Month: October 2024

At the urge of many friends, I watched a few episodes of the new Netflix show Nobody Wants This, which centers around the romantic relationship between a (male, presumably Reform) rabbi and a non-Jewish woman. This adds up to the fairly small corpus of film and TV works I’m familiar with that seek to highlight the lives of Jews in America: early Woody Allen (especially Annie Hall), some episodes of The Wonder Years, the Charlotte-Harry relationship in Sex and the City, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and, most recently, You’re So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah.

I watch these things in part to make up for a considerable gap in my Jewish experience. I was raised in a secular home by a secular mom and a dad with Orthodox religious background and studied quite a bit of Talmud and Jewish law in infancy with dad, in school, and at university. I’m studying Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union and I’m a rabbinical student. That’s not where the gap is: the more I encounter folks who grew up as American Jews (as opposed to Israeli Jews) the more I realize that an American Jewish upbringing is a subculture of its own, with a wealth of its own institutions, trappings, and tics: Jewish schools, shul programming, Jewish summer camps, Hebrew school, very particular ways of celebrating Bar or Bat Mitzvah, etc.

This, in itself, is not remarkable, and as I explained elsewhere, it is delightful to me that people look back at these experiences with nostalgia, as formative elements of their personhood. That’s great! And I’m sure it is owed, at least in part, to the prominence of Reform congregations. The US is a big country, and being Jewish will look and feel different in different places, to different people, but congregations that are welcoming to kids, that make outreach efforts, and that feel meaningful and cool are such a gift. It is because of these progressive denominations that the American Jewish kids I run into have experienced plenty of female and queer rabbis, connections between halakha and socio-political issues that are interesting to them, and other ways that make their Judaism relevant to their spiritual and moral development. In fact, I suspect that the marginalization of Reform Judaism in Israel, given the hegemony of the Orthodox rabbinate and its stranglehold on the government, is a big reason why so many Israelis feel completely alienated from their own spiritual culture.

Still, while watching Nobody Wants This I found myself puzzling over some of the depictions of U.S. Jewish culture. I didn’t get particularly hung up on the stereotyped and somewhat insulting depiction of Jewish women, though some folks understandably found offense there. Rather, I was somewhat surprised at two parallel things: first, the utter and complete ignorance of Judaism and Jewish culture by the non-Jewish characters in the show (who were apparently unfamiliar with the word “Shalom” and ignorant of the concept of Shabbat) and the stunning insularity of the Jewish cast of characters. Judy Berman, in her review for Time Magazine, comes close to this when writing that the show feels “short on insight into the realities of Jewish-gentile relationships in the 21st century”:

[That Noah’s environs pressure him not to date a gentile woman] is all believable enough within the context of Noah’s vocation. What feels less realistic, considering how cool and easygoing he’s supposed to be, is the homogeneity of his personal life. All of his friends seem to be Jewish couples . . . He and Sasha play on a recreational basketball team called the Matzah Ballers.

There’s a fine line between exploring Jewish identity and essentializing it, and Foster [the show’s creator, who converted – H.A.] sometimes crosses into dubious territory. Noah’s ruminations on theology and tradition can be lovely, and they feel true to his pensive character. But when Esther sends Sasha to the schvitz, where his dad spends all day every Sunday, to request a promotion at the family company, so that she can print his impressive new title on their daughter’s bat mitzvah announcement? It starts to seem as though nothing ever happens with Noah or his family that isn’t explicitly about being Jewish. Meanwhile, unlike just about any real person of her generation raised in a major metropolis, Joanne has never so much as heard the word shalom.

Perhaps Berman is right that this insularity makes sense (if barely) in the context of Noah’s vocation, and perhaps this is supposed to depict a very particular kind of Jewish community; maybe rich Jews in LA are as much of a representation of the overall U.S. Jewish experience as Cher and her friends in Clueless were a representation of the overall U.S. teen experience. Still, the insularity beggars belief. My professional and social environment has lots of U.S. Jews in it, raised on both coasts. These are all people who work and socialize with non-Jews, who participate in activities with non-Jews, who marry non-Jews and raise multifaith children in ecumenical homes.

True, some friends converted to Judaism before marrying Jews, and other friends married someone who converted in the context of their marriage. This is not my personal cup of tea for various reasons, and it would never occur to me to ask for something like this, but the folks I know who did it are happy with their choice. Good for them! None of them thinks it’s the one and only choice for Jews in the 21st century, and I know plenty of folks who made a different choice–including the composition of my own family. According to a 2020 Pew survey, 42% of all currently married Jewish respondents indicate they have a non-Jewish spouse. Among those who have gotten married since 2010, 61% are intermarried. True, intermarriage is very rare among Orthodox Jews, but Orthodox Jews are a mere 10% of the U.S. Jewish population. The idea of anti-miscegenation, or “marrying outside the faith”, is obviously part of Jewish history, but hey, Hebrew Union College now ordains reform rabbis who are in interfaith relationships. It’s been a change long in the making, and it reflects a realistic understanding that, given the statistics, to reject Jews who are married to non-Jews, not just as congregants but also as potential spiritual leaders, is to eject them, effectively, from communal Jewish life. HUC’s president Andrew Rehfeld explained that “a prohibition around Jewish exogamy … is no longer rational because intermarriages can result in engaged Jewish couples.” Still, I want to believe that this long-overdue wisdom doesn’t reflect merely utilitarian considerations, but also the more profound understanding that reaching deeply and intrusively into people’s loving relationships and intimate lives can be traumatic and destructive (see Ezra 10 for what I consider a particularly ugly, albeit perhaps historically understandable, example of such religious insularity).

If this were just about a show that depicts Jewish insularity in an archaic light (even if it’s wildly popular and overall well received) I wouldn’t bother. My concern, though, is in what this depiction of insularity says about possible growing trends in U.S. Judaism in the last year. You see, the many Jewish people around me who have, for many years, been at the forefront of progressive political goals, active in politics, in human rights, in equality work, in animal rights, and in environmental protection, participate in these efforts precisely because they don’t see the world through an insular lens. The young Jewish men who were murdered alongside Black men trying to register people to vote in Mississippi did it because, to them, blocking people from voting was not just a “Black issue”: it was a political issue that needed to concern everyone. For decades I’ve worked on issues involving correctional conditions and animal rights, not because there’s something particularly Jewish about these causes, but because I am a human being with a conscience who tries to live a moral life, and I care about everyone‘s wellbeing, not merely about the particular folks who share my demographic slice. I’m far from being alone in this.

Thing is, as more and more areas of intellectual, political, and artistic life in the U.S. shut down to Jews, and as people are stunned to wake up and see their friends, colleagues, mentees, and beneficiaries turn on them with horrific viciousness and stunning ignorance, many Jewish people are looking for new avenues for their world-improving energy. It’s not ridiculous to forecast that these efforts are going to be directed more inward from now on. Heck, I’m doing the same myself by looking to pivot professionally into Jewish spiritual leadership. Folks who discover that they have supremely shitty friends are going to look for better, more supportive friends, and where might those be found? in the Shul, in Jewish learning environment, in Jewish organizations and nonprofits. As The Godfather‘s Michael Corleone says to Kay when they reunite after he comes back from Sicily: “I’m working for my father now, Kay.”

My fear, therefore, is not that this Netflix show falsely depicts Judaism as insular (though it probably does). My fear is that the current climate will have life imitate art in the sense that more and more Jewish people will choose insularity–socially, professionally, politically–not to be exclusive or superior, but rather because, as individuals and as a people, we have to respond to this really, really difficult moment by reinventing ourselves.

Among the Dead Sea Scrolls is a short and puzzling one, referred to as 4QMMT–found in Cave 4 of Qumran, and titled Miqtzat Ma’asei Torah (“some deeds of the Torah.”) It was compiled from hundreds of tiny fragments found in six manuscripts. The text is very incomplete, but it seems to be addressed from the local sect (whose leader, the “righteous teacher,” is described in other scrolls, such as Pesher Habakuk) to a rival sect (whose leader is described elsewhere in the scrolls as the “wicked priest.”) There is animosity and sectarianism, with references of “we” and “you”. Early commentary on this scroll identified the authors as the Essenes, described in Josephus Flavius’ writings, but now there are other understandings of the scroll, which identify the authorship as Sedducean. The scroll reflects preoccupation with the calculation of the Jewish calendar and the holidays, particularly in the context of purity laws (which makes sense; remember, these folks liked to bathe a lot and kept lots of vessels for ritual dinners, which suggests preoccupation with issues of ritual purity.) The text we have is pretty sparse–only 121 rows have been assembled and deciphered–and most texts and translations I’ve seen online add words to enhance the readers’ understanding.

Which is where our story, which appears to be torn out of the pages of a Dan Brown thriller, begins.

When the scrolls were originally discovered, Qumran was under Jordanian authority. The Jordanian government entrusted the study and interpretation of the scrolls to a small cadre of archaeologists, historians, and theologians. When the area of Qumran passed into Israeli hands during the Six-Day War, the Israeli government kept to this arrangement. Alongside the massive national effort to procure the many scrolls that had been stolen or sold into private hands, the smallish group of scholars continued to hold somewhat of a monopoly over studying the scrolls. One of these scholars was Prof. Elisha Qimron of Ben Guryon University, who would win, many years later, the Israel Prize for Jewish Studies. Qimron was a relatively young scholar at the time, and partnered with Prof. John Strugnell of Harvard in working on the scroll (Strugnell would later blemish his own legacy through antisemitic slurs). He gave his first paper on 4QMMT in 1984, at the first Biblical Archaeology Society’s (BAS) annual meeting, but his work on deciphering the scroll took eleven years.

It’s hard to overestimate the amount of work invested in this grand project. Out of the hundreds of fragments, Qimron assembled 60-70 bigger fragments, and then pored over them to figure out the logic of the scroll. Because the text was so sparse, this took a while, and the versions you can find now in fascimile and annotated versions often add words that are not visible in the original fragments, but that help understand the context and reflect deep familiarity with the historical context of the scrolls in general and of the sectarian scene in particular. Toward the end of the project, in 1990, Qimron and Strugnall reached an agreement for publishing the text, translations, and scroll copies, with Oxford University Press

What happened next was wild. As Qimron (mostly) and Strugnell made headway with the scroll, they shared their work with some colleagues to obtain feedback and commentary. One of these folks was Hershel Shanks, a lawyer and one of the editors of the Biblical Archaeology Review. In November of 1991, before Qimron and Strugnell published their findings, and without obtaining their success, Shanks published a book on the scroll with BAS, edited by James Robinson and Robert Eisenman. The book includes photos of the fragments. The introduction to the volume, authored by Shanks, included an appendix: the Qimron cypher of 4QMMT – unsigned and unattributed. The book sold several hundred copies worldwide.

In January 1992, Qimron sued Shanks, Robinson, Eisenman, and BAS, for violating his copyright. The case found its way to the Israel Supreme Court, which you can read here (in Hebrew.) It brings up some fascinating questions of intellectual property and academic integrity that go to the heart of the concept of creativity.

While Shanks et al come off as, not to put too fine a point on it, loathsome plagiarists, they did not perceive themselves as such, and their argument that that the scroll scholarship’s playing field was rigged from the very beginning has some merit. As I mentioned above, both the Jordanian and the Israeli governments curtailed scholarly access to the scroll by allowing only a small group of scholars access to the original materials. Shanks saw himself as an activist for academic freedom and saw the publication of the BAS book as an important first step in expanding access to the scrolls beyond what he considered a “research cartel.” As someone who is studying the scrolls in 2024 with my fellow students at the GTU under James Nati’s terrific tutelage, I’d be the first to agree that our understanding of these mysterious texts really benefits from a plurality of perspective, especially when the surviving manuscripts are so fragmentary. But these noble intentions are somewhat marred by the main defense argument brought forth by Shanks & Co., namely, that Qimron’s work is nothing more than the work of a kid putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and thus not something that a modern scholar can hold intellectual property rights to.

The reason I find this claim so fascinating is that it echoes the questions of ownership, authority, and creativity that scholars are raising about the scrolls themselves. Among the scrolls found in the caves are multiple copies of several works of scripture. The Temple Scroll, for example, considerably overlaps with Deuteronomy (several versions of which are present in the Qumran corpus), and some modern scholars are challenging the notion that these are merely “copies” of some existing canonical version of Deuteronomy from that time. In the Temple Scroll, as opposed to the original text, the Deuteronomistic edicts are not pronounced from Moses’ mouth, but from God’s mouth (he’s the “I” of the text)–is this a fluke? A literary choice? A more fundamental statement that the scribe/author of the scroll is closer to the original intent of the laws than the mainstream folks who held a monopoly over the temple, presumably in the Moses tradition? Some of the most interesting Dead Sea controversies involve the question of the scribes’ creativity and originality. I find it striking that the same questions emerge in modern litigation with regard to the work of the people piecing together the scrolls.

Here’s how the Supreme Court tries to make sense of the intellectual property question (my translation – H.A.):

[The deciphered text has two components]. The first component is the physical, palpable “raw material”: the fragments of a scroll created about two thousand years ago and found in Qumran; the second component is what made the assorted fragments into a deciphered text through the physical assembly of the fragments, their ordering, deciphering the scripture upon them to the extent that deciphering was necessary, and completing the gaps between the fragments. In other words, the art of breathing life and soul into the fragments is what made them into a living, meaningful text. Indeed, the scroll fragments themselves are now in the public domain and belong to everyone in the sense that anyone who wishes to assemble and interpret them may do so. But the fact that the “building blocks,” the materials the creator used for his work, are in the public domain, is unrelated to the question whether the creator possesses intellectual property in his creation.

What, therefore, is the crux of the intellectual property question? Some cases espouse the view that creativity is the key factor, while others highlight the importance of expending effort, time, and/or talent on the part of the creator. Selecting and editing can be proper subjects of intellectual property, but because of their curatorial nature, courts look at the extent to which original contributions were part of the editorial process.

This issue of original contribution was at the heart of the defense’s argument. This sounds paradoxical and, to be fair, pretty callous, but it essentially goes like this: The fact that Qimron put a lot of philological and contextual firepower into his completion of the fragmentary text ironically undermines his own claim to originality. In other words, if Qimron now argues–by virtue of the careful philology and history he used to complete the text–that his version is the “true” text of 4QMMT, then what is his original contribution to the scroll? what he has produced is basically a printout of the text of the scroll, whatever work he did melts into the scroll, and nothing here is “owned” by Qimron himself.

Thankfully, the court rejected this argument. By examining the work Qimron had done on the scroll, the judges concluded:

The court below carefully examined Qimron’s work process, intending to examine the level of originality in the process, not merely because they thought that his time investment was sufficient to acquire intellectual property. This process, which ended in the assorted fragments becoming a whole text with content and meaning, included several layers of creation. . . in this case, the layers of the creative process are interwoven and connected, dependent upon each other and impacting each other. So, the deciphering of the writing impacts the ordering of the “islands” of fragments in a particular way; the ordering of the “islands”, in turn, impacts the possible meanings of the text, its structure, its content, and the ways in which one completes the gaps. One cannot separate these layers, and they should be seen as one creative work. Examining it as a whole creation exposes undeniable originality and creativity. Qimron’s work was not, thus, technical, mechanical, like simple manual labor whose results are preordained. His spirit, the soul he imbued in the scroll’s fragments, which turned the fragments into a living text, were not merely the investment of human resources, effort, and sweat. They were the fruit of a process in which Qimron used his literacy, his expertise, and his imagination, exercised judgment, and picked among several choices.

Again, this view of Qimron’s creative process corresponds nicely with some modern understandings of the creative process employed by the scroll scribes themselves, two thousand years before Qimron first laid eyes on the fragments. It’s easier to see the creativity in a scroll like Pesher Habakuk, which explicitly use the original biblical text and then expound with their own original interpretations and implications of the text, but even choosing to tell the Deuteronomy text through a fresh perspective is a creative intellectual choice. Whether or not Qimron’s ancient counterparts took pride in their scholarship–or even considered it scholarship–is one of the many mysteries we will never be able to unpack. But the Supreme Court’s decision that assembling and completing the text is creative work might well echo some of our thinking about the creative process behind authoring these texts in the first place.

Shanks & Co. brought up two additional arguments which, I think, the court rightly rejected. The first was that awarding Qimron intellectual property would be seen as upholding the monopoly he and a handful of selected others had on the text; the second was that publishing Qimron’s text without attribution reflects common academic customs. Everything we know and believe about how the academic process does and should unfold requires an unambiguous rebuttal of these arguments. The first argument, taken ad absurdum, would suggest that people should not be rewarded for doing good scholarly work, because the more authoritative their perspective, the less room there is for others to offer alternative perspectives. Where, then, is the incentive behind putting one’s expertise and talent into speculative work that is persuasive and authoritative? And don’t we all benefit from the fact that any work that refutes someone else’s solid effort must be solid as well?

Similarly, taking the second argument ad absurdum would deter people from widely circulating and sharing their work before publication. There are many good reasons for having other experts take a look at your stuff before you embarrass yourself in public (remember this? Wouldn’t you want to avoid such mortification?). When I think about a scholarship area I’m a little bit more familiar with–epidemiological innovation–the world lost precious lives because of labs keeping their findings and innovations close to their chest due to inflated egos and competition, and saved lives when universities and labs set aside their egos and collaborated. To ensure collaborative behavior, we have to mutually agree to give credit where credit’s due, rather than assume that rumors in the field do enough to respect each person’s contributions.

Finally, to get a sense of the work invested in bringing these manuscripts to life, be your own hero: try to read the original scrolls and see how much edited and interpreted editions add to (or detract from) your understandings of these mysterious, ancient texts.