(delivered at Sof this week) I’ve organized my drosh for today around two song lyrics. I’ll tell you about the second one later. The first is from one of my favorite musicians, Tom Waits, who says in one of his songs: “The large print giveth, the small print taketh away.” Reading this parshah, right at [...]
One of the websites on chabad.org dealing with pidyon haben starts with the subheading “special care must be taken with new entities”. The idea is a well known one in Torah: first fruits and all that. But if there’s one thing that having a baby — and by that I mean ‘watching my wife have [...]
Holy Week means many things to many different people. I am old enough that, to me, it means the start of the second record in the double album original cast recording of Jesus Christ Superstar.
Let’s face it, WoW totally fails the multiculturalism test when it comes to holidays. The calendar year of Azeroth is littered with events designed for waspy American geeks. You’ve got Christmas and Easter, the Christian holidays. Then you’ve got the American holidays: Valentine’s day, Halloween, Thanksgiving and a slight smatter of geek days like TLAP. [...]
Fran said we had — and I quote here from her email — a “two scroll morning” so I will try to keep this relatively brief. I suppose I’ve known since I was a little kid that ‘torah’ means ‘instruction’. I think too often we are tempted to imagine this as ‘instruction’ as in ‘teachings’ [...]
This text first appeared in excavations of Ugarit in 1962 with a colophon describing it as “‘A Hymn of Baal’s Victory Over The Silverfish”. It bears a resemblance to the ‘crushing of the crawlies’ texts first described by Charpin from Mari, and thus the theme is likely a common one in West Semitic culture. Although [...]
_(I gave this drash at my shul, Sof Ma’arav, yesterday. Exactly as predicted, Littman did point out the inaccuracies in tracing the patrilineal connections between Laban and Jacob so if you see an error, feel free to comment but remember…. most shortcomings have already been reported!)_ This is my first drash at Sof, and I’m [...]
“Melancholic Freedom: Agency and the Spirit of Politics”:http://www.amazon.com/Melancholic-Freedom-Agency-Spirit-Politics/dp/0195319826/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214896943&sr=8-2 by “David Kyuman Kim”:http://www.conncoll.edu/academics/web_profiles/kim.html looks like a great book. That said, I do feel the blurb from Cornell West (his dissertation supervisor) is a bit excessive: David Kyuman Kim is the leading philosopher of religion and culture of his generation. The breadth of his synthetic imagination, the [...]
“Almost Englishmen: Baghdadi Jews in British Burma”:http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=PVCzxtaSCXAC&dq=almost+englishmen+cernea&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=1au-tOAPMP&sig=9d9L8L2dlKoofvmyd1wLUpq4-Ig “New Mexico’s Crypto-Jews: Image and Memory”:http://www.amazon.com/New-Mexicos-Crypto-Jews-Image-Memory/dp/0826342892 Also one strange (possibly wonderfully so) archeology journal: “Time and Mind”:http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/berg/tmdj including “Biblical enthogens: a speculative hypothesis”:http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/berg/tmdj/2008/00000001/00000001/art00004: “I am a Jew who, though not observant, ?nds the Jewish textual heritage to be personally very meaningful. Following my experiences with Ayahuasca, I came [...]
“Papua New Guinea delegation donates gold for rebuilding Temple”:http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3457263,00.html
“Martin London has passed away”:http://www.sacbee.com/300/story/171287.html — he was a real mensch.
It’s made its way around the Internet for some time now, but Kathleen’s recent invocation of “Terry Eagleton’s scathing review of Richard Dawkins’s book”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html finally got me to sit through the whole thing and I must admit it is a fascinating document. As a point of academic bloodspot it is superb, of course, and the [...]
Out of the blue the other day Savage minds got “a comment from Howard (Eilberg-)Schwartz”:http://savageminds.org/2006/04/28/savage-jews/#comment-53589. I think of him as the Rabbi Who Reads Levi-Strauss, but apparently since then he has become a business executive and now lectures on the intersection of spirituality and corporate social responsibility. He has a “new website”:http://www.freedomandcapitalism.com/ with information about [...]
I often use Dawkin’s outrage with religion as an example to my anthro students that science, too, is a culture. Rather than use interviews with him now, there’s a “whole new book”:http://www.amazon.com/God-Delusion-Richard-Dawkins/dp/0618680004/sr=8-1/qid=1162357679/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-0329361-8750447?ie=UTF8&s=books that I will have to look over in my Copious Free Time.
In the name of becoming _the_ central blog for all things having to do with Shaloha, I hereby link to “Holy Tongue”:http://www.betham.org/sermons/marder030523.html a sermon about reform Judaism that starts in Kawaiaha’o.
Most histories of Jews in Hawaii note that the first Jew in Hawaii was a cook in the employment of Kamehameha observed by Ebenezer Townsend. I am sure that many have had the same feeling that I have had about this passage: huh? So I decided to track the reference down. The origin of this [...]
Because, you know, I’m keeping track. Jacob Adler: “Elias Abraham Rosenberg, King Kalakaua’s Soothsayer”:http://www.hawaiianhistory.org/pubs/hjhlist.html. Article from the Hawaiian Journal of History 4 1970. “An Early History of Jews in Hawaii”:http://www.konabethshalom.org/ourhistoryxx.htm
I’ll be spending the next couple of days blogging about the Solomon Islands but I thought I’d post a link to a longish “piece on Matisyahu”:http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=225 over at “Nextbook.org”:http://www.nextbook.org/ which sounds like an excellent arts and culture website for 30-something reformed Jewish intellectuals, if 30-something reformed Jewish intellectuals like me had time to read all [...]
My latest op-ed piece for “Inside Higher Ed”:http://www.insidehighered.com/ is now available and you can “read it here”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/04/17/golub. I’m happy with the piece, at least stylistically, but it is a lot more personal than a lot of the blogging I’ve done recently (although still I think perfectly acceptable professionally). As usual, the snarky comments from IHE’s [...]
First, let me congratulate Christians everywhere on the birth of their god: Congratulations! Second: this is my second Christmas in Hawai’i. This Christmas, as last year, I received many cards and emails asking me “how it feel to be in place where it isn’t snowing on Christmas.” The answer is: exactly the same way every [...]
From “Baraita”:http://www.baraita.net/blog/archives/2005_12.html#000561 It is really f***ing offensive to claim that this conjunction of December holidays constitutes a Jewish “dilemma.” You want a real dilemma involving Judaism and American culture? Try “whether or not to run errands on Shabbat.” Or if you are too immersed in a certain kind of Jewish world for that to be [...]
5766 in the house. Congratulations to the world on reaching another birthday, and I hope you all have a sweet (but not cloying) new year. High Holy Days have been relatively uneventful for my Scarily Erudite Beloved and I — indeed, I’ve been so busy teaching and such that it seemed like the Days of [...]
My Scarily Erudite Beloved has run off to do other things this evening, leaving me alone in the apartment with two lit candles, a bottle of 2002 Louis Latour Domaine de Valmoissine Pinot Noir and a mini barbecue chicken from the local Korean place. I take some small comfort in the unexpected and gratifying realization [...]
My Scarily Erudite Beloved and I met in choir. Between the two of us, we have a total of over four decades of singing experience. Our guest list includes not only a choir’s worth of people — and I mean _real singers_ — a conductor, and an accompanist. So far, the only thing we’ve really [...]
This week marks the start of the “Book of Leviticus”:http://www.hareidi.org/bible/Leviticus1.htm#1 for all of who follow the Laws of the God of Jacob. Leviticus is one of my favorite books of the bible because of all the rich ethnography. I mean: it’s sacrificetastic! When I finished reading this week’s portion I gave a sort of self-satisfied [...]