Walking the High Wire

I find it difficult to criticize The Happiness Prayer: Ancient Jewish Wisdom for the Best Way to Live Today by Rabbi Evan Moffic.  It is sweet book.  But I will do so anyway. 

Rabbi Moffic takes a portion of the morning Jewish liturgy and makes these statements into a stand-alone prayer and declaration of existence that will guide us toward happier lives.  

The problem is that this section of the Jewish liturgy, Eilu D'varim, has a deeply Jewish content.  Rabbi Moffic more or less dismantles this.  Take the last statement in Eilu D’varim.  In the English translation of the siddur it reads “and Torah study is equivalent to them all” or in Hebrew talmud torah keneged kullam. Rabbi Moffic renders this: look inside and commit.  

When we combine these kinds of midrashic moves and many statements about faith, generally not a major Jewish preoccupation, this book lacks a strong Jewish sense.  The book favors a Christian audience.  I am in favor of taking our Jewish texts and promoting the universal elements found within in them, and connections with other religious traditions.  But this book goes too far off the cliff.  

Rabbi Arthur Green does a far better job balancing Jewish vs Universalism.  Just read his recent book Judaism for the World.  He balances the particularly Jewish with the widely Universal as if he was walking on a high wire.

Judaism for the World: Reflections on God, Life, and Love

 

Rabbi Arthur Green is 80 years old (ad me'ah ve-essrim shana!) and is still going strong.  As one of the most influential religious thinkers in the twentieth and twenty-first century, he has been particularly prolific in the last ten to twenty years, and his Judaism for the World: Reflections on God, Life, and Love is a reflection of this.  Read this book, and you will see his over fifty years of Jewish engagement at work, presented in new and reflective ways.

As a neo-Hasidic proponent, it was interesting for me to read his experience visiting the graves of Hasidic masters in Ukraine.  He is distinctly uncomfortable with the practice of praying in saint’s tombs, although he is obviously taken with visiting the cradle of Hasidism.  This essay, I believe, shows the fault line that run through Rabbi Green: the skeptical academic and the religious devotee.  There is nothing wrong having these often opposing sides.  In Rabbi Green’s case, we can read how fruitful this divide is in his capable hands.

Joseph Smith and the Origins of The Book of Mormon

 

If you are a dedicated Mormon then Joseph Smith and the Origins of The Book of Mormon, by David Persuitte, will strike you as false, and perhaps even an attack on your religion.  But if you compare this book to work in the last hundred years on the sources of the Hebrew Bible, like Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic by Frank Moore Cross, then Persuitte’s work is well in line with historical studies of the birth of religions.  They are a product of their times.  Just as Cross sees elements of Ba’al and El worship from Canaanite religions in the Bible’s depictions of the deity, so too is the Book of Mormon a product, in part, of a book called "View of the Hebrews" written in the years before the discovery of the golden tablets.

The Hebrew Bible has the benefit of its great antiquity.  We know so little about its composition, that even the most well researched and erudite works are just very good guesses.  The Book of Mormon lacks antiquity.  Joseph Smith was a “prophet” in the modern world, and many people were interested in disproving his calling.  This book amply documents this grounding Smith and his book in the real world. 

Smith was someone who dug for buried treasure in his year years.  Persuitte explains how this pursuit was little more than a confidence scheme, and the “discovery” of the Book of Mormon was a confidence scheme on a grander scale with more lasting impact.  More generously we can say that Mormonism began as part of the folk religious practices of the eastern United States at the beginning of the nineteenth century.  LDS sources confirm this, like Smith's use of a "peep stone" to both find treasure and translate the Book of Mormon.  Yet this admission bolsters Persuitte's point that is work is a product of its time – before evolving, after all religions that take root, into a more institutional plant.

For me, the fatal flaw of the Book of Mormon is its lack of context.  The Hebrew Bible may not be literal history, but it has a cultural context in some early entity, a people called Israel.   The Merneptah Stele – an inscription by the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah (1213–1203 BCE) - documents battles with a people in the Canaan, and one is called Israel.  Far later extra-biblical references, like the Mesha Stele, dated around 840 BCE,  refers to the northern Kingdom of Israel and its king.  The world portrayed in the Book of Mormon has no such context (at least to non-Mormon scholars and historians).  You have little choice but to accept on faith that the events in the Book of Mormon occurred even in the most cursory sense - even as folk expressions or legends - as the people depicted in the book have no historical or cultural context.   

All and all this is an excellent book to examine at length one of the sources that probably one of the sources of the Book of Mormon.  This work goes into great detail, so if you only want to skim the surface of the topic, this is not the book for you.

Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession

 

Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession by Craig Childs is a remarkable story of what it means to remove the human past from the ground.  Childs is a purist, believing that nearly nothing should be removed  –  certainly not from pot hunters, and most of the time not by archaeologists.  But he is also a realist.  As the population has exploded in the American Southwest, finds have been discovered at a rapid pace.  Inaction is not possible.

As in all his books, Childs just wraps himself around this subject, seeming to inhabit every topic and area.  He has such passion and drive and he takes his reader along like a seasoned expert, and all is draped in remarkable prose.

Played Out... The Knife of Never Letting Go

 

The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness is very standard post-apocalyptic, sci-fi YA fare, with a twist.  In this world, men’s thoughts can be read.  This “noise” accompanies them everywhere, and in some areas of this New World it has led to catastrophic results.  This is a good premise, but Ness has a far longer novel than he needs to get his work done.  There is a great deal of repetition, therefore the plot gets lost.  The central idea of men and violence also gets overplayed, and therefore watered down. We are also stuck in Todd’s first person narration for the entire novel, which is not a pleasant place.  His naivete more often than not sounds like whining.  

A Laughable, Ridiculous Overreach

 

Professional reviewers have bent over backward praising James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman’s 2034: A Novel of the Next World War.  I read these reviews and wonderful if we read the same novel.

It would be impossible to explain all the implausible scenarios in the novel.  They just pile up, one upon another.  One is the speed of the crisis: it takes China and the US months to unfold their war.  In this work, and one would think so even more in 2034, crises emerge quickly, and end quickly, for better or worse.  A major conflict between China and the US would not unfold as a Pacific style World War Two naval conflict as these authors predict.

Then there is the initial premise.  The war starts because China has Battlestar Galactica Cylon abilities that literally control US military and civilian technology.  Yes, really.  Battlestar did a better job, as it was plausible in that world.  Yet another problem: why would one nation with nuclear capacity attack another with nuclear capacity?  Would not MAD work for the US and China as it did for the US and the Soviet Union.  How about a proxy war before we nuke Shanghai?

There little doubt in my mind that the United States will steadily lose global hegemony in the twenty-first century, perhaps even to China.  But not as this book fantastically, implausibly, and laughably lays out. 

Neti-Neti Meditation

Neti-Neti Meditation by Andre Doshim Halaw is an excellent source book to help eliminated the sense that we are a self.  He challenges us to shift our understanding that the “I” we so often feel is actually an entity we can locate; really, it is simply a process of thought without an anchor.  Halaw provides very easy to understand meditative exercises to help accomplish this.  But really, the devil is in the details.  Taking up a practice is about incorporating it into your daily routine.   That is the only way to do it; we need to find time for the silent 'self' which in very real ways does not exist for Neti-Neti  to work.

 

Writing as Life & Death: Craig Childs

 

Craig Childs writes like it is a matter of life and death.  If you have read some of his books, you will understand why in The Way Out: A True Story of Ruin and Survival.  Here, Childs lays it all out: the history of his family, their struggles, their torn broken hearts and souls.  In a broader sense, the book is about how men (the male of the human species) react to violence.  One way is this: for this author, who explores harsh lands in the desert southwest, traveling the land is the apparent enactment of a death wish.  In this book, we realize how closely death has followed Childs, and how closely he had followed it, for decades.