I call author David Klinghoffer Friday afternoon, August 31, 2007.
Here’s a partial transcript.
Luke: "How was the experience of writing this book different from the others?"
David: "I had to write faster. With my Abraham book, The Discovery of God, I did a lot more research. I write books on scholarly subjects but I’m really just a journalist. I couldn’t do the kind of research that a real scholar would do."
"It was harder in that there are more new insights. With the Abraham book, I was drawing on midrashim. My creative work was to tie them all up in a narrative. With the Jesus book I was relying on a lot of scholarly research that had been done before me and the creative work was drawing it into a narrative. Here I had to take some creative stabs on connections between the commandments because they are not specified in the traditional sources. That was uncharted territory."
"My next book was going to be called ‘Why God is a Republican.’ And every time I would mention that people would laugh. Now I can’t use that title because the organization I work for is a non-profit and we can’t be partisan. Now it is going to be called, ‘How Would God Vote?’"
"I write fast. I take risks. I’m sometimes surprised when people take great offense at things I wrote.
"Weakness? I’m writing about things that a scholar should be writing about and I am not a scholar. There’s always the danger of my being superficial and wrong."
Luke: "If you were offered a million dollar book contract but with the proviso that you could not criticize liberalism nor secularism, what would you write about?"
David: "I would write a novel about Judaism."
Luke: "What do you love about Seattle’s culture?"
David: "It’s a beautiful place. It’s gentle in many ways. You point out that it’s very secular and you queried why do I live here instead of Jerusalem. You speculated that I like secularism more than I admit."
"Being in a religious culture is a hothouse environment. Everybody’s looking at you. We live in a suburb where there’s a small shul as opposed to the main Jewish neighborhood called Seward Park where there are three large Orthodox synagogues. We chose not to live there in part that it is a hothouse. Everybody notices what you do and what you don’t do. Where we live there are more secular Jews. I guess you are right that it is inconsistent of me that I choose to live in such a secular area."
"It’s true that the place you’d think of as fun, beautiful cities to live in — Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Boston — these are all blue cities. The cities in the red spectrum, be it Dallas, they are not places I’d run to live in. That is a mystery. I don’t have a solution."
"These blue cities are new to secularism. The analogy I’d give is someone going off their medication. For the first few hours, the person may feel fine and concluded he never needed his meds."
"There’s a genteel quality to the better aspects of Seattle’s culture. Nordstroms could only have started in Seattle with their emphasis on customer service. But I didn’t move here for Seattle’s culture. It’s not like when you go to New York or L.A. and feel a buzz."
David’s favorite movies include The Last Emperor, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Lord of the Rings, and the Star Wars series.
"I listen to rock music all the time on the radio. It’s great for driving but I never listen to it at home. I don’t pay attention to the groups. I just turn on the radio and flip around to try to avoid commercials. If you mention the name of a song to me, it is almost certain that I wouldn’t recognize the name of the song but if you played it for me, I probably would recognize it."
Luke: "What did you think of Borat?"
David: "I thought it was funny but mean. The first half was hilarious. The second half I felt increasingly guilty yet enjoying it. It made fun of people who were trying to be helpful. It was cruel to people who weren’t bad enough to merit that kind of cruelty. Though I laughed throughout it, it was ugly movie."
Luke: "Would you agree to be interviewed by Borat?"
David: "No. Everyone knows that if Borat wants to interview you, it is to make a fool of you."
Luke: "Which part of life do you find most perplexing?"
David: "How to be a good husband."
He’s been married seven years.
Luke: "How has being a husband and father affected your thinking and writing?"
David: "I’ve been thinking about that in connection with our disagreement about gossip."
Luke: Some forms of gossip I view as completely reprehensible (those forms that do far more harm than good) and other forms of gossip as mixed (the good and harm are about equal) and some forms of gossip are good (those that do more good than harm).
David: "You’ve never been married and you don’t have kids."
Luke: "Correct."
David: "Have you ever held a real job, a 9-5 job?"
Luke: Yes. I’ve held various full-time jobs for three to six months each. I held part-time jobs for more than two years.
David: "Have you ever been part of a community that you felt committed to?"
Luke: "All of my life (with the exception of my years from age 18-26), I have been a part of a traditional religious community (before 18 it was Seventh-Day Adventist ones, from age 27 on it has been Jewish ones)."
David: "One way my life position has made me rethink gossip is that you understand what other people have to lose. With gossip you can destroy someone’s family and his role in the company and community. To understand what people have at stake, you have to experience this. You don’t just kill the one person. You kill his family, his wife, everyone connected with the irresponsible spread of gossip. It places a tremendous responsibility on the person who wants to spread information.
"Your argument is that where there’s smoke, there’s fire."
Luke: Sometimes where there’s smoke, there’s fire. When you transmit personal information, you have to balance the good with the harm before publishing. Sometimes transmitting gossip informs the unwary about something that could hurt them.
David: "I guess I’m placing more stress on the harm."
"People who have opted out of responsibilities and worries and concerns that other people have and treat those responsibilities lightly and then wear that fact proudly… It would be interesting to know if the people who run Jewish blogs that gossip, do they have anything at stake?"
Luke: "The more you have at stake, the more vulnerable you are, and the less you are in a position to write gossip."
David: "That’s my point. That drives me berserk."
Luke: "How important a role does gossip play in enforcing community norms?"
David: "It’s a two-edged sword. On the one hand, you can say it keeps people honest. At the same time, every time someone is caught doing something they shouldn’t and it is broadcast, it lowers the shock value of the thing reported. Before, the thing was so shocking that nobody would talk about it much less do it. Now it is being talked about all over and giggled at…"
Luke: "Why do you say that the media hold someone’s life in their hands? Someone could write that I am a child molester and I would still feel that my life is in my hands. Why would give the media that much power?"
David: "It does. Maybe that you’re a blogger and a lone ranger, you’re not married with kids, you’re not employed, you are invulnerable to being destroyed. You report things on yourself, you linked to something nasty someone had written about you that wasn’t true, and for you there’s no cost to that. It’s all part of being a blogger. It’s interesting to read. It costs you nothing. But you report the same thing about someone else and it costs them everything."
Luke: "Isn’t that because I’ve built up a thick skin and someone else hasn’t?"
David: "No. It’s because you’ve exempted yourself from responsibility for other people. Is there anyone for whom you are responsible?"
Luke: "I know that my writing profoundly affects the hundreds of people I write about."
David: "That’s different. They choose to read your blog."
Luke: "No. The people I write about [whether they read me or not]."
David: "Is there anyone who is inextricably bound to you?"
Luke: "Not on an ongoing basis. Sometimes people are particularly vulnerable and I am the one who’s there for them."
David: "Someone who looks to you for support."
Luke: "A lot of people who are disenfranchised, who have a story they want to tell but don’t have the means. They feel beaten down by life. I get to tell their story. I went to dinner the other day with Marsha Plafkin. I told the story of her troubles with the University of Judaism….
"She said to me she would not have been able to get married without my telling of her story. That freed her to go on with her life. Prior to then, she felt so completely battered by life, she felt unable to carry on."
David: "I don’t know the story, but taking what you said at face value that’s great. But that’s different from what I’m talking about. If you were to disappear from the world tomorrow, her life goes on."
Luke: "Yeah, but if I had disappeared before telling her story, her life would not have gone on as it has, if we take what she said at face value."
David: "But if you disappeared right now…"
Luke: "But the other persons who I might help now…"
David: "Your relationship with them is purely hypothetical. Anyone you might help in the future, you don’t know who they are yet."
Luke: Some of them I do know who they are. I’ve taken down their story. I’ve started to check it. I just have not published it.
David: "You have to imagine yourself in the total existence of someone you are writing about. It’s harder for you to do that because you don’t have those kinds of responsibilities now."
Luke: "But as a conservative, don’t you believe in individual responsibility? You keep talking about the power of the media to destroy someone’s life. I would contend that a person has a fair amount to say in their own destiny and that a person who has some resources should not allow himself to be destroyed by some damaging report in the media."
David: "That’s naive. You can’t not let yourself be destroyed."
Luke: "Let’s say you are accused by a blogger of sexually molesting a 12-year old girl. And the allegation is true. That’s very damaging but I would contend that depending on how you handled it, you could carry on."
The proper way to handle such a thing would be to admit the truth and then plead for your sin to be balanced against the good things you’ve done in your life and point to evidence that shows you have changed from the person who did the evil.
David: "I guess."
Luke: "Let’s say you plagiarized three lengthy paragraphs in your new book. Normally, that would end your career as a writer. But I contend you could bounce back. It would destroy your career as you know it now but it would not have to destroy your life."
David: "Whatever someone does to me, deserved or undeserved, would deeply impact everyone connected with me."
Luke: "Let’s say a blogger has that information on you, should they publish it? Would you if the shoe was on the other foot?"
David: "I don’t think so. I’d email them privately and let him know that I’ve got his number and put some fear into him."
"People make careers out of jumping on someone’s mistake and using it to advance themselves."
Luke: "I think that works to the good."
David: "Whenever everyone is ganging up self-righteously on some guy who has everything to lose… Did you see my column for NRO about Larry Craig? Everyone jumping on this guy… Maybe I’m a contrarian."
Luke: "Are you a contrarian?"
David: "I guess you could say that I am."
Luke: "Wouldn’t that be part of the reason that you choose to live in blue areas?"
David: "Someone could say that… You could more readily explain it as a profound inconsistency in my whole argument. If what the Torah says in this parsha is true, then you would think that societies that are God-centered would prosper and be beautiful places to live and that places that are not God-centered would be pits. Anyone who takes the Torah seriously would have to ask themselves why is that not the case? Seattle is not a pit."
Luke: "Where would you be if you didn’t have secularism and liberalism to fulminate against?"
David laughs. "I guess I would be an archeologist."
We talk about Noah Feldman.
David: "I find something uninspiring about Modern Orthodoxy and I can kinda see why this guy might have felt unexcited by it."
Luke: "How often do you encounter anti-Semitism among right-wing Christians?"
David: "Never."
Luke: "Did you ever hear from Mel Gibson?"
David: "No."
Luke: "How do you recharge (aside from the predictable answers such as family, friends, Judaism, etc)?"
David: "I like to drink a screwdriver when I get home from work. I like to see the ocean. I like to see big bodies of water."
Our interview wanders.
David: "I’m always looking for a teacher. I’m always searching for a guru. Not just a living person, but a book. Then I’ll think, ‘Now I’ve found it. This is how I’m going to explain Judaism.’ And then I’ll read more and I’ll realize that doesn’t quite do it. I’m still trying to figure out an overall hashkafa (worldview) that satisfies me completely. I haven’t found that."
"The whole blog phenomena has things that are depressing. The internet has brought a lot of nastiness. There are things that I wish I’d never read about rabbis, whether they were true or not."
Luke: "It seems that when you go out into the world you are looking solely for evidence to support the Torah rather than ever challenge your understanding of the Torah?"
David: "All of my writing is an experiment in trying to see if the Torah can be tested as a guide to life. I use the Torah as the primary guide to understanding reality. Relying on other sources for morality is fine for other people but that’s not what I’m trying to do."
"I’m happy to chalk what I don’t understand in Torah to my own inadequacies. As soon as you start saying the Torah is wrong about this, what sort of anchor is there for your moral thinking?"
"The link you sent me seem to have a lot of academic and journalistic thoughts about gossip that were more positive than Torah’s. That doesn’t fit with our understanding of gossip. There are positive things that gossip does just as you could think of positive things that unjust wars do. They help keep down the population, but that doesn’t mean it is OK to embark on unjust war."
Luke: "Often ‘lashon hara’ is used to try to shut down a discussion that needs to be had."
David: "Yes. Often. It does seem like if you followed strictly the Chofetz Chaim’s guidelines for what you can say, it would be hard to open your mouth, let alone to write a gossip blog."
"Gossip is sort of the equivalent of going to war."
Luke: "The news media under-reported the Roosevelt, JFK and LBJ administrations."
David: "The sort of culture that would have allowed us to talk frankly about JFK’s sexual adventures, there would have been consequences that spread throughout the culture. You’d be talking about a different culture, less gentle, more indifferent to hurting people like Richard Jewel… Making a decision [to report personal information] is like dropping a stone into a pool. You have no idea of the consequences."
