faith and reason

Rabbi Donniel Hartman gave a fascinating talk called "Faith and Reason". This is not a full description of that talk (too much). It's not really even a complete summary, as I'm skipping past a bunch of stage-setting. This is more of a partial summary plus reaction all rolled into one. (I'll try to be clear when he's talking and when I am.)

R. Hartman argues that in a world in which we have many choices, where we can choose to associate with "people like us" (whatever that means), we are free to choose how to respond to religion. In a previous talk he suggested that many choose atheism, usually negative atheism (I don't know that God exists) or practical atheism (whether God exists doesn't affect what I do) rather than positive atheism (I know that God doesn't exist). In this talk he suggested that a barrier to faith is the baggage you think you'll have to accept. Many, he thinks, make assumptions about that baggage -- the things we will have to believe or at least accept -- based on pediatric perceptions of religion. He asks: If I choose the presumption of faith do I have to leave my brain at the door?

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faith and the Shoah

When I saw an entry on the schedule called "faith after the Holocaust" I sort of sighed a little. People have been asking "why?" for 70 years and we're no closer to an answer in all that time. And while of course I understand that it is profoundly important, my lack of personal connection to it (my family was never at risk) makes it hard.

This session was excellent. Rachel Korazim, who seems to be well-known (I'd never heard of her) reviewed with us some literature and poetry, unpacking for us all the nuances that you would not know if you had not been in Israel soon after. Possibly some of this stuff is in Dani's consciousness that way (Dani's family was in Canada during the Shoah but his parents moved to Israel in the 50s for a time); I'll have to ask him.

Rachel Korazim was there too (she's in her mid-60s and remembers), so she was able to provide a lens on the time. One story that prompted a lot of this was the beginning of a book (I think book and not story) called See Under: Love by David Grossman. Just a taste: it starts: "It was like this. A few months after Grandma Henny was buried in her grave, Momik got a new grandfather." Unpacking this: "it was like this" -- do stories tend to start that way? It's a Yiddish-ism. "Buried in her grave"? Why not just "buried" or "died"? The point is that she got a grave, a grave that her family can visit and that actually contains her body, which is intact. "Got a new grandfather"? How do you usually get a new grandfather today? Through remarriage. Is that plausible here? What it really refers to (as the story later describes) is reunification; every afternoon at a fixed time there was a radio broadcast listing names of people looking for other people, and the kids -- who, unlike their parents, were learning Hebrew -- had to listen to this broadcast and tell their parents if any family members were mentioned. She went on, giving us a vivid picture of what it was like to live in Israel then. Fascinating and emotional.

Other texts included: "Written in Pencil in the Sealed Car" by Dan Pagis (allusions to Kayin and Hevel), "Yitzchak" by Amir Gilboa (the binding of Yitzchak), and "The Camp Inmate's Shirt" by Avnir Trainin (allusions to Yosef's special coat, which was striped according to the rabbis, not necessarily "of many colors" like in the musical). These are all poems. There was also another story excerpt.

shorter bits

I've been learning a lot and it's going to take a while to write it all up -- certainly not before I get home. So in the meantime, some shorter bits:

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