I have decided that I would like to process a confusing time in my life by leaving here for anyone present or future who desires to “Google” my name the innermost secrets of my heart.
I really loved being a student because I was really invested in the objective of self-improvement. I went to a high school in which I was with few and notable exceptions a “teacher’s pet” and at this school many students often occupied this role in a given classroom because relations between teachers and students were broadly in my experience extremely congenial. Those teachers who succeeded in convincing me that doing the work they assigned would lead to a betterment of my mind enjoyed my enthusiastic contribution.
I like many young people was faced with a decision at one point of “what I wanted to be when I grew up” and I landed on “scientist” because science classes were often my favorites. When I took Chemistry I thought “I’ll be a chemist”, and then I took physics and said “oh no this is way better I’ll be a physicist”, and the eventual direction of my scientific career would be to join a lab specializing in “Biophysical Chemistry” in perhaps a nod to my younger self’s undirected or multi-directed enthusiasm.
In college I really enjoyed studying Organic Chemistry and I thought to myself “I enjoy this subject which others often hate - I should specialize in this niche”. I performed research at that same teacher’s lab as an undergraduate, and honestly, I was an extremely ineffective synthetic chemist. I used to drop the glass beakers losing days of progress, and I later pivoted to a research setting which used plastic containers instead perhaps as a solution to this problem.
But looking back I think that I was self-sabotaging because I really did not want to be a research scientist.
My PhD career at Columbia ended when my professor very kindly and tactfully created an opportunity for me to realize for myself that I did not want to be a research scientist, after the quality of my work for him reflect this fact. I was deeply disillusioned.
I was at this time recruited via a friend I had made in a collaborating lab to a teaching job at the Yeshiva University High School for Girls, often referred to as “Central” despite its ironic placement at the far fringes of New York City.
The strangeness of my experience teaching at this school was that it was simultaneously a radical change in career direction and a radical change in religious context. I remember once shaking the hand of a woman who would later become my mentor and being politely informed that this was an inappropriate action I ought not repeat.
That first year I made many mistakes first-year teachers make. The biggest one was that I allowed my students to leverage my vanity in order to avoid learning. In later years I would recognize this tactic for what it was, but in that first year I was happy to answer all of their questions about who I was and why I was teaching there instead of going through the arduous task of trying to teach them physics. I was even persuaded to demonstrate the singing ability which my students succeeded in uncovering from my backstory with them as a reward for something or other.
I remember learning of how the school’s musical performance was closed to men, and being unhappy that I would not have the chance to see my students who saw me perform themselves perform. Their strict observance of a rule called “Kol Isha” would at that time puzzle me, even as it has since become a crucial aspect of my understanding of intersex relations in the Orthodox world.
A student of mine would actually teach me a lesson about this rule, when she decided that she wanted my feedback on her vocal performance. I did not see any harm in this, although I was careful to ensure that my physical person was visible from the hallway and that the door was slightly ajar in accordance with the advice given to me by an instructional video I was required to watch as part of my onboarding. The eventual outcome of this incident was that the student was instructed not to repeat this violation of Kol Isha and I received neither a reprimand nor an explanation of why my student had been reprimanded.
This was the experience that defined for me the terms by which Orthodox Judaism treated a visitor from Reform Judaism.
Several years later at that same school I would have a year where I felt like I made progress on the problem I was originally hired to address. I felt simultaneously a feeling that I had found a line of employment which I was capable of deriving fulfillment from and that I had learned how to operate comfortable in a previously-uncomfortable religious dynamic.
And then I learned that my comfort was more narrowly-scoped than I thought.
I was informed that my job going forward was to become part-time, and when I declined the offer to continue in that capacity my employers helped to place me in their brother school, the Yeshiva University High School for Boys.
And I didn’t even make it to Chanukkah before I quit.
Why I Didn’t Fit
I feel the need to apologize for flirting with what might be called “Lashon Hara”. There is a rule in Orthodox Judaism that you are not permitted to speak ill of others in certain fashions.
I think that the simplest and least “evil” way to phrase what might be perceived as a criticism is that I had become extremely acclimated to the way in which an Orthodox girls’ school was run and that this was not a strong predictor of my ability to acclimate to the way in which an Orthodox boys’ school was run.
I am quite confident that my teaching career ended the day that I walked out of work in between classes and mailed the books I’d borrowed and never returned to that physical location ever again.
I fear that even sharing this detail is enough to be Lashon Hara, because the reader must at this point either conclude that there is something horribly wrong with me or that something horrifying happened to me. People don’t generally substitute “two weeks notice” for “leaving the building immediately and never returning” unless something has happened to prompt that intensity of departure.
The maximally-charitable way which I want to describe that event was that my growing realization that the culture of this school was actively incompatible with my mode of being (which was reflected in me having already given two weeks’ notice at this moment) reached a point of such high intensity that I desired more than anything in the world to stop trying to shove my round peg into this workplace’s square hole and I feared I would seriously hurt myself if I continued for even another moment.
The lesson that I learned was that being stable and happy hanging out at an Orthodox female setting and being violently incapable of hanging out at an Orthodox male setting was a combination which could possibly overlap.
What is Different
Having hopefully succeeded in avoiding Lashon Hara when discussing my former employers, I would now like to state my truthful opinion in this matter: the different sets of texts in Judaism convey vastly different pieces of information.
At the girls’ school, students studied the words of the prophets. My opinion is that these books record genuine experiences had by real people. I established in a prior post that I think Isaiah were he alive today would be diagnosed with schizophrenia, but that Julian Jaynes in his seminal and only work argued that this was the normal state of being for all pre-Iron Age humans. Either way my point is that I think the texts which the women specialized in were records of authentic “dream journals” which obviously a lot of people place a lot of stock in the predictive power of.
At the boys’ school, students studied the Talmud, which females are (traditionally) prohibited from studying. I don’t doubt that they also read many other texts including the prophets, but the conclusion I reached was that my Reform-meshing-with-Orthodox self was perfectly happy at the institution in which the Talmud (which my ancestors rebelled against in a fashion no less dramatic than the Boston Tea Party) was prohibited from being studied and extremely uncomfortable at the institution which was the only one specializing in that text.
My controversial opinion is that the Mishnah read on its own explicitly condones the consumption of “chicken parmesan”, and that the commentary on it is an intentional effort to contradict the meaning of the underlying text and revert to an earlier set of dietary laws. I had a friend from the synagogue I grew up at who kept very strict kosher regarding pork shellfish and cheeseburgers and freely consumed Chicken Tikka Masala. I believe that the “trafe banquet” was imprecise in its execution but that the underlying truth which enabled its religious legitimacy was the continuing practice among some Reform Jews to consume chicken parmesan whilst otherwise keeping the same dietary laws as Orthodox Jews in alignment with dietary practices attributed in the Talmud to “Galileans” (which I read as code for Christians).
What is Next
The next step being taken in many contexts including some which call themselves Orthodox is to reject this fundamental division of specialization in educational terms between men and women. The “Partnership” movement and the “Traditional Egalitarian” movement represent splinter factions in the direction of one another from the Modern Orthodox and Conservative movements respectively. What they share in common is an extension of the study of Talmud to women, meaning that the world they are creating is one in which the conditions which were so intolerable to my person as to cause me to spontaneously leave my place of employment and never return are now being extended to cover women in addition to men.
The next step which I am taking is to more deeply commit myself to continuing to represent authentically those behaviors which I believe to be best, incorporating both what I was raised with and what I found joy performing in the “no Talmud” Orthodox context which I was able to acclimate to into the most cohesive and actualized person that I can be.
My controversial view on feminism is that the end of the demand for the sort of labor which requires human beings to be turned into replaceable parts in an industrial machine will come one day and that women decided to throw themselves into the machine to rescue the men from that drudgery by helping to finish its objectives faster.
My controversial view on the hypothetical fusion point I perceive between Partnership and Traditional Egalitarian is that the reason why women were prohibited from studying the Talmud is that they would have realized the fact that it was bullshit and that these people are going to wind up reaching the exact same conclusion which Reform Judaism did through an extremely different pathway.
I have realized that I absolutely cannot be on “team Talmud” at this point and I am eagerly awaiting the day when the process of unravelling its many lies and manipulations and connecting to the valuable historical document which was preserved within it is begun in earnest by whoever else besides me realizes this fact about it. I did one page which was most relevant to me but that was as far as I got.
Thank you JTS
My favorite anecdote about this which I will now share concerns the English translations of these documents by the famous (or perhaps infamous depending on whom you ask) Jacob Neusner. He was brutally lambasted by his mentor for “misunderstanding the Hebrew/Aramaic”, and to this day people will respond to bold claims made about what the Mishnah or the Talmud says with “what language are you reading it in?” To provide one example, the Mishnah read on its own states plainly that the Jewish scriptures may be written “in Hebrew or in Greek”, and this section of the Talmud goes to great lengths to discredit the quality of that translation which was the basis of early Christianity and remains in use in the Greek Orthodox Church to this very day. Which is to say that arguing over translation is a debate as old as the schism between Judaism and Christianity.
The outcome of growing my knowledge of the Hebrew language has been that I have myself begun uncovering what I view as ideologically-motivated “mistranslations” within the officially-recognized Jewish canon.
I had the privilege of studying Talmud with the esteemed Rabbi Gordon Tucker at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and I found myself landing in an interesting disagreement as to whether or not certain passages of the Mishnah might have been authored prior to the invention of writing.
The religious perspective which I will now share with you the somehow-still-interested reader is that I believe the word “Torah” which is best translated in my opinion as “teaching” contrasts the word “Mishnah” which means “repetition” as describing two different means of conveying information. The Mishnah contains logical statements to be memorized and transmitted exactly as they are from generation to generation, and the Torah contains mythological stories to be retold in a fashion which preserves their essential emotional weight including when doing so requires an adjustment of the details.
The decision to commit the Torah to the page represented in my estimation the decision to canonize the current version of the telling of those ancestral stories as officially the final never-to-be-changed-again way of telling that story. The decision to claim that precisely this version of the story had always existed came alongside the decision to adopt a chronology which coincidentally or intentionally places Creation around the same time in which archeological evidence dates the invention of writing.
I was told once that the Mishnah was previously prohibited from being written down, before finally being preserved for fear it might go extinct if not written. I at the time scoffed at this idea, but I have become increasingly convinced that the Mishnah was indeed prohibited from being written down. I view it as a “separation of powers”.
I view it this way because another feature which I believe was introduced around the time of the commitment of the Pentateuch to the page was the widespread usage of other objects containing written passages from those books as in my opinion a job-security measure. The idea being that the people having committed to using writing for this holy text wanted to be assured that writing wouldn’t cease being popular. It seems crazy to imagine that writing would have been a passing fad from a world in which I am using it to communicate it with you right now, but in its earliest days it faced fierce opposition from many who believed its continuing existence posed an inherent threat to stable society including famously Socrates.
Tefillin and Mezuzahs ensure that the precise specifications of Torah scrolls always have skilled hands to execute on them which have practiced on texts which are always intentionally hidden from view. And to ensure that writing does not gain an undue amount of influence over the people, the Mishnah which represented the precisely-memorized lines of legal rulings dating back who knows how long would continue to exist independently of writing.
Of course the logical outcome which I am pointing towards here is that the decision to write the Mishnah down represented a decision to surrender to writing, whatever that means.
The Alphabet versus the Goddess
In Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, he postulates that language itself is a vehicle which enables consciousness. And I think that he has a point there.
Whereas other species may communicate using sounds, and even learn words in human languages, the nature of human language is vastly different in terms of its level of complexity when compared with other animal equivalents. I think that the duality present in us humans which is absent in other animals is between whatever Jaynes’ describes as consciousness and those qualia which we share with dogs and bats. And the view that this presents on writing is that in writing one may express that human-specific aspect without necessarily expressing any of the common-animal aspect.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a man I met who introduced himself as Leo and whose Chinese name I never learned.
He was explaining to me how the hardest part of learning English was learning how to come across as “expressive” in this context. In Chinese tones convey semantic meaning, whereas in English variations in tone generally convey subtext. He found that if he simply spoke English as a plain translation of Chinese that he came across as “robotic”, and that learning to speak natural English required a greater degree of injection of emotion to fill the tonal space which in this language rarely conveys semantic meaning.
I believe that what the Talmud conveys most effectively in representing the decision to surrender to writing and be its bitch is the ability to produce statements which are logically coherent if at-times nonsensical, which it regularly does.
If you have read this far, and are the comment-leaving type, I hope that you will tell me whether what I have written here conveys something which feels true to your animal side as well as your higher language-mediated consciousness.