In the spirit of looking facts in the face, let us admit what Jewish law actually prescribes: Abortion in the context of a non-Jewish nation like America is a death-penalty offense. My point is not that America should now write Biblical, Talmudic, or Maimonidean legislation into modern legal codes. The suggestion would be madness. But surely it's appropriate for Jews to confront without flinching what our classical sources say, digest their values, and do our best to reflect back the wisdom we find to this sad world that we are intended to influence as a "kingdom of priests" (Exodus 19:6).
I'm prompted to bring this all up by Beliefnet's other Jewish blogger, Rabbi Brad Hirschfield. Yesterday, with much respect and affection, I offered
a correction to Rod Dreher. Now similarly, here's one for Brad,
who writes on the shooting of late-term abortionist Dr. George Tiller. Brad is incorrect when he says:
Under no circumstances is a fetus considered a human life, according to Jewish law. Ironically, Maimonides, calling a fetus a rodef [pursuer], uses this law to explain why a baby must be aborted if the pregnancy endangers the mother's life. While Jewish law is no fan of abortion, and does not sanction abortion on demand under all circumstances, it is never murder.
Let's make an elementary distinction. Jewish law rules differently for non-Jewish societies (like our own) than for a Jewish society. Torah is even stronger in its defense of the unborn in a Gentile nation than in a Jewish one. Interesting, don't you think? The Talmud contains the teaching, and Maimonides codifies it as accepted law, that in a Gentile context, aborting a fetus in fact constitutes murder, punishable by court-imposed death sentence.
Miriam Shaviv has a fascinating book review in the
Forward on the
Spanish "Jewish Christians" or "Marranos" who, up until the expulsion from Spain in 1492, accepted baptism and outward life as Christians while maintaining a secret, internal loyalty to Judaism. They did this under the threat of intense persecution. Some practiced Jewish rituals in secret. Others mentally "nullified" their Christian observances. Some tried not to think about religion at all and instead concentrated on worldly matters like business and politics.
It's a historical phenomenon but also a very contemporary one: spiritual and personal identities split between the demands of competing world views. Writes Shaviv about Yirmiyahu Yovel, author of
The Other Within:
Yovel...sees split identities as "a basic structure of the human condition," but one that was legitimized only in the modern era. "In earlier times," he says, "split identities were considered illicit and illegal, a grave social and metaphysical sin punished by the Inquisition (and later, by nationalism and similar 'integralist' movements)." In this respect...the Marranos were harbingers -- and perhaps, to some extent, catalysts -- of modernity.
You may have followed the "
Craigslist killer" story in which one intriguing angle was the question of whether the accused, Phillip Markoff, is Jewish or not. It turns out he has a
Jewish father and non-Jewish mother, who divorced. He was raised by his mother and a step-father, "occasionally" attending their Catholic church.
An ancient Biblical tradition, a midrash, relates that the Canaanites wrote marriage contracts between man and man and woman and woman, and that this was one reason the land "vomited" them up in favor of the Israelites who took their place. The historicity of this isn't the point. It's the moral that matters, having to do with the social impact of being libertarian about marriage combinations
Today
Rod Dreher,
Andrew Sullivan, and
John Derbyshire are contemplating the question of whether there is a secular case against same-sex marriage. Is there?
Well, there would have to be. God doesn't rule arbitrarily. He has in mind the aim to encourage human flourishing, and He knows better even than Andrew Sullivan does. That doesn't mean His reasons are always entirely scrutable. That may be why the exact nature of a religion-free case against state-sanctioned gay marriage sometimes seems a bit hazy. Nevertheless, I'll give you my three thoughts about how human interest is served by resisting attempts to remake matrimony.
First, the institution of marriage is very ancient, and that by itself tells us something. A profound wisdom accumulates over the millennia, as generations discover the kind of institutions best suited for human beings. For thousands of years and across a multitude of cultures, people have agreed that marriage means the union of man with woman. This consensus is enshrined in religious beliefs, revered by Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus alike. You can think of these beliefs as God-given, but you don't have to. You also can think of them as human discoveries.
"And God said, Let there be light: and there was light" (Genesis 1:3).
I was just haggling with my wise editor at the
Forward over my use in an op-ed piece -- about the Biblical commandment of counting the Omer -- of the term Dark Age to describe our own times of secular ascendancy. This is one thing that good editors are for -- catching writers in the act of being needlessly hyperbolic or pugilistic -- so I conceded the point and we went with "secular ascendancy." But I will share with you that I still think Dark Ages aptly characterizes what we're now living through. The British medical writer James Le Fanu has another term that's equally or more apt. He thinks we're living in the Age of Counter-Enlightenment.
In the new issue of
The American Scholar,
Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd tries to explain how a universe unguided by divine purpose can still have meaning. Most of the essay, "Purpose-Driven Life," is pure blather, largely unreadable. But his simple point seems to be that purpose bubbles up from below through the otherwise "mindless process" of Darwinian evolution:
Does evolution by natural selection rob life of purpose, as so many have feared? The answer is no. On the contrary, Charles Darwin has made it possible to understand how purpose, like life, builds from small beginnings, from the ground up. In a very real sense, evolution creates purpose.
I'm not sure but I think Boyd means that the illusion of purpose is generated in this way.
Richard Dawkins also has meaning on his mind. He's been on a lecture tour speaking about "
The Purpose of Purpose." The world's chief celebrity atheist has invented a pair of neologisms, "archi-purpose" and "neo-purpose," to designate respectively illusory purpose in nature and genuine mind-generated purpose.
Since in Dawkins's understanding there's no Divine mind outside nature, the only purpose-generating minds belong to people and maybe some higher mammals such as whales.
The question these two thinkers are nervously flirting with is simple and commonsensical: Does meaning in life depend on your believing in God? Or can life have real purpose, not pretend purpose, in a universe without a Deity standing outside nature and imparting purpose?
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