This blog entry is being published automatically. I'm off Friday and Saturday for Shavuot, when Jews around the world observe the two-day festival that recalls the giving of the 10 Commandments at Mt. Sinai and the associated mass conversion of the assembled Israelites to the faith of Torah.
I'll be back with you on Sunday, but I bring to your attention a fascinating report from JTA about a
newly ordained Conservative rabbi, Juan Mejia, born in Colombia from a Converso background. Conversos were the Spanish Jews who accepted outward conversion to Catholicism in Spain prior to the 1492 expulsion. They are also called Marranos. Shavuot is a time when Jews re-accept the Torah, and interestingly that's what is happening too among some Hispanic Catholics in the American Southwest and in South America when they realize their ancestors were Converso Jews who fled Spain long ago, pursued by the Inquisition under the suspicion (often correct) of being secret Jews.
My post on
childless Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor provoked some interesting misunderstandings among commenters.
I argued that the experience of raising kids potentially confers traits you'd want in a judge, more so than merely being Hispanic and female. Remember that it was Obama, not me, who raised the subject of an individual's personal life story as a criterion in selecting a SC justice. It would not have occurred to me. The U.S. Supreme Court is not the Sanhedrin, where fatherhood was indeed a prerequisite, as noted in my earlier entry.
But once the question is raised, then yes, let's consider it. Compassion and empathy are virtues. But so is having had people rely on you for their lives. So is realism. Having kids promptly dispels fond daydreams you may have about how daily life "should" be. Isn't it interesting, then, that America's most childless big cities are more or less identical with its most liberal cities? To the extent liberalism implies a lack of realism about human nature, this makes sense.
The pack is led by San Francisco with its enormous, sterile gay population, followed by my own dear Seattle where we have more dogs than kids. In the case of SF, homosexuality is not the cause but the correlate. A 2005
New York Times article on kid-free metropolises does a nice job of setting up the atmosphere of politically correct sterility.
Somebody should write a book with that title.
Reason 142? Wikipedia. For all that I make use of this Web resource every day, I often get a queasy feeling about it. Many "facts" I've come across I know to be false or misleading, whether subtly or grossly, but there's little you can do about it, and not least when the context has anything to do with evolution. There will always be some anonymous Wiki "volunteer" out there on instant email-notification standby, having nothing better to do with his time than to change your correction back to what it had been originally.
Don't these people work for a living? I guess not.
This morning a friend sent around a
USA Today op-ed by journalist and former RFK aide John Seigenthaler. I assume Seigenthaler is Jewish. At the conclusion of the article, he tells a Hasidic story, without calling it that, that he says he heard from his mother. It compares the insidiousness of gossip to feathers from a pillow scattered in the wind. You can no more call back a slander you have spread, make amends for it, than you can gather up all those feathers.
The piece originally appeared back in 2005 but remains relevant and disturbing. In his Wikipedia biography, Seigenthaler was linked by some anonymous Internet snake with no less a crime than being somehow involved with plotting the assassination of John and Robert Kennedy. He couldn't get rid of the smear for 132 days. This is an extreme case, obviously, but many people, well known and less so, have been hurt in ways that are nearly impossible to trace, punish, or amend, thanks to wonderful Internet resources like Wikipedia.
A reader, Professor Joshua Berman at Israel's Bar-Ilan University, writes to me with a brilliant insight about President Obama's Supreme Court pick. Berman's new book, by the way, is
Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought:
Obama is correct when he says "The life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience," and that a justice must also know "how the world works, and how ordinary people live."
That's the wisdom behind the rabbis' dictum (see Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Sanhedrin 2:3) that a judge -- no matter how learned and wise he is -- cannot serve on the Sanhedrin [the Jewish high court] unless he has children. Sonia Sotomayor has no children.
It is ironic that a judicial nomination is being trumpeted on the basis of the nominee's "life experience," when she would fail the "life experience" test of the Talmud. She may be a fine jurist and a fine intellect, but is being childless really "how ordinary people live"?
Of course, from a constitutional standpoint, a nominee cannot be disqualified because of childlessness. But the rabbis' caveat should give us pause to consider: What does raising children do to us? What insights and sensitivities are uniquely engendered because of that singular experience? How do those insights inform our judgment generally speaking? Are there sensitivities developed through that process that we would want our judges today to possess?
This is seems to me absolutely right on, and the questions are crucial to consider. Your thoughts? Read on for mine.
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