EZ Reads 3/28/11

Woah, March is almost over?! It's been a busy month. Real writing will hopefully resume tomorrow... meanwhile here's some good reads from the past few days:

• I finally watched the amazing interview of 12-year old Tamar Fogel. It's mind-boggling how mature she is.
• The biggest buyers of Gemaros (Talmuds) worldwide are far and away...South Korean!?
• How perfectionism can lead to procrastination (and what to do about it). Who knew!?
• Justice and humanity and twisted irony - a Palestinian Arab attacks soldiers, and they stop him after he injures one... then fly the attacker and victim together to get treatment.
• R' Gil discusses how the Orthodox world mirrors the Evangelical Christian one in terms of divides, and questions what to learn from it.
• For all those who love sociology, the claims of a sociologist may impact one of the largest potential class actions in history. It's actually interesting, but I would think that even if it can be proven it shouldn't therefore make them guilty - I don't see how unconscious bias of the whole population would be fair to sue over. There would be no end to it.

EZ Reads 2/25

• A fascinating (albeit very long) piece in The New Yorker by Gary Greenberg on psychiatry that delves deeply into many of the key issues, including whether the key issues are just made up or exaggerated by a profitable industry. Excerpt:
  
  
  
  

  In “The Loss of Sadness” (2007), Wakefield and Allan Horwitz, a sociologist at Rutgers, argue that the increase in the number of people who are given a diagnosis of depression suggests that what has changed is not the number of people who are clinically depressed but the definition of depression, which has been defined in a way that includes normal sadness. In the case of a patient who exhibits the required number of symptoms, the D.S.M. specifies only one exception to a diagnosis of depression: bereavement. But, Wakefield and Horwitz point out, there are many other life problems for which intense sadness is a natural response—being laid off, for example. There is nothing in the D.S.M. to prevent a physician from labelling someone who is living through one of these problems mentally disordered. The conversion of stuff that people used to live with into disorders that physicians can treat is not limited to psychiatry, of course. Once, people had heartburn (“I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”) and bought Alka-Seltzer over the counter; now they are given a diagnosis of gastroesophageal reflux disease (“Ask your doctor whether you might be suffering from GERD”) and are written a prescription for Zantac. But people tend to find the medicalization of mood and personality more distressing. It has been claimed, for example, that up to 18.7 per cent of Americans suffer from social-anxiety disorder. In “Shyness” (2007), Christopher Lane, a professor of English at Northwestern, argues that this is a blatant pathologization of a common personality trait for the financial benefit of the psychiatric profession and the pharmaceutical industry. It’s a case of what David Healy, in his invaluable history “The Antidepressant Era” (1997), calls “the pharmacological scalpel”: if a drug (in this case, Paxil) proves to change something in patients (shyness), then that something becomes a disorder to be treated (social anxiety). The discovery of the remedy creates the disease.

• An interesting piece on Freakonomics about a family who pretends to be Christian for social reasons. Feel free to make analogies to Purim on one end and living in a frum community on the other...
• Sometimes, I really want to do something like this.

Orrin Hatch's Chanukah Song

Hat tip: Mom

This is interesting and cute, and just kinda nice:

Senator Orrin G. Hatch, a solemn-faced Republican with a soft spot for Jews and a love of Barbra Streisand, has penned a catchy holiday tune, “Eight Days of Hanukkah.”

The video was posted Tuesday night on Tablet, an online magazine of Jewish lifestyle and culture, just in time for Hanukkah.

Known around the Senate as a prolific writer of Christian hymns and patriotic melodies, Mr. Hatch, 75, said this was his first venture into Jewish music. It will not be his last.

“Anything I can do for the Jewish people, I will do,” Mr. Hatch said in an interview before heading to the Senate floor to debate an abortion amendment. “Mormons believe the Jewish people are the chosen people, just like the Old Testament says.”

In short, he loves the Jews. And based on an early sampling of listeners, the feeling could be mutual.

There's also a detailed piece by Jeffrey Goldberg in Tablet about how it came about; meanwhile, enjoy!

Eight Days of Hanukkah from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

Some Jews need help

Here's my response to this:

5 Shiurim @ 2 hours a piece = 10 Hours

10 or 20 Shekel X 5 Shiurim = 50 or 100 Shekel

Another way to spend 20 hours:

5 Minchas @ 15 minutes (say a nice long Shemona Esrei, ask Hashem for everything you need) a piece = 1.15 hours

8.45 hours @ a trained certified licensed therapist

50 or 100 shekel getting to and from the therapist.

A few things I've learned so far in life:

You can't be happy with God unless you're happy with yourself.

You can't be happy with yourself unless you know why you're not happy.

And you can't know why you're unhappy unless you know what's wrong with you.

Now let me clarify. I'm not by any means trying to be facetious. I honestly believe that trained and learned and up to date Psychologists/Psychiatrists do a lot better job figuring out what's wrong with us than we can. That's in fact exactly what they are trained to do. I don't get paid to figure out what's wrong with me. I get paid to be an accountant. If I have problems in my life that I can't figure out or I can't readily and easily solve in an every day sort of manner, I go to a shrink, and they tell me what's wrong with me.

And then once I figure out what's wrong with me, and I work on it, and I feel better, then I can go work on my relationship with God and tikkun and my yiddishkeit and my emunah and all that stuff. And where do I go to for that? Well first, the Big Man Himself (through prayer) and then this neat little book he gave us back on some mountain called the Torah. And I read all the wonderful seforim that his righteous disciples wrote up ('cuz that's what they get paid to do) specifically for people like me who have trouble in those areas that I just mentioned.

I'm not saying it's all black and white and I'm not saying it's this simple. But I am asking who is this woman to go preach a method of overcoming serious trauma and getting closer to Hashem when it seems as if she's qualified in neither of the above.

It's great if it works for you or for them or for some people. That's all fine and good. Well you know what, I got something else you may want to try. His name was Jesus Christ. All you have to do is believe that he was your lord and savior and that he died for your sins, and your entire life will change. That belief alone will promise you a great many blessings and grant you wonderful mental and spiritual security. It in fact will guarantee your safe passageway to heaven. And it's as simple as believing. That's all I ask is that you believe and put 10 shekel in this jar.

HA!

I just made you a Christian.

Muslims, Christians Making Peace?

This is fascinating; while at first glance this seems like a very good thing in general, I'm wary of the impact such a combination would have on Jews and others. Excerpt:

The "survival of the world" is at stake if Muslims and Christians do not make peace with each other, leaders of the Muslim world will warn the Pope and other Christian leaders today.

In an unprecedented open letter signed by 138 leading scholars from every sect of Islam, the Muslims plead with Christian leaders "to come together with us on the common essentials of our two religions" and spell out the similarities between passages of the Bible and the Koran.

The scholars state: "As Muslims, we say to Christians that we are not against them and that Islam is not against them - so long as they do not wage war against Muslims on account of their religion, oppress them and drive them out of their homes."

The phrasing has echoes of the New Testament passage: "He that is not with me is against me" - a passage used by President George Bush when addressing a joint session of Congress nine days after 9/11.

The Muslims call instead for the emphasis to be on the shared characteristics of world's two largest faiths.

Regardless, it is certainly fascinating and surprising, and can have far, far-reaching impact.

Uncle Jake

Since Ezzie hasn't yet taught me how to continue a post on a different page, and I don't want to clutter up the main blog page with a long article, I'm just posting the URL. In the article, which I found via Jewish World Review, Dennis Prager writes about being Jewish and politically Conservative.

EDIT: [Ezzie:] Here's the piece from Prager, which is incredibly sharp: Jews who support the Christian right are "Uncle Jakes."

So says a pro-Israeli Jewish official in his recent column for the Israel Policy Forum, a pro-Israel organization. "Uncle Jake" is M. J. Rosenberg's term for Jewish equivalent of "Uncle Tom." Just as the left sees conservative blacks as traitors to African-Americans, so it sees conservative Jews as traitors to the Jewish people. I am the "Uncle Jake" most criticized in the Rosenberg column.

That a Jew on the left would use this term to describe Jews who support conservative Christians gives one an idea of how irrational, how hysterical are the arguments of the Jewish (and non-Jewish) left. And lacking a rational basis, they frequently rely on name-calling.

Speaking personally, I have been called many things in my life, but "Jewish traitor" is a first. For the record, and offered with obvious embarrassment at having to list these things about myself, here is a brief review of my Jewish activities:

From 1969 onward I was one of the leaders of the Soviet Jewry movement, beginning with being the national spokesman for the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, the leading activist group in that cause.

I have lectured in more Jewish communities in North America — federations, synagogues of all denominations, Jewish community centers — than almost any living Jew. And I have spoken at the national conventions of virtually every major American Jewish organization — including Hadassah, the General Assembly of Jewish Federations; the United Jewish Campaign; AIPAC; and the American Jewish Committee.

I co-wrote with Rabbi Joseph Telushkin perhaps the most widely used introduction to Judaism in the English language.

I am the recipient of the American Jewish Press Association's 2004 Prize for excellence in Jewish Commentary.

For seven years I was the director of the Jewish retreat center, the Brandeis-Bardin Institute.

I am a founder of a Jewish day school in Southern California.

I am the emcee of the annual Chabad telethon; I've been teaching the Torah at the University of Judaism for 25 years, and teach Torah at my Reform synagogue. And I have brought tens of thousands of Jews back to Judaism and Jewish identity — Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox.

How then does a Jewish writer call me, a man whose life has been so committed to the welfare of the Jewish people, a traitor to Jews?

The answer is simple: To many leftist Jews, a non-leftist Jew is by definition a traitor. It's as simplistic as that. To these Jews, "left" and "Jewish" are synonyms. Just as to many on the left, "left" and "black" are synonyms.

The use of this smear is the tactic of those who cannot argue. Blacks and whites who smear black conservatives such as Thomas Sowell, John McWhorter, Larry Elder, Walter Williams, and Ward Connerly as "Uncle Toms" do so because they cannot, or wish not, to engage them in intellectual argument. It's far easier to libel them than to debate them.

The same libel and intellectual shallowness characterizes the Rosenberg piece.

His major charge is that Jews who support conservative Christians are "Jews taking positions hostile to the Jewish people in order to stay faithful to some political agenda."

And what are these positions that are "hostile to the Jewish people"? Rosenberg enumerates them: "the entire Christian Right agenda: opposing abortion, poverty programs, progressive taxation, laws that protect gays, affirmative action, the environmental movement, and feminism.

Even if that portrayal of conservative positions were accurate, why are these positions "hostile to the Jewish people"? Because they are conservative positions! Again, to such minds, "left" and "Jews" are synonymous, and therefore "conservative" and "hostile to Jews" are synonymous.

If you think most abortions are immoral; that a lower tax rate is better for society, including the poor; that the problem of poverty in America will not be solved by the government spending trillions more; that marriage should not be redefined; that a race-blind society is a finer society and that race-based affirmative action hurts both the recipients of the lowered standards and the society at large; that we desperately need the oil from a small percentage of the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve because doing so will help us rely less on Saudi oil and won't hurt any caribou; and think that, in retrospect, the feminist movement (as distinct from the belief in man-woman equality, which every religious conservative I know holds) hurt more men and women than it helped — you are anti-Jewish.

Such shallowness is based in part on ignorance. For example, Rosenberg writes that "He [Prager] conveniently ignores the fact that Christian Right support for Israel is largely based on a religious belief that Christ will only return after Jews are all in Israel accepting the divinity of Jesus Christ."

That is the lie about Christians that the left spreads to prevent Jews from knowing the truth about Christian support for Israel: that it is rooted overwhelmingly in the beliefs that G-d promised the return of the Jews to Israel, that Christians are grafted onto the tree of Israel, that G-d blesses those who bless the Jews, that Israel is a humane democracy and its enemies are bloodthirsty and backward regimes.

To Rosenberg, conservative Christians are a caricature.

Rosenberg's charges that Jews who support Christian conservatives do so from nefarious motives and that Christians who support Israel do so from nefarious motives is typical of the left. They judge motives, not deeds. And the reason is clear. They are so certain of their moral superiority, they can only deduce that all those who differ with them are bad people. That's how a Jew who has devoted his life to the Jewish people can be called an Uncle Jake.