LAT: The profane origins of ‘Merry Christmas’

Posted on December 26, 2017 by Luke Ford

I wonder why the news media and the entertainment industry revel in trashing the sacredness of Christmas. Why are there incentives among our elites to trash the public observance of Christianity? A nation that does not have a sacred zone is in big trouble.

Los Angeles Times Op/Ed:

For most of its history, the Christian church regarded Christmas as a small event on its calendar not requiring much observation. Puritans in England and later the American colonies went one step further, banning the holiday altogether since they could find no biblical support for celebrating the day. As the historian Stephen Nissenbaum has explained, the Puritans imposed fines on anyone caught celebrating and designated Christmas as a working day. These strict rules were necessary since so many men and women engaged in the drunken carousing that accompanied winter solstice festivities, an ancient tradition that the church had failed to stamp out when it appropriated Dec. 25 as a Christian holiday.

In this setting, “Merry Christmas” was born. The greeting was an act of revelry and religious rebellion, something the uncouth masses shouted as they traveled in drunken mobs. Troubled by such behavior, the New Haven Gazette in 1786 decried the “common salutation” of “Merry Christmas.” “So merry at Christmas are some,” the paper lamented, “they destroy their health by disease, and by trouble their joy.”

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LAT: ‘Antipathy toward the Muslim minority is rooted in racial differences and spiked with fears of Islamist terrorism.’

Posted on December 26, 2017 by Luke Ford

Isn’t that all you need to know? Racial differences and fears of terrorism sound like a rational reason for outsiders to hate a group.

The path to a happy life is to be of service to others. The path to a happy life for minorities is to be of service to the majority. If your presence isn’t enhancing the well-being of the majority, then why would the majority want you around? I think most minorities fail this test. Israel, for example, is not enhanced by its two million Arab minority. I don’t think most American whites would regard blacks, illegals and Muslims as enhancing America’s well-being.

Los Angeles Times:

“Buddha loves all people and teaches us to try to resolve suffering, but we have a duty to protect our country at the same time,” he said at his simple monastery outside the northern city of Mandalay.

Life means war aka conflicts of interest. Resolving suffering for all peoples is a noble value, but a more important value is protecting your own country. If this isn’t your primary value, then you won’t have a country for long.

The basis of politics is the friend-enemy distinction. For most non-Muslims, Muslims are the enemy.

As Maj. Kong noted: “Anti-Semitism is as natural to Western civilization as anti-Christianity is to Jewish civilization, Islamic civilization and Japanese civilization.”

As one Jewish professor noted: “American Jews want to maintain a distinct identity and on the other hand want to be fully integrated into broader society and don’t want the distinctiveness to come at a price.”

The antipathy toward the small Muslim minority — in a country that is 90% Buddhist — is a virulent brew of ethnic, economic and religious nationalism promulgated for decades by the military, and spread easily via social media across a population with some of the lowest education levels in Southeast Asia.

Nationalism does not require promotion. It is the most natural human impulse in the modern age when it comes to politics. Nationalism means recognizing the friend-enemy distinction. All victimologies contain a nationalism and all nationalisms contain the capacity for genocide. Why would Myanmar want a 10% Muslim population? What do the Muslims add to Myanmar aside from division and terror?

It is built fundamentally on racial differences: The Rohingya, who are denied citizenship in Myanmar, are physically and culturally more similar to the peoples of Bangladesh and India than to Myanmar’s ethnic Bamar majority. Scholars say they descend from Arab and Persian traders who arrived in what is now western Myanmar more than 1,000 years ago.

Those differences have driven a deep wedge through this country of 50 million. Of all the monks, student activists, ethnic guerrillas and other dissidents who once opposed the army’s abuses, almost none have spoken up for the country’s most beleaguered people.

It is normal, natural and healthy to have negative feelings towards people who are different. It is up to minorities to prove that they belong. The moral onus is not on the majority to accept minorities. All things being equal, division equals weakness and cohesion equals strength. The more united a country, the stronger.

For years, Myanmar’s army has rallied Buddhists by claiming a Muslim plot to overtake the country. It rewrote the country’s arcane citizenship laws to exclude the Rohingya, and routinely ignored hardline monks who spewed hatred toward Muslims.

The propaganda was seemingly confirmed after a small insurgent group — the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, or ARSA — rose up last year and began attacking Myanmar security forces. Now monks such as Myawady Sayadaw freely reconcile Buddha’s nonviolent teachings with a military offensive that some call a possible genocide.

It sounds like the Myanmar majority are acting in their self-interest. Most people, even when they have a tradition of benevolent rhetoric, tend to act in their own self-interest. There’s plenty of benevolent rhetoric in Judaism, but when Jews needed to establish and protect the Jewish state, they killed when they needed to (and sometimes when they may not have needed to).

There was little outcry in October after one of the country’s most influential monks, Sitagu Sayadaw, gave a speech at a military base in which he appeared to justify ethnic cleansing.

If it is in a group’s self-interest to practice ethnic cleansing, then they’d have to be cucked not to cleanse.

When the army took power in 1962, it began pushing the narrative that the Rohingya had been brought into Myanmar illegally by British colonial rulers, who used laborers from present-day India and Bangladesh to build roads and infrastructure. The generals created an educational system that inculcated bigotry in generations of schoolchildren.

Children don’t need to be inculcated with bigotry to prefer their own kind to strangers. It is normal, natural and healthy.

“Over 50 or 60 years, the army provided fertile ground for hate, and putting that into the mind of a third- or fourth-grader brings you the results we are seeing today,” he said.

Hate doesn’t need to be inculcated. It is part of the human condition. We tend to hate those who are different from us. That said, hatred does not automatically lead to genocide. Rather, genocide results from extreme conflicts of interests.

Even as the Myanmar government and Bangladesh pursue a plan to repatriate Rohingya refugees starting in January, the state-supported climate of hate makes it all but impossible to imagine that many could return.

I’ve yet to read an article on the Rohingya that even tries to make the case that they are an asset to a non-Muslim country. Nobody even tries to make that argument.

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Parasha Vayechi (Gen. 47:28-50:26)

Posted on December 24, 2017 by Luke Ford

Listen here and here and here.

Watch. This week’s Torah portion concludes the Book of Genesis: “The parashah tells of Jacob’s request for burial in Canaan, Jacob’s blessing of Joseph’s sons Ephraim and Manasseh, Jacob’s blessing of his sons, Jacob’s death and burial, and Joseph’s death. The parashah constitutes Genesis 47:28–50:26. It is the shortest weekly Torah portion in the Book of Genesis.”

* Should a Jew say Merry Christmas? Christmas memorializes the birth of Jesus, the Messiah according to Christianity.

* It is vitally important to Jacob in this week’s parasha that he be buried in the Holy Land, and yet many Jews are appalled by blood and soil ideologies as nationalistic. Judaism is nationalism of the blood and soil variety.

Wikipedia: “Blood and soil (German: Blut und Boden) is a slogan expressing the nineteenth-century German idealization of a racially defined national body (“blood”) united with a settlement area (“soil”). By it, rural and farm life forms are not only idealized as a counterweight to urban ones, but are also combined with racist and anti-Semitic ideas of a sedentary Germanic-Nordic peasantry as opposed to (specifically Jewish) nomadism. The contemporary German concept Lebensraum, the belief that the German people needed to reclaim historically German areas of Eastern Europe into which they could expand, is tied to it.”

* “Anti-Semitism is as natural to Western civilization as anti-Christianity is to Jewish civilization, Islamic civilization and Japanese civilization.”

* Why the Jews? The Reasons for Anti-Semitism. Jews as unpopular middlemen.

* Sholom Rubashkin of Agriprocessors is free thanks to a sentence commutation by President Trump. Is this good for the Jews? For the goys? Samuel Freedman writes for the Washington Post: “Yet too many Jews have one set of ethics for their own kind and another for gentiles.”

Isn’t dual morality the most common form of morality in the world? There’s one standard for how you treat your own kind and another standard for how you treat outsiders? Isn’t dual morality the essence of all tribal morality, including Judaism? Does not the Torah explicitly endorse dual morality in that it sets different standards for how you treat your fellow (such as do not lend at interest) versus the outsider?

I have many reactions to Sholom Rubashkin’s going free. One is tribal. This is a member of my tribe. Even if I am not fond of him, there’s universal rejoicing throughout the Orthodox world over his freedom. Who am I to set myself apart from the community and be a Debbie Downer?

As a member of the tribe, I understand the impulse that you don’t want your own kind languishing in the goy’s justice. On the other hand, if you don’t respect the goy’s justice, you don’t truly want to be an equal member of his society. You can’t just take all you can from the goy and simultaneously disrespect the goy and not expect there will be negative consequences.

As one Jewish professor put it: “American Jews want to maintain a distinct identity and on the other hand want to be fully integrated into broader society and don’t want the distinctiveness to come at a price.”

Until recently, I would have felt chauvinistic and primitive for rooting for my tribe’s interests against my universalist principles. What are more important? Principles or interests?

* Tweet: I’d say that somewhere around 1/3-1/2 of US Jews actually are basically regular white people.

Reply: Yeah but the Jew lies within them, latent and waiting to be activated. Some sequence of events or code words can activate them at any moment.

Luke: Judaism’s perspective lies with the reply. Judaism regards Jews as having a special soul and a special connection to the divine that can be activated at any moment. The word “holy” in Hebrew — kadosh — means separate.

My rule of thumb is that when anti-semites and philo-semites agree, they’re probably right.

* NYT: STOKING FEARS, TRUMP DEFIED BUREAUCRACY TO ADVANCE IMMIGRATION AGENDA

Haiti had sent 15,000 people. They “all have AIDS,” he grumbled, according to one person who attended the meeting and another person who was briefed about it by a different person who was there.

Forty thousand had come from Nigeria, Mr. Trump added. Once they had seen the United States, they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa, recalled the two officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive conversation in the Oval Office.

* Dennis Dale blogs:

I deleted my Twitter account yesterday, exhausted by the pointlessness of it all. I saw a tweet of mine, something I thought clever, had been retweeted by one of my dozens of followers to his dozens of followers and I was plunged into an oh-so-familiar bout of mediocrity-induced depression. It’s not fun to suck. I’m not going to suck anymore–not on Twitter, at least.

I’m not wasting any more time on it. What I’d like to do now is a podcast. Looking for a partner.

I will continue to participate in Torah Talk with Luke Ford of course, until they wise up and throw me out. The idea is to do a short one of my own as well once a week. Two guys talking in a humorous fashion about things.

* Philip Weiss writes:

The Palestinian experience today is a lot like the Jewish experience of pogroms 100 years ago and more in eastern Europe. As Jews were beaten and killed by marauding gangs with the blessing of the state — American Jews were not silent. Jews acted. Our leaders went to the White House. Important Jewish organizations were formed. The most powerful Jew in the world, the banker Jacob Schiff, supported the Russian revolution because he so hated the czar. The most brilliant Jew in the world, Franz Kafka came out of his office in Prague to see Jews being beaten and he went to Zionist meetings.

Today millions of Palestinians under occupation are being humiliated, deprived of freedom, their children given no chance to dream of a better life… and the leftwing Zionist organization says a 16-year-old Palestinian woman whose cousin was maimed and who slapped a soldier in the courtyard of her house is carrying out a stunt.

Peace Now urges separation: “the occupation corrodes Israel and its image, and will continue until Israel extricates itself from the Palestinians.”

Jewish separation from Palestinians is a delusion. It is like whites separating from blacks in the U.S. Israel is 20 percent non-Jewish; and it rules territories containing 5 million Palestinians; and though the world has resolved to “extricate” the Jews from the Arabs for 70 years now, the communities are intertwined more than ever, as Israeli Jews flood the West Bank and build more and more Jewish-only colonies.

These Jewish colonies and their military escort have inflicted endless trauma on the subject population.

* I watched the movie Darkest Hour recently. “During the early days of World War II, with the fall of France imminent, Britain faces its darkest hour as the threat of invasion looms. As the seemingly unstoppable Nazi forces advance, and with the Allied army cornered on the beaches of Dunkirk, the fate of Western Europe hangs on the leadership of the newly-appointed British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (Academy Award nominee Gary Oldman). While maneuvering his political rivals, he must confront the ultimate choice: negotiate with Hitler and save the British people at a terrible cost or rally the nation and fight on against incredible odds.”

One thing that struck me was that the England of 1940 was incredibly unified. If you had a religion, it was likely Christianity. I believe Churchill only had one bodyguard (by contrast, there’s a ten-part TV series on Hitler’s Bodyguards). He moved around London freely because, perhaps, it was dominantly white, Christian and homogeneous. I cannot recall one British Prime Minister getting assassinated. What created the feeling of social cohesion in the Britain of then as opposed to now?

Churchill’s famous speech in the House of Commons on June 4, 1940: “… we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

It’s a shame England doesn’t have that same fighting spirit today. Could multiculturalism have anything to do with it?

William Blake:

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England’s[b] mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

There used to be a distinct English and Australian physiognomy. The English were always more racially united and enjoyed closer bonds and higher social trust than did the more diverse, litigious and violent Americans.

* Gen. 48: 20 So he blessed them on that day, saying:
By you shall Israel give-blessings, saying:
God make you like Efrayim and Menashe!
Thus he made Efrayim go before Menashe.
By thee shall Israel bless.

Rabbi Hertz: “To this day, every pious Jewish father on Sabbath eve places his hands on the head of his son, and blesses him in the words: ‘God make thee as Ephraim and Manasseh’ (Authorised Prayer Book, p. 122). Ephraim and Manasseh would not barter away their ‘Jewishness’ for the most exalted social position, or the most enviable political career, in the Egyptian state. They voluntarily gave up their place in the higher Egyptian aristocracy, and openly identified themselves with their ‘alien’ kinsmen, the despised shepherd-immigrants. Every Jewish parent may well pray that his children show the same loyalty to their father and their father’s God as did Ephraim and Manasseh.”

* Most of these blessings to Jacob’s grandchildren are not really blessings. This is Jacob’s revenge (Dennis Prager). The anti-semite could read many of these blessings and receive confirmation of his anti-Jewish views. He could easily say, “I know Jews like this!”

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Why all the sympathy for this slaughterhouse executive?

Posted on December 22, 2017 by Luke Ford

Samuel Freedman writes for the Washington Post:

Such was the human face of the social wreckage visited upon Postville by its would-be savior, an Orthodox Jewish executive and rabbi named Sholom Rubashkin. This same man, who was convicted of a $27 million fraud, sentenced to 27 years in prison and ordered to pay $18.5 million in restitution, this week had his term commuted by President Trump.

Besides pandering once more to the Orthodox Jewish portion of his base, Trump acted as a result of a high-powered lobbying effort that included everyone from celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to former attorney general Michael Mukasey.

There is an argument to be made that Rubashkin received an unduly severe sentence, two years longer than the prosecutor had sought and lengthier than the one meted out to Jeffrey K. Skilling, former Enron chief executive. But at a moral level, the level that can fairly be applied in a case drenched in the supposed adherence to religious practice, never has so much bipartisan and interfaith influence been invested in such an undeserving individual. In the Hasidic, Yiddish-speaking milieu where Rubashkin was reared, there is a blunt term for such a man: gonif, crook.

One of the tragedies of Rubashkin’s fall and his unmerited rescue is that he could legitimately have played the hero. When his father, Aaron, first bought the former Hygrade meat-processing plant in Postville 30 years ago, the Rubashkin family had the opportunity to restore reliable, unionized, good-paying jobs to a portion of the hollowed-out heartland that direly needed them.

Instead, when the Rubashkins reopened the Hygrade plant under kosher auspices as Agriprocessors, they attracted and exploited a labor force of immigrants from the former Soviet empire, as Stephen G. Bloom recounts in his masterful book “Postville.” When those workers earned enough or wised up enough to leave, the Rubashkins began hiring hundreds of Mexican and Guatemalan workers, many of them undocumented. In all respects, conditions worsened.

Rabbi Morris Allen, of the Conservative Jewish synagogue Beth Jacob in suburban Minneapolis-St. Paul, recalled recently in the Forward what he saw on investigative visits to Postville:

“How well I remember the working conditions at Agriprocessors, where underage kids were working on the killing floor; where the local school bus made a stop at the plant to drop off young students who worked after the school day ended — often until 11 p.m.; where pregnant women were not allowed a bathroom break or time to visit their doctor; where safety equipment was lacking and where nearly the entire work force were undocumented workers easily exploited as they lived in fear of being turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

…The Torah exhorts faithful Jews to love and help the stranger 36 times, more than any other commandment. Yet too many Jews have one set of ethics for their own kind and another for gentiles. Sholom Rubashkin ran his company on that principle, and his champions and enablers in the presidential commutation did the same.

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Losing Her Religion

Posted on December 22, 2017 by Luke Ford

From the New York Times Book Review:

THE BOOK OF SEPARATION
A Memoir
By Tova Mirvis
302 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $26.

Modern Orthodox Judaism — a loosely defined sect that adheres to the strictures of Jewish Scripture, while engaging with the broader world, intellectually and economically — has always been something of a paradox: It embraces modernity and, at the same time, lives by the dictums of an ancient system. Tova Mirvis’s memoir, “The Book of Separation,” chronicles this paradox, and many others, in an intimate tale of leaving a community that served as the literary inspiration for her first two novels, and the bulwark of her life.

Mirvis’s story is less stark than recent memoirs of leaving ultra-Orthodox sects; Modern Orthodoxy, by definition, allows more mingling with the outside world. Nonetheless, her narrative is one of deep heartache, both in the predeparture attempt to quiet her own objections to the faith, and in the self-willed abandonment of certainty that departure requires. Early in the book, Mirvis writes about a childhood objection to the biblical verse that commanded Adam to rule over Eve; her mother quieted her objections with alternative explanations. Mirvis muses about the contradictions she felt: “The text couldn’t be wrong; the rabbis couldn’t be wrong. If sexism was wrong, the text couldn’t be sexist. … The laws couldn’t change, the words couldn’t change — nothing, in fact, could change — yet you could turn the words, reframe them, and reshape them, do anything so that you could still fit inside.”

When I interviewed Tova January 30, 2005, it was clear she was no longer Orthodox, but I don’t think she realized that:

Luke: “Do you believe in God?”

Tova: “Yes.”

Luke: “Do you believe God gave the Torah?”

Tova: “I do. I think it’s more complicated… I don’t believe in the fundamentalist notion that he wrote it down and handed it off but I believe in an evolving dynamic chain of tradition. It has formed my life. It is complicated. I would guess that I don’t believe in it in the same terms that Wendy Shalit does.”

Luke: “How about in the terms that Maimonidies formulates in his eighth of thirteen required beliefs [the Jewish prayer Yigdal, which translated into English reads: ‘I believe with complete faith that the entire Torah now in our hands is the same one that was given to Moses, our teacher, peace be upon him.’]”

Tova: “Remind me.”

Luke: “That the Torah is divine. That every word of it is divine. And if a person was to say that a single word in the Torah is not divine, that that is outside permitted belief.”

Tova: “I don’t know. That’s a good question. Part of my Orthodoxy is that you don’t have to know all the answers. I don’t know. It’s a good question.”

Luke: “This was a question that obsessed the characters of Chaim Potok novels and it obsesses me.”

Tova: “What’s interesting about Orthodoxy is does the term mean sameness of belief? There’s little sameness of belief in Orthodoxy. There are basic tenets. I don’t think one could articulate an Orthodox theology that would apply across the board. It’s complicated and I live with that complication every day.”

Luke: “Orthoprax means correct practice. Orthodox means correct belief. Sorry to hone in on this, but would it be more accurate to call you Orthoprax than Orthodox?”

Tova pauses: “I don’t even know where to begin. No, I have no idea. I don’t know what those words mean. Is someone who belongs to an Orthodox synagogue and drives there [on Shabbat and festivals], is he Orthodox? I don’t know. Is one who davens three times a day but eats out [in non-kosher restaurants], is he Orthodox? I don’t do that, before that gets tagged on to me, but I don’t know. I don’t know what these terms mean. I don’t really think about them. I don’t know that there’s a need to define in that way.

“I am Modern Orthodox. I am liberal Orthodox. I am feminist Orthodox. But what does that have to do with my right to write fiction? The whole question of where writers are coming from is problematic and the least interesting way of looking at novels. I don’t know what my own personal beliefs have to do with it. Is it a credential test?

“People ask [a prominent Jewish author] if he believes in God. They want a yes or no answer. He thinks it’s not a yes-or-no answer but a discussion. To live in the Orthodox world is to be engaged in these questions and discussions and to wrestle with them and to be part of a conversation. It’s not to have all the answers. I just don’t believe that anyone does.”

Luke: “Are you familiar with Louis Jacobs?”

Tova: “Vaguely.”

Luke: “He was on the way to becoming Chief Rabbi of England in the early 1960s. They found a book he wrote in 1957 called We Have Reason To Believe where he accepted what is the universally held view in academic study of sacred text that the Torah is composed of different strands composed in different centuries and woven together over centuries. Because of that, he was thrown out of Orthodox Judaism.

“I bring that up because with your vast secular education, I am sure you are familiar with literary criticism and the asking of three basic questions: When was something written? Who wrote it? For what purpose was it written? If you apply those three basic questions to sacred text, you would come up with an answer completely different from that of traditional Judaism to its sacred texts. Do you wrestle with this?”

Tova, pauses: “Sometimes, but not to where I need to have the answer, to resolve it in my head. I think the same applies to issues of Orthodoxy and science.”

Luke: “Is Jewish Orthodoxy compatible with Modernity?”

Tova: “Yes.”

Luke: “So one can be authentically Orthodox and authentically Modern?”

Tova: “That’s what the Modern Orthodox movement is about. Modern Orthodoxy was founded on the principle that one doesn’t live in separate worlds where we do our Orthodox thing and then we do our Modern thing. We integrate them.”

Luke: “Do you think it is true?”

Tova: “Do I think that it is true?”

Luke: “Ontologically, ultimately? That you can be authentically Modern and authentically Orthodox and integrated?”

Tova: “I do.”

Luke: “I’m sure that much of what you learned at Columbia ran completely counter to your Orthodox Judaism?”

Tova: “I don’t know. It didn’t.”

Luke: “Did you ever take a class in Bible?”

Tova: “I didn’t. I regret that.

“I think these are interesting questions but they don’t have to do with fiction, with my fiction.

“I think of Wendy Shalit’s piece as a tzitzit-check, a sheitel-check. What are your credentials for writing. As a writer, I don’t pretend to have all the answers to the theological questions of Orthodoxy. I don’t pretend it in my life and I don’t pretend it in my fiction.

“I don’t think that writing from a place of certainty makes for the best fiction.

“I can discuss with you my own doubts though I don’t think that I need to. Orthodoxy is not always an easy package to hold together.

“I take issue with her argument that because characters struggle with communal norms and divine truths they are outsiders. I think she wants to do this to writers and to our characters. It is the second one that pisses me off more.”

After the interview, I exchanged some emails with Tova.

Eighty minutes after the conclusion of our interview, Tova wrote me:

“I must tell you as well, in hindsight, that I have an isssue with many of your questions. Upon thinking about it, I wondered whether questions such as whether I believe in the one of maimonides 13 principles of faith are intended for discussion and thought, or to determine whether I’m really the insider I claim to be. if the former, then I truly am interested in the conversation and the ongoing exploration. But if its the latter, then I’d make the same objection as I make to her piece. Must we believe in the 3rd principle of faith, for example, to write legitimately about the ortjodox world. What if someone only believed in numbers 1-11? Does that disqualify them? And since its so on point, I’d love to quote The Ghost Writer, which I mentioned: “Do you practice Judaism? If so, how? If not, what qualifies you to write about Judaism for national magazines?” I’m feeling a little too much of Judge Wapter in the air.”

I replied: “That was my favorite section of the Ghostwriter. I do not believe that you need to believe in anything to write on Orthodox Judaism or any topic. My questions on your beliefs were to find out where you are coming from. I realize this is a very sensitive area for many people… I had a fascinating discussion along a similar line with Alana Newhouse…in my book on Jewish journalism.”

Later, I emailed Tova: “Why have you stayed Orthodox?”

Tova wrote back: “I’ve stayed Orthodox because it’s who I am, it’s my childhood and its my family, my parents and my children, and it’s part of all my memories. I’m Orthodox because I love ritual, because I love the texts, love the idea of a chain of ideas passed down from generation to generation, each one adding one more link. Because I love Shabbos, love that the chaos of my everyday life quiets down for those hours. Because sometimes when I least expect it, a cantorial tune, a word of a prayer will catch me off guard and move me, make me feel a longing for something deeper, fuller, higher. I’ve stayed Orthodox even though so many things about it anger me, so many things feel problematic and troubling and unresolvable. And I stay because the Orthodox world is so much wider than some people believe, because one can doubt and wrestle and observe and believe and that is all part of this tradition.”

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