In B Flat: Interactive YouTube Digital Orchestra

This is just flat-out cool.

Modern Orthoprax & Heterodox: Angry at God, for possibly not existing?

Modern Orthoprax & Heterodox: Angry at God, for possibly not existing?

For me, it was a pretty straightforward sequence...not without anguish, but still:

Step A:
"5. Get angry at God...": Not only for possibly not existing, but for this pain-wracked world that He purportedly created and perpetuates. Hardly a novel question (tzaddik v'ra lo, etc.), but the standard and not-so-standard answers became mere tirutzim when viewed against the searing reality of the pain that they are attempting to explain away.

Step B:
"1. Accept that God possibly might not exist, but maintain a type of Pascal's wager..." Tried that one on for size, quickly realized I couldn't possibly satisfy the minimum demands of all of the possible Gods that have been postulated over the course of history, and so figured I may as well thow in the towel.

Step C:
"6. Wait for a sign from God..." Kind of ongoing. I suppose for me this means that I aspire to remain open enough to have my mind changed by some direct and clear communication.  No more speaking in riddles for me.

Step D:
"4. Set aside the question of whether He exists or not, and throw yourself into secular ethics - the type that don't depend on a God to make you want to be good." Yeah, here's where I'm at. For me it was perhaps easier than Modern Orthoprax describes, since a core of my skepticism is my observation that "good"ness and "godli"ness in people are utterly unrelated. Lord knows (ha, ha) that plenty of otherwise believing Orthodox Jews (including/especially learned Rabbonim) cannot possibly be described as "good", and Ithere are many, many ordinary assimilated Jews and non-Jews of all stripes, who are very "good" indeed.

Skipped "2. Try and convince yourself...that God actually exists" - haven't I been doing this all my life until now?

Only dabbled in "3. Convince yourself that God does not exist." I don't need much convincing, but since this question is higly unlikely to ever be definitively settled, prefer to think of myself as falling on the atheistic end of the agnostic spectrum as opposed to the out-and-out atheistic.

Traffic Signs

Arguably, this has more to do with the great job that the sign designers did than with my ability to remember what was on the test when I got my driver's license:


via Auto Insurance.org

Other Gods

Following along with the weekly parsha last week (Shoftim), I noticed that the Artscroll chumash consistently translates the phrase Elohim Acherim as "gods of others".  This is not a translation but an unacknowledged commentary, or perhaps a twisting of meaning to avoid an uncomfortable truth.

Note to Rabbi Arthur Scroll (as a clever blogger put it a long time ago): The translation of Elohim Acherim is "other gods". 

"Gods of others" would be Elohei Acherim.

As Robert Wright convincingly points out in his book The Evolution of God, the plain meaning of the phrase Elohim Acherim, which occurs all over chumash, suggests that Judaism was not originally monotheistic in the sense that we currently understand the term.  As far as I can find, nowhere in the chumash does God state "I am the only God" or, "there are no other gods".  Instead, the implication of the first of the Ten Commandments and many, many other verses is that the Jews are not to worship any of the other gods - only Him...clearly implying that plenty of other Gods in fact exist for the Jews not to worship.

It would be a nice world indeed where translations could be trusted as translations and commentaries stated and acknowledged as such.  Curiously, Artscroll translates ayin tachas ayin... literally as an "eye for an eye..." despite the now traditional strained insistence in the commentaries that this is not at all what the verse ever intended....more on that later.

A Jew In Real Time

I am a Jew.  I live in the USA in the 21st century. 

I live amongst other Jews who inhabit an imaginary world in which the world stopped its societal, cultural and intellectual development at the time of the enlightenment.  These neighbors, friends and relatives engage in 1984-style historic revisionism to maintain the inner illusion of historical stability of their lifestyles and worldview.

I am a Jew.  I live in the world in real time, not imaginary time.  I attempt to engage our history as a people and the artifacts and practices that we have inherited as the works of our people, and to both appreciate and question these freely and openly. 

My neighbors, friends and relatives tend to feel threatened and defensive when their illusions are challenged or brought into question. 

This blog is a place where I can safely share my thoughts on these subjects and various other interests as they occur to me.