Here in the Yale bubble, two hours on a train and a world away from the real world concerns of New York, students are outraged. The Yankee Doodle — a dozen stools and one grill that served up pigs in a blanket — has been closed. Students mourned the closing. Some raised money to bail out the shop. Rick Beckwith, Doodle owner, campaigned against his former landlord — the copy shop next door — and asked the university for new digs. The old landlords reconsidered then re-reconsidered. The Yale equivalent of pundocracy weighed in on the weighty issue.

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Greetings from Jerusalem! The internet cafe next to the central bus station from which I write closes in half an hour, so indulge just one memory from this land of many memories

Thursday night I went to the Kotel, the Western Wall of the ancient Temple Compound. It is the the holiest place at which Jews can pray. Very nearby is the Al-Asqa mosque, which sits on what was the Holy of Holies in the Temple that the Romans destroyed many years ago. By custom, the Old City of Jerusalem is divided into an Arab quarter, a Jewish quarter, an Armenian quarter, and the Christian quarter, through which I walked on the way to the Kotel. I passed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, known to some Christians as the place of Jesus's burial. (Before I get many angry comments, remember the spot is disputed, as is the ownership of the church.) Next to the church is the Mosque of Omar. A religious Jew told me that Omar, an early Muslim holy man, asked to be taken to the Temple of Solomon and was taken to that Church. As this holy man visited, later Muslims built a Mosque there. I have no reason to disbelieve this story.

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You’ll forgive my recent absence. We’re in exam week and everything is due. Tomorrow’s economics exam is worth 100% of my grade, or feels like it. You who have taken exams know this phenomenon, of course. Professors on the street have started remarking that these are the days they are so glad they are done with school. Thanks, Professor. That’s helpful in these days.

Sometimes these are the days when everything comes into focus. The whole semester arrayed in front of you and you see them as coherent wholes, even interacting with one another, not discrete lectures and problem sets. Suddenly taking four religion classes in a semester pays off and you understand what it all means.

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Theology overheard while studying:

EE: Hey, {Computer Science roomate}! Guess what? {Mathematics roomate} is in a quantum state! He says he tends towards belief in God.

CS: That's interesting! {Mathematics roomate}, you're in a superposition between belief and disbelief. What are your normalization coefficients? Perhaps 1/root(2).

M: You guys are such nerds.

To be fair, my offhanded comment regarding Mariology started it. If my Game Theory professor reads this blog, he'll now understand why my problem sets are occasionally less than stellar.

Fiat Lux and Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale today host a discussion with Professor Anthony Kronman and Rabbi Jim Ponet about the Meaning of Life (which seems to need capitals, somehow).

There was some confusion as to what Meaning of Life would be discussed. As a friend put it, this is an undertaught and underdiscussed topic. But I am confused. Was I meant to do reading before hand? Should I have prepared questions? Do I take notes? If the meaning of life is a teachable topic, do I treat it's teaching like a class? I hope I pass!

The TV producers won’t deal with the writers’ guild, and the theater producers won’t deal with the stagehands, so both have struck. No TV, no Broadway. Let me be the first to ask: Does this mean we’ll have to talk to each other now?

As we slog through midterms, canceling club meetings left and right, it’s hard to remember why this whole college thing is better than what we want to do, whether we want to debate politics or to learn Judaism. At these times especially, I remind myself that this whole college thing is Judaism. Virgil’s Aeneid seems to me similar to the Bible; it always has, as EconoPundit kindly points out. But the point here is larger than reading Aeneas as a Moses-character.

Most traditions allow for some creative reading of the Bible, and Jews especially trade midrashim. For those of us whose families do not claim that the rabbinic interpretations are the only possible readings of the Bible, who think we can learn from Jewish tradition and from scholarly biblical criticism and from non-Jewish interpretations, it is hard to understand where we draw the line. And I am not sure we have to draw a line. Certainly, at some point we say that a book, if still worth reading, is less worth reading than others, but why shouldn’t we study Rousseau along with our Rashi? And if we don’t hold Rashi as binding (as most of us don’t, even if we should), then why shouldn’t we think both of them equally, and deeply, important? So remember: that test is Torah.

Dear New Jersey Transit worker #1:

I got off the train in Trenton, a place that I have never visited before and may never visit again, unsure of how long until my next train left or from where it left. You told me not to buy my ticket on the train, saving me money, and to take the bridge over the track, saving me time. I do not know your name and did not thank you. Thank you.

Dear New Jersey Transit worker #2:

After finally succeeding to buy a ticket from Trenton to Penn Station and getting $8 change in quarters and Susan B. Anthony dollars, I heard, “Penn Station, all aboard” from somewhere in the station. I dashed up the stairs and over the bridge that sent me, I thought, to the next train. I had turned and was about to go through doors marked EXIT when you shouted, “You don’t want go down those stairs!” I frantically asked where the train to New York was and you calmly but quickly pointed me down the right set of stairs, which I would not have found otherwise and down which I tore right away. I do not know your name and did not thank you. Thank you.

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USA Today announced the best teachers in America today. Full disclosure: my high school Latin teacher, Mr. Tylinski, was honorably mentioned. I know from observing him the hours upon hours these teachers commit to their students. The students, perhaps, are like parishoners a pastor dedicates his life to helping. Education may not be salvation, but I wonder whether religion or religious beliefs motivate teachers to work so hard for so little reward.

More on this later, but I am not sure that nothing succeeds like success. How many of us have known a teacher whose commitment to his own and his students' excellence has only infuriated his colleagues, students, and administrators? I imagine many of them disdain how high these saints set the bar of excellence. Of course, we often are those disdainers. How often do we applaud when others challenge us to be better people, especially when better people means dedicating our lives to helping others?

The Cubs lost. The Bears lost. I am still smiling, though, because two weeks ago, the Packers lost.

I love baseball, but there is something to be said about super-modern professional football as religious experience. One can understand religious rituals as celebrations of the power of the gathered, frenzied community, and not just any individual believer, or fan. F-16s flyover the opening kick and a hundred thousand fans scream in unison at every big hit and sing at every score.

We have written already at length about the inability of contemporary churches to reach many youth. Compare that to my extactic text message inbox immediately following the Bears triumph over their arch rivals:

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I just got my hands on the book that people are talking about up and down the East Coast: Education’s End. Written by former Dean of the Yale Law School Anthony Kronman, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life argues, so far as I understand, that the German research ideal – to add to knowledge at all costs – has led to great advances for humanity in the sciences and maybe even knowledge in the humanities, but no help for the thousands of college students who want to know how to live their lives. The most popular religious figures on today’s campus are the one’s most morally demanding and “reactionary”: the evangelical Christian Bible leaders and the Chabad rabbi.

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During Yom Kippur services, the Yale Jewish clergy stressed the theme of God’s ability to eliminate sin totally. Of course, Jewish tradition emphasizes that God only can do this for affronts to God; affronts to other people, you have to take care of with people, first. Moreover, the prayers admitting sin to God are always said in the plural; this allows everyone to admit sin without embarrassing himself, and also implies that we all pray on behalf of the congregation. But it also suggests the inevitability of sinning against God, especially when you don’t understand the Hebrew sins you’re confessing, especially when your homework before Yom Kippur was to read Augustine.

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The problem Liz outlines is, as David suggests , not limited to the Church. In reaction to over-reaching orthodoxy, everyone that used to offer normative claims – let’s call it “morality” for short – defers nowadays, instead playing guitar and trying to entertain. The problem is in other American religious communities, for sure, and also in schools, in colleges, in theaters. There’s much to be said here – and I hope to say more in the future – but let me just suggest that by failing to offer morals, even wrong morals, these institutions have failed their flocks. Before, if the Church told me something was wrong, it preserved the idea of wrong, even if it misapplied that idea. Now the very ideas of right and wrong, of good and evil, have withered away. Our moral muscles have atrophied from misuse, and no one trusts anyone, least of all herself, to evaluate anything. This is untenable and dangerous in ways I hope we can discuss.

During those years when I stayed for most of the (very long) High Holy Day liturgy, I’ve noticed the ebb and flow of people follow distinct trends. To be economical about it, certain parts of the liturgy are products demanded by the market more highly. I suppose people feel that these services are better investments, with higher payoffs. One is the Yizkor service, a short memorial service sentimentally connected for many with their loved ones who have passed. This part of the services brings out so many people that a tradition, in no way binding, has developed that children whose parents are alive should not be in the room; otherwise not everyone could fit.

The part of the service that everyone seems to love, though, is the blowing of the shofar, both on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. The liturgy suggests several reasons why we blow the shofar, a ram's horn in multiple sense of the word. “Wake up, God!” seems to be one reason. And yet why would blowing through a ram’s horn make God any more likely to listen to us sinful mortals?

On Rosh HaShanah, I stood on the men's side of a small congregation. We had reached the Shofar service (about an hour later than promised; people who had shown up just to hear the shofar found us in the middle of reading the Torah). Traditionally, the shofar is blown one hundred times. After every blast, a small child clinging to his mother imitated the blast. A long blast, a long shriek of delight from the toddler. A series of short toots, a series of short exclamations from this little boy. And if the sound of an innocent little boy happily shouting, held by his mother, isn’t reason enough for God to save us all for another year, I can’t imagine what is.

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“You, Lord, are truth.” Draped in a prayer shawl with four fringed corners, decked in full suit and tie, swaying back and forth per Jewish custom, I read those words aloud from the prayer book one week ago on the second day of Rosh Hashanah. They triggered a crisis of theology. What does it mean for God to be Truth?

Saint Augustine wept when he was elected Bishop of Hippo. He wanted to be a monk, so he could contemplate philosophy and God. Instead he had to administer a complex and difficult church. The religion of philosophy and the religion of going to services with your family differ.

So praying at college, especially during the High Holy Days, requires a little of multiple personalities – setting aside one personality, always questioning, always wondering, and accepting another. The liturgy helps with this: God is our Father, who will always take us back. Holidays, and especially Yom Kippur, allow me to re-examine my own life, my interaction with others, and not to worry about the nature of God, at least for another day.

In Manhattan on the Lower East Side someone has written on a brick building “rumspringa.” As I understand it, that’s the phrase for the period a young adult member of the Amish community goes through “running around” the world before coming back to the church. Yesterday, I heard a new phrase: “frumspringa.”

Frum is a Yiddish word meaning traditionally observant. Like many Yiddish words, we need and don’t have an English equivalent. You could see an ultra-orthodox Jew in Williamsburg in New York wearing a black coat and black hat in the Eastern European style on a summer day and say, “Wow, he’s pretty frum” just as you could find a devoted Democrat voting Republican in a local primary explaining, “I’m not such a frum democrat.” Will I refuse to eat in a non-kosher kitchen? “I’m not that frum.” Did she go to college and start reading the Bible everyday? In an American-izing of the phrase, she is “frumming out.”

So a frumspringa is exactly what we need, those of us who are in college, who are looking to be serious in our Judaism, who are approaching the Day of Judgment in a tradition without clear divine retribution for sin, who want to lead normal, adult, productive lives, who want meaning, who don’t know where we are going.

Around this time of year the Jewish liturgy is full of this line from Lamentations (5:21): “Take us back, O Lord, to Yourself/ And let us come back;/ Renew our days as of old!” Or maybe this isn’t just a Jewish impulse. As Augustine says in his Confessions, “Lord, make me chaste – but not yet.”

Newsweek and the Washington Post bring us “What Islam Really Says” about various issues. They, correctly, have asked various Muslim experts. After all, the inheritors of a faith tradition have a privileged relationship with that faith tradition’s meaning, as do scholars of it. Non-Muslims, including, I daresay, most of the publishing staff of Newsweek and the Washington Post, should provide a forum in which the necessarily Muslim debate about the meaning of Islam can take place.

One voice in the present debate belongs to Irshad Manji and her recent campaign Project Itjihad, “a charitable initiative to promote the spirit of Ijtihad, Islam’s own tradition of critical thinking, debate and dissent.” In calling for diversity and reform in Islamic thought, she necessarily addresses Muslims; she necessarily addresses non-Muslims in calling for human rights, including women’s rights, for all Muslims. When we ask, “What does Islam say?” we ask, “What interpretation of Islam on Islam’s terms is there that accords with core ‘Western’ beliefs?”

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I wrote several days ago about doing good. I wrote yesterday about President Kennedy’s inaugural asking people to do goo. He asks us citizens of the world to sacrifice in order to bring “a new rule of law, where the strong are just, the weak secure, and the peace preserved.” Kennedy asks also when we ought to do good.

History, I believe, marches, inevitably, towards its end – the World to Come, perhaps – and our actions either drive history’s arc closer to or farther from its, or God’s desired end.

With this as“All this will not be finished in the first 100 days, nor will it be finished in the first 1000 days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet, but let us begin.” Kennedy’s intuition is borrowed from Rabbi Tarphon: "The day is short, the work is great, the workmen are slothful, the reward is rich, and the Master is urgent.” He also said: "It is not incumbent on thee to complete the whole task, but thou art not at liberty therefore to neglect it entirely. . . faithful is the Master of thy work, who will pay thee the reward of thy work; and know also that the gift of the recompense of the righteous is for the world to come."

We forget, sometimes, what that means, and I don’t think a political lecture is here necessary, but I do think that people often forget how much they can affirm or deny the processes around them that may be good or bad. Every time you purchase an item, you vote. Every you take a job, you vote. And every day, here on earth, provides you a new opportunity to make sure that ours is truly God’s work.sumption I find great power in the speech.

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In teaching John F. Kennedy’s presidential inaugural address, I noted, for the first time, how the speech ends: “Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own.”

First, Kennedy intends to do God’s work – a constant trope of American rhetoric, and one that I hope will invite my readers to comment. Second, he appeals to history as the final judge of our deeds. One might often think the Final Judge to be Someone Else, but President Kennedy has collapsed whom Patrick Henry called: “a just God who presides over the destinies of nations” into the very destinies of nations themselves.

Why do God’s work? Why do good? The Jewish tradition, to my knowledge, says little about eternal punishment, more concerned with what goes in the land of the living than in the realm of those who have lived. Man is meant to do right, as I see it, for love of good and not for fear of heavenly displeasure. More about this tomorrow. For now, I invite comments.

I have come to a conclusion that you doubtless reached long ago: work is hard. And I’ve come to another conclusion: good work is not necessarily romantic, or large, or even particularly interesting. Good work is work that makes a good system work, so that the good can be in the most banal of activities – in my case, walking down Chapel Street in New Haven with green balloons.

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Recently I've been reading Building the Interfaith Youth Movement, a
series of essays and reports compiled by Eboo Patel and Patrice Brodeur. Patel,
whom I know and like very much, founded and runs something called the Interfaith
Youth Core, the theory of which he discusses in the book. His claims are very
insightful and, I think, quite right. In today's world, people by and large
have no choice but to interact with people of other backgrounds. With
interconnectedness given, cultural and religious institutions depend on their
members continually choosing to remain faithful to those institutions,
especially in America. Even the faithful, though, draw a strict line between
their interconnected lives and their lives of faith. At best, this division is
disingenuous. In times of communal and intercommunal crisis, this division
becomes dangerous. Patel's response is to create "spaces where people from
diverse religions come together and are intentional about matters of
religion."

Patel suggests using public service as transportation to these spaces. But the
final point is to define citizenship in the language that Americans have always
defined citizenship, since the Puritans: religious language. Now, however, we
don't have the luxury of orthodox explanation. We must be pluralist in our
citizenship. I wonder whether Patel is winning, and where these spaces are. Who
thinks about citizenship at all? I am interested to know the thoughts of everyone reading this weblog. Is there a common citizenship to which the faithful, especially the faithful youth, of America can appeal?

Yale graduates her students with the pomp of a Northern European, 15th century, Catholic university, in the circumstance of an American, 21st century, vaguely atheistic college and university.

Senior Week, an ecumenical Baccalaureate Service, festive Class Day exercises, traditional Graduation Exercises, and various Diploma Granting ceremonies: In some ways four years of college are preparation for the whole affair. Graduates smash clay pipes on the ground, symbolizing the end of the joys of youth, and they sing about the “Bright College Years” they will always remember. That last song, our alma mater, concludes with the famous aphorism “For God, For Country, and For Yale.”

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Yesterday, I attended a lecture given by Michael Chabon in the Harold Washington Library in downtown Chicago. The lecture was part of a series of events put on Nextbook, “public programs on Jewish literature, culture & ideas,” which derives its name from a Saul Bellow quote. Holding a copy of Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein in my hand (that’s a whole other entry) and in the beautiful winter gardens of this temple to books named after our late mayor, I was part of something: Chicagoan, Jewish, poetic.

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It’s officially spring. Heck, as far as I’m concerned, it’s officially summer. Evidence: 1) I don’t go to school anymore. 2) The amount I can think about baseball has leaped up about 10000% in the last two days. I have a long relationship with baseball.

This all comes to mind because some fellow American Jews have started the Israel Baseball League. Now, I had this idea years ago, but nobody cares, since I am not a top baseball executive, nor the former American Ambassador to Egypt and Israel (who, by the way, is a very bright, nice man).

To us, baseball in Israel is perfectly logical. Israel is a functioning democracy, but it is missing several things. One of them is baseball. The Israeli game should provide some fun and maybe a different way of looking at the world, one that isn’t the fast-paced culture of soccer or basketball, right? No! Because in the Israel Baseball League, not only are there only 45 games, and each only of seven innings, but if the game ends in a tie, the winner is decided by home run derby.

I am outraged.

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I was trying to figure out what about Liz’s http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/faithbook/2007/05/this_4286_catholic.htmlpost bothered me so, before I was subsumed by studying for finals.

With the macroeconomy safely behind me, at least for a little while, and a week of saying goodbye to friends before they leave the alternate universe known as college for a little while, I may be figuring it out what it is, even as I have totally forgotten, say, about counting the Omer, the Jewish tradition of marking the nights after Passover until the next major holiday. I’ve thought before that religion, or faith, or mine anyway, is about doing; it’s about repeating the same actions over and over the way they’ve been repeated over and over before. Or so I thought.

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So we’ve begun to hit final exams, which, in addition to explaining why I haven’t posted in a while, explains why I haven’t been, shall we say, acting out the rituals of my forebears in a while.

This is problematic for a host of reasons. To me, Judaism is, more than a faith in any particular tenet, a habit, a practice of praying three times a day, or once a year, or not eating pork, or upsetting cousins when eating pork, or whatever. It has seemed to me not only that this habitual nature of Judaism makes it accessible to all sorts of Jews, but also that it is particularly healthy to have habits in the first place.

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What does one do after tragedy? Classmates of mine were stopped on the street by a professor. He wanted to know whether students were changed by the shootings at Virginia Tech. “Not really,” they said. They said no more.

“Well, that’s a conversation stopper,” the professor said. But there was more. A friend of mine had been forwarded a prayer request, as his family’s neighbor was a student at Virginia Tech. Ten hours later, he found out she had been killed.

One sees signs, and hears mottos, such as “we’re all Hokies now.” And it’s true that we observed a moment of silence in our various clubs and societies for the victims of this attack. But the moment of silence ends. And those who, like my friend’s neighbors, lost a daughter may be left cold after the collective embrace of a nation is removed. It seems that without anything to do, we move on.

I asked the Professor whether he thought this would change the way the school operates. I am sure that committees will be called and meetings will be had and for a while we will think we are doing something, taking action, fixing the world. These are probably good. But maybe part of the faithful response, a response that I certainly won’t have, is to continue to hug.

There will be more articles and more news and more thoughts about more things, and if we’re all Hokies today, we won’t be tomorrow.

This week, Yale welcomes upwards of 1000 admitted students to campus in hopes of convincing them through a mixture of Dean’s talks and ad hoc alcoholic revelries. I had planned to write a letter arguing the reasons why I find these so-called Bulldog Days so disappointing. In light of the shootings at Virginia Tech, that discussion seems irrelevant.

I knew nothing of those attacks until today in Hebrew class when I walked in, late, to a class whispering in somber tones the Hebrew words for to kill, to die, to be injured, casualty, massacre. All day long internet news pages loaded and re-loaded seem to know nothing but how to count: 31 killed in Virginia shootings, 32, 33. At Passover, just passed, we sing, “Who knows one?” I know one, but who knows thirty three?

I find most interesting the adjectives used to describe this tragedy: senseless, insane, and beyond adjectives, the inevitable “Why?” And then, silence, only prayers. The students at Virginia Tech were sent an e-mail by school officials telling them to remain inside away from windows. What does one say during that period? There is nothing: concern, rumors, and silence. What we thought were central actions of learning: talking, questioning, reasoning, asking and answering “why” are reduced to the inactions, perhaps, of a different human experience: prayer, silence, asking and maybe answering, “how?” Reason is impossible, irrelevant.

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