Sermonette: Arguing with, and Appreciating, Deuteronomy 21.10-25.19 ("Ki Teitzei")

Sermonette

28 August 2015

Temple Ner Ami, Camarillo, CA

(1650 words, ca. 12 and a half minutes)

            So the child says to the rabbi, "Rabbi, why did the Holy One set the minyan at ten?" And the rabbi replies, "That is simple, my child. A minyan of ten guarantees that for every issue of importance to the congregation — and {shuddering to recall} many, many issues of no importance whatever! — there should be at least a dozen opinions."

            Okay, a lot of Jews, it is said, like to argue, and I grew up in Chicago: among another group of people who definitely like to argue.

            And not argue just with each other, at least not among Jews.

            One image of Israel's relationship with God is a loving betrothal, as in the final prayer when putting on tefillin, or in a mystic reading of the Song of Songs — or with greeting the Sabbath bride as we did with L'Cha Dodi. But marriages, especially after the first six hundred years or so, can get stormy, and another image of the Jewish relationship with God is the wrestling match: Jacob wrestles with the angel and is renamed "Israel": "He who struggles with God." Abraham dickers with God over the destruction of Sodom, and Job in the poem of Job is far from patient with God. In the long poem in the center of the book of Job, Job is ticked and accuses God of injustice. Ultimately vehemently, Job presents his indictment to a silent God — or silent to the climax of the poem — and the Book of Job as a whole suggests that without such an argument there may be no true encounter with God.

            Which brings me to the Torah reading for this Shabbat, Ki Teitzei — a substantial hunk of Deuteronomy — where most of us nowadays would have some questions — and one or two places where we should have objections. And it brings me, as someone ignorant of Hebrew, to what I can recite and talk about. Baruch ata Adonai natein haTorah: The often-repeated and expanded upon, "Blessed are You, Eternal, who gives the Torah."

            We bless God for giving us Torah, the Teaching: God's teachings, commandments, injunctions, laws.

            And I got thinking about that blessing for Torah.

            I don't think I'd bless the California State Assembly for giving us the California Revised Statutes, and I know I cursed them (quietly) for allowing photo-enforced traffic lights with two-second yellows. Still, even when being welcomed to Ventura County with $600 in fines and fees for my first moving violation since I was 18 — even then, I don't think I would have found anything in California law as, let's say, problematic as the "Rules for waging holy war" in Deuteronomy. Most of those rules are in last week's reading, but Ki Teitzei starts out with the rules for a victorious Israelite soldier seizing from "among the captives a beautiful woman" and appropriating her — seizing her — for a wife.

            Also, well … for 35 years I lived in a college town around the corner from a consolidated high school and occasionally fantasized dire punishments for teens who are "stubborn and rebellious" (and noisy) and for any over-age kid who's "a glutton and," way more so, "a drunkard." Still, having them stoned to death as Deuteronomy commands (21.21) seems excessive — and "a little bordering upon cruelty."

            When we bless God for "Torah and mitzvot," what should we be blessing God for?

            First off we should be thankful for the arguments within our Scriptures and beyond where it's a question of whether swords should be beaten into plowshares, as Isaiah says, and we "learn war no more," or the other way around. The prophet Joel tells us to "Hammer your plowshares into swords and your pruning hooks into spears" and rather than ceasing to learn war anymore, to "Train even your weaklings to be warriors" (3.10).

            Also there are — always — historical contexts and the need to be not so open-minded that our brains fall out, but humble not just before God but also with our ancestors, and honor their progress in compassion.

            For a famous example, Christians criticize the Law of "an eye for an eye." Well, back in the day of Hammurabi and Moses, that law served to limit violence. Somebody knocks out the eye of a guy in the ancient world (or our world), and he'd want to kill the offender. And American Christians might keep in mind that if the US had stuck to "an eye for an eye," we would have paused after killing four or five thousand Afghans in revenge for 9/11 — and see what, if anything could be done against al-Qaeda by law. "An eye for an eye" can be idealistic even today.

            More specific to today's reading, Ki Teitzei commands, "You shall not give up to his master a slave who has escaped […]; he shall dwell with you [… and]; you shall not oppress him" (23.15). The Code of Hammurabi, nearly four thousand years ago "decreed death as the penalty for sheltering a fugitive slave" (RSV 244 n.); and the laws of the American colonies and the United States required returning fugitive slaves until 1864.

            More generally, we have to use our imaginations and think about what evolving Torah meant to our ancestors.

            A nice Jewish boy, if secular, Steven Pinker, wrote in 2011 a long and fascinating and controversial book called The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. "What? — Violence declined?!?", you will say — which is why Pinker needed to write a big book. "Don't we live in peculiarly violent times of existential threat!?"

            Well, no, not really. There are existential threats to the human species from asteroids and comets and thermonuclear war. And the last period of global warming back in the Middle Ages was great for the Vikings but horrible for people living in hot, dry places like, well, like around here, and our current round of global warming will produce, in many places, like around here, very tough times.

            Still, nothing going on nowadays compares with the bloodbaths of the two world wars of the 20^th century, and my students in a course called just "Massacres" came up with the scary statistic that those two world wars and some 80 million dead were barely a blip on the graph in the increase in human population. World War II was an existential threat to Jews and Roma and did (thank God) destroy the Third Reich; but the 20^th-century World Wars were a spasmodic exception to a general trend of improvement.

            "Genocide" is a modern word, but large-scale massacres are ancient, and we find it hard to believe that Violence Has Declined because we can barely imagine how violent a world our ancestors lived in during the anarchy that preceded civilization and the violence and oppression under early kings and empires.

            Scribes in really ancient, ancient Mesopotamia wrote of kingship coming down from heaven as a gift from the gods. Well, yeah; having a king meant that now all you had to fear in the lethal violence category was the king and his thugs from the capital and not the local free-lance thugs. Early civilization was less violent and brutal than what preceded it, but that still leaves a lot of room for violence and brutality. Our ancestors got a taste of civilized life in Egypt, and my ancient history book says the Hebrews weren't treated much differently from Pharaoh's other subjects — and our ancestors in Egypt thought they were treated like slaves. And when our later ancestors demanded a king, the Prophet Samuel described in gory detail how even an Israelite king will tax them and draft them "and you shall be his slaves" (1 Samuel 8.10-18). Oppressive kings were better than constant clan warfare and small-group violence, but they were bad and could be very bad. So, Blessed be the Eternal, who gave the yoke of the law to restrain and guide individuals and (on balance, eventually) curb violence and oppression.

            And blessed be the Eternal for Torah not just as Law but as Teaching and a Way of life: for giving us a creation myth where God looks upon all the work of of Creation on the 6^th Day and finds in "very good" (Genesis 1.31) — a phrase a great teacher of comparative religion says "gives a lilt to the whole attitude toward nature" and life in Torah, and makes Torah the ground of "This beautiful tree, the tree of life." <http://billmoyers.com/content/wisdom-faith-christianity-judaism/>

            And, indeed, the weirder rules in Deuteronomy in the reading for today repeat the kind of Rule of Separations in the Book of Leviticus — and these also make sense.

            Torah teaches that in the beginning God brought order out of chaos; and the rules to keep fabrics all of one material and farm fields of one crop, the rigid rules on sex and gender and age status — these are bad ideas today but long served as walls against chaos.

            We need "New Rules!" about now, and Reform Judaism helps provide them, but the impulse behind the old rules was necessary. Back when humans were beginning to get the world organized in our minds and cultures, we needed strong categories for animals and crops and fabrics, even for men's clothing and women's clothing; we needed at least regulation of the violence of frequent wars and constant slavery — and rules to keep in check royal egomaniacs.

            And many of the rules really are good ideas: expanding our circles of empathy, sympathy, of feeling and concern. In the Torah reading for today, in the midst of a bunch of rigid regulations on punishments and inheritance and "Levirate" marriage. In the midst of lawyerly details comes the rule, "You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain" (25.4). Even an ox deserves reward for his labor, a standard of justice and compassion that we have not met today.

            Blessed is the Eternal, who's given the Torah to Israel.

High Theory and the Crotch Shot in Paul Verhoeven's ROBOCOP (1987)

            I had a colleague who was into capital "T" Theory of the literary, cinematic, and cultural-feminist variety. We didn't interact much, but for a brief while we both worked, separately, on analyses of Paul Verhoeven's fine 1987 film, ROBOCOP. I got to look over her presentation on the film and noted to her a "proof-text" for her main point on gender: in the scene at the nightclub (or disco) where Robo goes into "ARREST MODE" and hauls in Leon Nash for questioning.

            During the arrest, Leon pulls a gun, which Robo knocks from his hand, to be caught be a young man who dances with it, as the dancing generally continues.

            Part of the satire here is the obliviousness of the "civilians" — those neither cops nor criminals — to the altercation between a suavely thuggish man and a police cyborg who is unmissably large and far more machine than man; and I probably should've paid more attention to that skewering of obliviousness. In Mass (1971), Leonard Bernstein and Paul Simon noted that even during that more activist period, "Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election. / Half the people are drowning and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction." The partiers in near-future Detroit are part of the stoned half, and, as always, a major part of the problem: all those people far, far too cool and sophisticated to, as we used to say, "get involved."

            Apathy, though, wasn't what either my colleague nor I would be dealing with, so I'll forgive myself for concentrating on what comes after Leon pulls the gun on Robo: Leon's kicking Robo in the crotch with a mighty "Clang!" followed by a scream not by Robo but by Leon, as Leon goes down, to be pulled toward the exit by Robo by the hair on Leon's head, with a continuing scream by Leon and Robo's line, "Let's talk."

            First point here: My colleague thanked me for pointing out the Nightclub Scene and "the crotch shot" (my formulation) and in the final draft of her analysis ignored it. She was doing Theory, "dad gummit"!, and she neither needed for her audience nor wanted for herself the crass empiricism of something we could see and hear in the movie.

            My second point is that she really should have used the two crotch-shot shots for her analysis. Even among advanced students in our program, relatively few could follow the philosophical arguments for capital "T" Theory — I couldn't follow most of the arguments, and I was a full freaking professor — and it's important that young American learn to analyze works in their popular culture.

            And with iMovie and what the antihero in GROSSE POINT BLANK calls "a certain ... 'moral flexibility'" — or healthy respect for the Fair Use Doctrine — a teacher at the end of the 20^th century could find a lot of cinematic examples to test hypotheses and reinforce analyses.

            In the Nightclub Scene, Leon delivers a very hard kick to RoboCop's crotch and Leon goes down howling. Our reaction might well be, "Wow, Robo! What a man! He's got balls of … oh …." Precisely. Robo has neither balls nor penis. His crotch is a crotch, period, and this is made explicit in the film. Robo otherwise has a hyper-masculine body, and on the shooting range, he has the biggest and most powerful handgun of all the cops; but no testicles, no penis, no nuthin' that goes toward the most basic sort of manliness.

            And the mutilation is part of what denies Robo not so much sex as his family.

            In James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd's THE TERMINATOR (1984), the ultimate macho man turns out to be a machine: an almost unstoppable, killer robot, impervious to pain — in all ways unfeeling — merely passing for human. There's a very explicit lesson there, although it is missed by the teens (and older folk who should know better) who take the Terminator for the role-model of the film. ROBOCOP takes a different tack, and it may be more effective for young males (although THE TERMINATOR and Cameron and Hurd's ALIENS are more girl-friendly).

            When I was growing up, a young guy might wimp out of a confrontation with the cliché "I'm a lover, not a fighter" and not lose too much street cred. In RoboCop, we get to see what in this dystopian Detroit is the near-ultimate in macho. And many in the audience will come to identify with him and sympathize with him and note that his macho is intertwined with his maiming, with a loss, at least for a while, of the lover in many senses of the term.

            At film's end, RoboCop has regained his name — "Murphy," literally the last word in the film — and a face and identity; and he achieves a human relationship with his police partner. He can "dispute it like a man," to use a callow expression out of Shakespeare's Macbeth (4.3), but he can again "feel it as a man": i.e., he is still one kick-ass cyborg, but he has regained a large part of his humanity.

            Insofar as we empathize and sympathize with Murphy/RoboCop, and think through the images of masculinity in the film: that far audiences have been invited to rethink some traditional cultural ideals of manhood.

            Insofar as subtlety is rarely a virtue in popular culture, especially in works for young males, it is well that this lesson is driven home with all the directness of a powerful kick to the gonads.

Marijuana Debate (yet again): August 2015

            In his column in the Ventura County Star for August 13 (and other papers), Tom Elias usefully reminds us of the risks involved in marijuana use and, (therefore, marijuana legalization. Still, we need to put such arguments into larger contexts.

            Anything worth doing is worth taking some risks to do, and human beings have found getting zonked one way or another worth doing for as long as we've been civilized, and possibly going back to the First Agricultural Revolution some 12,000 years ago: we may've grown grain as much for beer as for bread. The issue with psychoactive drugs from beer and wine to heroin and amphetamines is how to regulate them to minimize harm.

            Our current system includes aggressive pushing of privileged drugs such as pharmaceuticals and ethyl alcohol — there are TV ads for medicines and beer — and criminal punishment for selling and possessing DRUGS!!! not favored by people in power. This system does more harm than good, and there will be a net increase in the public good in changing it to one that deals with all drugs in our culture sensibly and handles addiction and other drug abuse as public health issues.

            Yes, there will be problems in legalizing marijuana and, I hope, other drugs. For Americans generally and currently targeted minorities particularly, the lost and ruined lives will be far fewer with legalization.

Hard-Headed Science-Fictional Romantic (A)Theism: The Mystic Leaps in Arthur C. Clarke's CHILDHOOD'S END and SPACE ODYSSEY

 

            In August of 2011, there was an exchange on the ListServ of the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA-L Digest, 13.24) among some heavy hitters in the field — Elizabeth Hull, Eric Rabkin, James Gunn — on the tone and meaning of the conclusion of Arthur C. Clarke's 1953 novel, Childhood's End. The ending is both somber and sublime and a test — perhaps a kind of Rorschach test — of readers' values and worldview.

            In the climactic sequence of the novel, the prepubescent children of Earth come together in a mass with each former child showing "no more emotion or feeling here than in the face of a snake or an insect." The controlling aliens in the novel, "The Overlords themselves were more human than this," but the lead Overlord tells the last human, watching with distress Earth's former children, that he is “searching for something that is no longer there. […T]hey have no more identity than the cells in your own body. But linked together, they are something much greater than you" (ch. 23, [Ballantine 1953: 202-03]).

            To that last man and to just about any reader, the transition from children to … this is appalling. In their development, the children at first appear savage and then what we would call subhuman: filthy to start with, and then appallingly destructive, sterilizing the world around them, and finally destroying it. They are on their way free from "the tyranny of matter" (ch. 20, p. 183), but this allows a contempt for the body and for nonhuman life: The adults of Earth have been dead for a while, typically in despair at the loss of posterity and their world, typically by suicide in one sense or other (ch. 20, p, 185; ch. 21, p. 188; ch. 23, pp. 208 & passim).

            Finally, what has quickly evolved from the children of Earth absorbs into itself the energies of the planet and leaps like a "great burning column" into the "Overmind": an evolved entity beyond matter and energy, combining as many species as It (I'm going to capitalize the "I") can find for further evolution. Finally, the Children are gone, and the Overmind departs: "They had leeched away the last atom of [… Earth's] substance. It had nourished them, though the fierce moments of their inconceivable metamorphosis, as the food stored in a grain of wheat feeds the infant plant while it climbs toward the sun" (ch. 24, pp. 216-17).

            Where they are going is foreshadowed by the dreams of the first child to begin the metamorphosis as he moves in his subconscious with increasing fearlessness and enthusiasm "into the universe that was opening up before him," including visions of "Sidereous 4 and the Pillars of the Dawn"; as one of the Overlords says, "and there was awe in his voice. 'He has reached the center of the Universe'" — though perhaps just the local universe, our galaxy — "And," adds the head Overlord, "he has barely begun his journey," envying the leap that will destroy the human species but which his species cannot make (ch. 18, pp. 170-80; ch. 20, p. 185).

            With no exception I can recall, my students who spoke up on the end of Childhood's End really disliked it. I would cite to them how the Overlords envy humans for being able to evolve beyond individuality and the material world. I'd read Clarke's pulling out all the figurative stops in a crescendo of prose/poetry to describe the children of Earth's fiery apotheosis. And I'd quote the judgment of the last man — a humanist romantic — on what he had seen of the end of his kind: "Yet it was fitting; it has the sublime inevitability of a great work of art" (ch. 24, p. 205).

            Nah. They'd have none of it, at least not those who spoke up. Individuality was too high a price even for immortality and participation in a kind of godhead.

            So we moved on to Clarke's and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey as novel and film, where another final man, in a sense, retains his individuality but becomes Star-Child (ch. 47), a god-like entity in communication with the other gods (ch. 32, "Concerning E.T.'s"). I pointed out to my students that the ending of Childhood's End, although indecorously flashy, was in a well-established Eastern tradition of becoming nothing to become All, and that 2001 was in the Western tradition of the Superman/Übermensch, as signalled by Kubrick's use of Richard Strauss's tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra — which makes the transcendent theme pretty damn problematic, given the Nazi horrors Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas on supermen either led or got dragged to.

            Now I have problems with the whole set of issues involving apotheosis, transcendence, supermen, separable souls, and the Platonic-Christian-puritanical tradition of asceticism and the denigration of the body.* (Ancient Egyptians, Spartans, and others come in here also, but in complex ways, and also some of the far more recent Cyberpunks, who know better.) Still, I admire Clarke for confronting head-on a problem in what we might call humanist-Romantic- secular-scientific SF: all us geeks who think of ourselves as hard-headed but really, really want SF adventure in galaxies far, far away, or at least our local group.

            This issue is handled by that head Overlord, Karellen, in what amounts to a press conference addressing the human species under his supervision. "

                "There has been some complaint, among the younger and more romantic elements of your population, because outer space has been closed to you. We had a purpose in doing this; we do not impose bans for the pleasure of it. But have you ever stopped to consider—if you will excuse a slightly unflattering analogy—what a man from your Stone Age would have felt, if he suddenly found himself in a modern city?”               “Surely,” protested the Herald Tribune, “there is a fundamental difference. We are accustomed to science. On your world there are doubtless many things which we might not understand — but they wouldn’t seem magic to us.”               “Are you quite sure of that?” said Karellen, so softly that it was hard to hear his words. “Only a hundred years lies between the age of electricity and the age of steam, but what would a Victorian engineer have made of a television set or an electronic computer. And how long would he have lived if he started to investigate their workings? The gulf between two biologies can easily become so great that it is — lethal.”
               […]               “And there are other reasons why we have restricted the human race to Earth. Watch.” The lights dimmed and vanished. As they faded, a milky opalescence formed in the center of the room. It congealed into a whirlpool of stars—a spiral nebula seen from a point far beyond its outermost sun.               “No human eyes have ever seen this sight before,” said Karellen’s voice from the darkness. “You are looking at your own Universe, the island galaxy of which your Sun is a member, from a distance of half a million light-years.”               There was a long silence. Then Karellen continued, and now his voice held something that was not quite pity and not precisely scorn.               “Your race has shown a notable incapacity for dealing with the problems of its own rather small planet. When we arrived, you were on the point of destroying yourselves with the powers that science had rashly given you. Without our intervention, the Earth today would be a radioactive wilderness.               “Now you have a world at peace, and a united race. Soon you will be sufficiently civilized to run your planet without our assistance. Perhaps you could eventually handle the problems of an entire solar system — say fifty moons and planets. But do you really imagine that you could ever cope with this?”               The nebula expanded. Now the individual stars were rushing past, appearing and vanishing as swiftly as sparks from a forge. And each of those transient sparks was a sun, with who knew how many circling worlds ...               “In this single galaxy of ours,” murmured Karellen, “there are eighty-seven thousand million suns. Even that figure gives only a faint idea of the immensity of space. In challenging it, you would be like ants attempting to label and classify all the grains of sand in all the deserts of the world.               “Your race, in its present stage of evolution, cannot face that stupendous challenge. One of my duties has been to protect you from the powers and forces that lie among the stars — forces beyond anything that you can ever imagine.”               The image of the galaxy’s swirling fire-mists faded; light returned to the sudden silence of the great chamber.               Karellen turned to go; the audience was over. At the door he paused and looked back upon the hushed crowd. “It is a bitter thought, but you must face it. The planets you may one day possess. But the stars are not for man." (Part II, ch. 14, [Ballantine 1953: 136-37]) 

            One of those "younger and more romantic elements" (with the unRomantic name of "Jan") becomes the Last Man, and he, too, comes to this conclusion, and does it looking at the extinction of humankind and the leap to the stars of the beyond-human children. After noting "the sublime inevitability" in the passing and surpassing of the human species, the last man sees that "[…] the road to the stars was a road that forked in two directions, and neither led to a goal that took any account of human hopes or fears."

               At the end of one path were the Overlords. They had preserved their individuality, their independent egos; they possessed self-awareness, and the pronoun “I” had a meaning in their language. They had emotions, some at least of which were shared by humanity. But they were trapped, Jan realized now, in a cul-de-sac from which they could never escape. Their minds were ten — perhaps a hundred — times as powerful as men’s. It made no difference in the final reckoning. They were equally helpless, equally overwhelmed by the unimaginable complexity of a galaxy of a hundred thousand million suns, and a cosmos of a hundred thousand million galaxies" (CE ch. 23, p. 205).

            And at the end of the other path is either disillusionment or something godlike. In Clarke's mostly capital-G Godless universe, it had to be something that had, highly improbably, evolved.

            The usually hard-headed, often hard-science thinker and author Arthur C. Clarke ran into the hard facts of not just the great barrier of the speed of light but, even if that barrier could be broken, the sheer immensity of the universe. And that was the universe of 1953 and 1968, not the increasingly plausible multiverse of the 21^st century.

            We could joke back in the 1980s about Carl Sagan's pronunciation of "billions and billions of stars" and the line as many of us remember it that "We are made of starstuff." Neil deGrasse Tyson says the same things, with an additional generation of science behind him, and with a better voice. We joked, but these ideas are literally awe-inspiring, at least if one has a working imagination and sense of awe.

            That starstuff and "billions and billions of stars" also should be daunting, since Sagan and Tyson can take us through the universe only through the spaceship of the imagination. As places for Romantic exploration, "The stars are not for man." And "no, nor woman neither," as Hamlet added to a somewhat related comment on human beings as "how like a god!" and "this quintessence of dust" (2.2.300-06).

           

            Clarke's mystic leaps are either audacious or cowardly, depending on how you want to look at them, and the ideas are dangerous (and Eric Rabkin did a penetrating brief critique on Childhood's End in the ListServ exchange). Still, they should be kept in mind every time we see a space opera or any variation on the theme of (actual title in 1940), Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. Insofar as we take them seriously, Clarke's mystic leaps are a variety of leaps of faith into the absurd. Any idea of human beings "conquering" the universe or the galaxy or even more than a handful of stars: that is what is ever-so-politely called in scientific and scholarly discourse, "counterfactual." Less politely put, galactic spacefaring is fun fantasy I thoroughly enjoy, but also thoroughly Romantic and fantastic bullshit; and in the Flash Gordon/universal conquest vision, parochial — and delusional. Given the suffering and evils of our world, a comfortable Theist is pretty contemptible and possibly dangerous; given the immensity and indifference of the universe, a comfortable atheistic SF fan hasn't thought things through.

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         * Note

                  "Ursula K. Le Guin and Arthur C. Clarke on Immanence, Transcendence, and Massacres." Extrapolation 28 (Summer 1987): 105-29.