way of life will, one day, fade from existence – along with America as a whole, and possibly even what we call "Western Civilization," provided that the timeline continues for long enough.

And yet, here I am: a Jew in exile, fasting and mourning and reflecting on events that happened thousands of years ago, following laws that have were meticulously observed for many centuries before the first Hawaiians ever set foot on these islands, thinking about myself, my people, and my future through concepts that have been kept alive in generation after generation through constant study and thought. My culture – the culture of Torah – has outlasted Ancient and Modern Waikiki, and will continue to do so for as long as we observe these laws and anchor our existence in these truths and values.

Towards the end of his book, Lear writes:

Plenty Coups had to acknowledge the destruction of a telos – that the old ways of living a good life were gone. And that acknowledgment involved the stark recognition that the traditional ways of structuring significance – of recognizing something as a happening – had been devastated. For Plenty Coups, this recognition was not an expression of despair; it was the only way to avoid it. One needs to recognize the destruction that has occurred if one is to move beyond it. In the abstract, there is no answer to the question: Is the Sun Dance the maintenance of a sacred tradition or is it a nostalgic evasion – a step or two away from a Disneyland imitation of "the Indian"? What is valuable about Plenty Coups's declaration is that it lays down a crucial fact that needs to be acknowledged if a genuinely vibrant tradition is to be maintained or reintroduced. It is one thing to dance as though nothing has happened; it is another to acknowledge that something singularly awful has happened – the collapse of happenings – and then decide to dance.

The mourning practices of the Three Weeks are our way of acknowledging the destruction of our past way of life which centered around the Temple and its service in the Land of Israel over which we were sovereign – not so that we can "move beyond it," but so that we can maintain it until such a time that it can be reintroduced. Unlike Plenty Coups, who had to try to figure out how he was going to save his people and help them to survive and thrive in the world-after-the-destruction-of-the-world, we are not on our own. Hashem has given us the tools, in the Written and Oral Torah, to preserve our way of life despite the horrific catastrophes suffered by our people. He has given us the promise of a future redemption – one which is rooted in the certainty of the mind, rather than the unreliable forces of the psyche and the imagination. And He has protected us in each and every generation against those who seek to annihilate us - a fact to which all of Jewish history bears witness. I cannot help but recall the conclusion of Mark Twain's famous essay, Concerning the Jews:

To conclude. - If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one per cent. of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star-dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of; but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers.

He has made a marvellous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished.

The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?

Mark Twain didn't have an answer to this question, but we do. The secret of our immortality is observing the fast of the 17th of Tammuz in Waikiki. The secret of our immortality is "sacrificing" a day of vacation in Hawaii to keep Shabbos. The secret of our immortality is to forego the hundreds of popular restaurants in Honolulu to eat only kosher food. The secret of our immortality is to live by the eternal Torah, to adapt its laws and ideas to the modern world instead of withdrawing from it or assimilating into it.

Lear wrote that "It is one thing to dance as though nothing has happened; it is another to acknowledge that something singularly awful has happened – the collapse of happenings – and then decide to dance." Paradoxically, although it was a day of mourning, my reflections today have filled me with gratitude. I have acknowledged that something singularly awful has happened – yet, I have decided to dance.

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Thursday, July 14, 2022

The Pros and Cons of a Postmodernist Analysis of Halacha

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The Pros and Cons of a Postmodern Analysis of Halacha

I recently read Faith Shattered and Restored: Judaism in the Postmodern Age (2017), by Rabbi Shagar. I found it to be exceedingly thought-provoking, if fundamentally objectionable. I agreed with many of Rabbi Shagar’s particular insights while disagreeing with his overall framework. (If you’re interested in my review of the book, let me know and I’ll share it with you.) One example of this is his approach to taamei ha’mitzvos (the reasons for the commandments). He writes:

The test of halakha is not its truth, but its ability to maintain the integrity of its character as a linguistic and practical system. This character is the core of halakha, whose scale of values and beliefs - which neither proves nor justifies it - is merely a byproduct of the nature of the halakhic system. Thus, rather than justify or rationalize halakha, we must describe it phenomenologically. For instance, we should examine how the laws of family purity shape the relationship between husband and wife, instead of propounding justifications for them with facile pronouncements about how halakha "exalts women," or "acknowledges the body," or "values emotion," and so forth. Such apologetics emanate from a self-deceptive desire to beautify the halakhic world in the face of criticism from the world of Western cultural values. Instead, one should lay down the ethical and existential consequences of halakha: What sort of romance is shared by couples who lead such a lifestyle, how their passion manifests, and so on.

I hold the study of taamei ha’mitzvos in high regard. Although I regularly engage in what Rabbi Shagar disparagingly refers to as “self-deceptive apologetics,” I also see the benefits of a phenomenological analysis of halacha. See, for instance, my article entitled The Non-Symbolic Trumpets, in which I cite the Sefer ha’Chinuch’s phenomenological explanation of the reason for the mitzvah of sounding the trumpets at the time of korbanos. He explains that (a) man needs help focusing, (b) korbanos require focus, and (c) a loud trumpet sound helps man to focus on the korban. Likewise, in my shiur entitled Kiddush: The Universe of Torah in a Glass of Wine, I discuss R’ Yehuda ha’Levi’s explanation of making berachos on food: pausing and contemplating what you’re about to eat results in greater enjoyment from the food. I appreciate how such analyses can be readily integrated into one’s practice because they are rooted in our immediate experience.

At the same time, I disagree with Rabbi Shagar’s postmodernist foundation. In his preface to the book, Aryeh Rubin defines post-modernism as “the denial and deconstruction that come from the erosion of belief in any ‘grand narrative’ and in the ability to perceive the truth.” This is why Rabbi Shagar is opposed to the traditional approaches to taamei ha’mitzvos. He would look at the Ralbag’s definition of Torah (“a God-given regimen that brings those who practice it properly to true success”) as being influenced by Ralbag’s immersion in the Greek world of Aristotelianism, dismissing it as an artificial “grand narrative.” Likewise, he would characterize Rav Hirsch’s Torah im Derech Eretz paradigm as a 19th century German Jew’s noble (or ignoble) effort to integrate the values of Western Culture into Judaism. He would chalk up the various kabbalistic explanations of mitzvos as byproducts of this or that cultural or intellectual influence. And so on.

I think that Rabbi Shagar’s approach is self-defeating. He claims to reject the “grand narratives” and value systems that other thinkers employ in their analyses, yet somehow maintains that he is able to engage in an objective phenomenological description untethered to any particular value system. Is this possible? Can he really assess “what sort of romance is shared by couples” who follow the laws of family purity without imposing some culturally biased view of romance? Romance in 21st century America differs from the romance of the Victorian era which differs from Romance during the Persian Empire. Can he make statements about “how their passion manifests” without subscribing to his own narratives about “passion”? Can he “examine how the laws of family purity shape the relationship between husband and wife” without taking a stance on what “relationship” means and what constitutes “shaping” that relationship?

One might respond to the above, saying, “Ha! Your objections reveal that you agree with his postmodern framework after all!” Yes and no. I agree that our view of reality is influenced by our personal theoretical frameworks. But at least I’m not the one who is claiming to reject all grand narratives while insidiously framing everything in my own grand narrative.

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Wednesday, July 13, 2022

Judaism and the Benefits of EFT (Episodic Future Thinking)

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Artwork: Witness the Future, by Anato Finnstark

Judaism and the Benefits of EFT (Episodic Future Thinking)

Note: This is a sequel to yesterday’s introductory article on EFT. If you haven’t read that, then this will be difficult to follow.

Soon after I began reading McGonigal’s book, I realized that as an Orthodox Jew, I pass by countless opportunities to engage in EFT as part of my day-to-day halachic observance. Every time I daven, I express my yearning for a future in which our nation has returned to Israel, the judges have been restored, our enemies have been destroyed, Jerusalem rebuilt, the Davidic monarchy reestablished, the shechinah returned to the Mikdash, and the world filled with peace. Every time I say mussaf, I ask Hashem to bring back our korbanos. So many of the pesukim I recite on a regular basis are about the Messianic era, the climax of world history. Shabbos, Pesach, Sukkos, Tishah b’Av, Purim, and Chanukah all have future-looking themes. Judaism certainly focuses on the past, but it is a remarkably future-oriented religion.

If you noticed, I said that “I pass by countless opportunities to engage in EFT as part of my day-to-day halachic observance.” I haven’t truly seized these opportunities by imagining these future scenarios in vivid detail, as EFT requires. I haven’t taken the time to really apply my full imagination to these phenomena, asking specific questions such as: Where exactly am I in this future? Who else is here? What is around me? What is true in this version of reality that isn’t true today? What do I really want in this future moment? How will I get it? How do I feel, now that I’m here?

What would happen if I did these things? Not only would the future become more real to me, but it would trigger a shift in my entire perspective which would lead to other psychological and intellectual perfections. McGonigal explains:

When you take a mental time trip ten years into the future, your brain starts to think with a different point of view. This isn’t a metaphor – it’s a literal fact. Scientists describe this as switching your imagination from first-person to third-person perspective … When you’re thinking in first person, you’re totally immersed in your own thoughts and feelings. When you’re thinking in third person, you escape your own ego and get a more objective and expansive experience.

(She goes on to support this assertion from the scientific literature, which I can’t summarize in a 1-page article; let me know if you’d like the citations.) Afterwards, she enumerates some of the benefits of this shift in perspective:

a major benefit of switching from first person to third person is that it’s a huge empathy booster. In scientific language, we “reduce our egocentric biases” and become “less ego-identified” – which means we get out of our own heads and can start to see things the way someone else might. We’re better able to consider that others might have different wants, needs, values, or ideas than we do. We also become more open-minded – and this is particularly important when it comes to thinking about how the future might be different, or how we ourselves might change. Studies show that when we zoom out in time and perspective, we become much more likely to take in new information that runs counter to our existing beliefs. This is a kind of mental superpower.

I can’t help but wonder whether Jews tap into these benefits on a minimal level simply by thinking about the future so often, even if we don’t practice EFT. Thinking about the ingathering of exiles three times a day must, on some level, chip away at the feeling of permanence we have about our current home. Yearning for the judges to “remove sorrow and sighing” must, on some level, give us hope that our emotional turmoil is not everlasting, and that there is hope for a cure. Verbalizing our conviction in a future of peace with our neighbors must, on some level, rewire our minds and emotions to believe in peace as a real possibility; this, in turn, will make us more likely to do something about peace in our lifetimes.

It seems to me that it would be a worthwhile investment of time and energy to practice EFT on the future scenarios we talk about in davening, whether through journaling, simulations (like this cool video of a modernized Chamber of Hewn Stones in the Third Mikdash), reading fiction, writing fiction, fleshing out these scenarios when we encounter them in our learning and teaching, or even by taking a few moments just to visualize what we’re saying when we daven.

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Tuesday, July 12, 2022

EFT (Episodic Future Thinking) Training: A Summer 2022 Experiment

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Artwork: Future Sight, by Dan Scott
EFT (Episodic Future Thinking) Training: A Summer 2022 Experiment

My learning, my teaching, and my life (yes, I realize I just listed three synonyms) are shaped by the books I’m reading. Sometimes I can tell from the outset that a particular book will have a huge impact on my thinking. One of those books is Jane McGonigal’s Imaginable: How to see the future coming and feel ready for anything – even things that seem impossible today, published in 2022. I’m only halfway through, but I figured I should plan ahead by writing this prefatory article now.

McGonigal has the unique distinction of being both a future-forecaster and game designer. Her specialty is creating simulations that help people imagine the biggest global challenges we might face in the future. In 2008 she led a six-week future-forecasting simulation called Superstruct in which 10,000 people worldwide simulated living through five different threats, including a global respiratory pandemic that originated in China. The simulation was based entirely on the imagination of the participants: “we simply asked people to predict how they would feel and what they would do in their own lives during this kind of rapidly spreading outbreak.” Despite the fact that the simulation was entirely imagination-based, it yielded shockingly accurate predictions about the details of pandemic life during Covid-19.

McGonigal advocates a specific use of the imagination called episodic future thinking, or EFT. Here’s her description:

[Episodic future thinking is] the mental ability to transport yourself forward in time and pre-experience a future event. EFT is often described as a kind of “mental time travel” because your brain is working to help you see and feel the future as clearly and vividly as if you were already there. But EFT isn’t just thinking about the future; it’s simulating the future in your mind. It’s the difference between knowing that it’s probably going to rain tomorrow – a kind of “fact” or abstract thought about the future” – and vividly imagining yourself in the rain, trying to pre-feel the rain on your skin, and using everything you know about what tomorrow might be like to make the scenario more detailed and realistic. EFT might entail picturing where exactly you’ll be when it starts to rain, what you might be wearing, who might be with you, whether you’re likely to be annoyed by the rain or delighted by it, whether you’ll rush to get somewhere dry or stroll leisurely through it, and so on.

Her book is an eminently practical one, the full benefits of which can only be unlocked by readers who practice EFT on a regular basis. I’ve read enough to be sold on the power of EFT, and I’ve committed to practicing it every day for the next month. The main utility I hope to derive from my EFT practice can be summed up in Chazal’s definition of a chacham (wise person) as: “eizehu chacham? ha’roeh es ha’nolad” – “Who is wise? One who can see what the future will yield.” My rebbi, Rabbi Moskowitz zt”l, would note that Chazal didn’t say “one who knows the future” but rather “one who sees the future.” Chochmah (wisdom) is when the future is as real to the mind and the emotions as if it were perceived by the senses. How can we make our knowledge of the future real to our minds? By utilizing our imagination. In the introduction to his commentary on Mishlei, Saadia Gaon explains that this is the crux of Shlomo ha’Melech’s method:

Furthermore, sensory knowledge is easier and more real to the [minds of the] masses than intellectual knowledge since the sensory faculties exist in them from birth. Therefore, it is necessary to craft mashalim (examples and metaphors) for [the masses] in order to equate the dictates of the intellect with the dictates of the senses ... For this reason, when the intellect sees something detrimental or hears about something harmful and reveals it to the emotions and sees that they don’t trust it or accept it, [the intellect] should speak with them in a manner that they will understand.

This is why EFT needs to be vivid and detailed. The emotions don’t grasp abstractions and will not be moved by them. It’s not enough to tell the emotions that “the lazy man’s estate will deteriorate.” Instead, you need to say:

“I passed by the field of a lazy man, the vineyard of a man who lacks understanding, and behold! it was all grown over with thistles, its face was covered with nettles, and the stone wall was broken down. And I beheld, and I applied my mind and took discipline: a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to recline, and your poverty will come like a traveler, and your lacking like an armed man” (Mishlei 24:31-34).

The more details you imagine, the more your emotions will be impacted.

This article was just an intro. I hope to expand upon other benefits of EFT over the next few weeks. That is, in the future.

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Monday, July 11, 2022

How Rambam Sees God in the Sunset

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Photo: one of the many sunset photos I took this past Hawaii trip

How Rambam Sees God in the Sunset

I just returned from my annual trip to visit Popo (my 97-year-old grandmother) in Hawaii. Whenever I’m there, I do my best to trek out to the shoreline every evening to watch the Hawaiian sunset. It’s not just the aesthetic beauty which makes a sunset like this such a special experience. Rudolph Otto, a 20th century theologian and philosopher of religion, used the term “numinous” to mean “arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring.” I’m sure I’m not the only one who has felt this numinous quality in a sunset. The question is: What does Judaism have to say? Just because this feeling is real doesn’t automatically mean that this is a valid religious experience in the Torah’s eyes.

My initial thought was that perhaps such experiences fall under the headings of ahavas Hashem (love of God) and yiras Hashem (awe of God). The Rambam defines these two experiences in the Laws of the Foundations of Torah 2:2:

What is the way of loving and fearing God? When a person contemplates (misbonein) His great and wondrous works and creations and sees from them His infinite and incomparable wisdom, he immediately loves, praises, and extols and is filled with a tremendous desire to know the Great Name, as David said, “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God” (Psalms 42:3).

And when he reflects upon these same matters, he immediately recoils back with fear and dread, knowing that he is a small, insignificant, unenlightened creature standing with a frail and puny mind in the presence of Perfect Knowledge, as David said, “When I behold Your heavens, [the work of Your fingers, the moon and stars that you have set in place, I exclaim:] ‘What is frail man that You should notice him, [and the son of mortal man that You should take note of him?’]” (Psalms 8:4-5).

Are the feelings described by the Rambam here identical with the numinosity felt by the average person? Seemingly not. According to the Rambam, ahavas Hashem and yiras Hashem are the emotional states which result from cognitive activity: tevunah (theoretical understanding) and machshavah (practical consideration). Both require a relatively high level of knowledge, as evidenced by the fact that the Rambam goes on to provide a three-chapter primer of Aristotelian metaphysics and physics “to open the way for the meivin (contemplative thinker) to love the Name.” While it is certainly possible to for a sunset to awaken ahavas Hashem and yiras Hashem, I don’t think the average person’s awe of the sunset stems from a scientific knowledge of astronomy, optics, and other areas of physics.

However, in the middle of the aforementioned primer, the Rambam drops a clue which might provide us with the basis for an answer. In the Laws of the Foundations of Torah 3:11, he cites a pasuk from Tehilim: "Praise Hashem from the earth: sea creatures and all depths, fire and hail, snow and smoke" (Tehilim 148:7). This is problematic: how can non-rational creations – such as “sea creatures and all depths, fire and hail, snow and smoke” – praise Hashem? Rambam answers:

The meaning of this statement is: praise Him, mankind, from His gevuros (mighty acts) which you see in the fire, the hail, and the other creations that can be seen on earth, the gevurah (might) of which is constantly discernable to the small and the great alike.

When the Rambam describes the gevurah of these phenomena, he is clearly not referring to the lofty intellectual levels described in Chapter 2:2, since he specifies that this gevurah is “constantly discernable to the small and the great alike.”

I believe that the gevurah mentioned by the Rambam is identical with (or is at least related to) the numinous feeling we experience when we behold such natural phenomena as crashing waves, a ferocious storm, and a dazzling sunset. In that aspect of these experience, man feels the overwhelming power of Hashem’s mighty acts, and “there the small and the great are equal” (Iyov 3:19). True, for the meivin who understands the science behind these phenomena, the sunset may give rise to ahavas Hashem and yiras Hashem, but both the meivin and the average person alike will be able to praise Hashem from the awe that arises within them when they gaze upon His handiwork in nature.

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Monday, June 27, 2022

State of the Blog: Summer 2022

This week's Torah content has been sponsored by Naomi Mann in honor of Rabbi Moskowitz zt"l, whose shloshim is this week.

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Artwork: Mishra's Factory (Summer), by Kaja and Phil Foglio

State of the Blog: Summer 2022

Last year at around this time I launched The One-Page Article: a Summer 2021 Experiment with four objectives in mind. Foremost among these objectives was my own mental health, which was at a low point due to the burnout I experienced from teaching 850+ shiurim during that stressful 2020-2021 school year of covid. The experiment was a success: I wrote 31 one-page articles over the course of that summer, and was proud of each one. This allowed me to keep up my usual daily summer writing without the added pressure I sometimes felt in past years to write a full-length article each day. Better yet, the self-imposed word limit helped me to grow as a writer, enabling me to write about ideas that I never would have written about in the past, as I detailed in Hunting for Treasure vs. Panning for Gold on the Beaches of Nome.

You may have noticed that I’ve continued in one-page mode this summer. It’s been great! I love finding the “right-sized ideas” to write about, I love the challenge of presenting these ideas as concisely as possible, and I love the feeling of accomplishment that caps off each weekday of the summer. I’m sure I’ll return to feature-length articles at some point, but for now, I’m really enjoying this.

I am scheduled to fly out to Hawaii to visit Popo (my 97-year-old grandma) tomorrow. I’ll be there from June 28th through July 7th. As such, I find myself confronted with the question: Should I stick to my article-a-day schedule while I’m in Hawaii or should I take a break? To many people, this might be a no-brainer: “Of course not! Take a break! Enjoy your time in Hawaii!” But to a recovering perfectionist, workaholic, self-appointed self-taskmaster, this is a tough decision. Whether it stems from rational or irrational considerations, I don’t want to interrupt the flow of Torah content. Also, I thoroughly enjoy the process of writing, even while on vacation. Writing Torah articles in Hawaii has been a part of my summer since 2007. At the same time, it would be wonderful to take a break from being on a content-production schedule – especially at the outset of my summer vacation, when I’m feeling the burnout from the year.

After giving this some thought, I’ve settled on something of a compromise: I will continue writing my articles while in Hawaii, but I will not post anything until my return. This will relieve me of the pressure to meet my self-imposed deadlines every day while simultaneously granting me the freedom to write, to be, and – more importantly to my psyche – to feel productive. There’s a non-zero chance that I’ll make an exception for this Friday, since parashas ha’shavua articles are “time-sensitive,” but other than that, I’ll do my best to hold back until the second week of July.

And while we’re taking care of “book-keeping” (as Rabbi Moskowitz would call it), I figure I should mention another summer project I plan to undertake. I would love to design a website which will serve as a hub for ALL my Torah content: YouTube videos, podcast episodes, articles, shiur announcements, Zoom info, links to Torah resources, etc. Had I known in September 2020 that I would be publicizing all my Torah content, I would have set something like this up then, but all my energy was devoted to the actual preparation of said content that I simply didn’t have time. I’d like to rectify that going into 2022-2023.

If anyone has any suggestions for which service or platform to use, let me know! As of now, before doing any research, I’m leaning towards using something tried-and-true, like WordPress. I plan to fund this site with donations from Patreon and sponsorships, so if you plan on making a donation in the near future and would like to contribute specifically to the website, I’d love to give you public thanks on the page.

See you back here on July 11th! In the meantime, feel free to read or reread the hundreds of past articles!

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