During our recent family vacation we spent three hours in an outrigger canoe on Big River (and you can do the same). It was the morning after Thanksgiving. The river was glassy-smooth and a deep sense of calm descended on all three of us, to the point that even our boisterous boy piped down, listening to the gentle splash of oars in the water and the occasional birdsong.
Canoeing in a river will reduce distractions and slow down cognition to the point that one notices small things: a bid perched on an old tree, harbor seals sunning themselves on the river bank, slippery river otters slinking into the water, grebes diving for fish. I want to notice such things in my surroundings.
Back at the inn, I read Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media. I found them even more persuasive in 2024, when the online cacophony is crowding my brain and impairing my ability to think freely. It feels like all these corporations try to do is upset me or try to sell me something, or a combination of both, which dovetails nicely with Cory Doctorow’s excellent analysis of the enshittification of online platforms. I’m persuaded. Today I’m disengaging from all social media for the time being, and we’ll see how that impacts my quality of life, mental acuity, emotional availability, and priorities.
The plan is to replace this fake socialization with true socializing, one on one, with people I know and enjoy; invest effort in my neighborhood and local community; and spend some of it on solo pursuits like my fitness, music, and reading. And, of course, on my family, who deserve me at my best. I will continue to blog, and I wonder how being removed from the turmoil of social media will impact where my interests go or how this platform evolves.
On the heels of finishing the manuscript for my next book, Behind Ancient Bars, we’re taking a much-needed Thanksgiving break in Mendocino. The breathtaking vistas and calm atmosphere are an opportunity to rest, lift, swim, play, and read at a different pace, one I have missed lately while working and studying full time.
One thing I’m doing on this break, whenever some downtime is available, is reading. From an actual book, not from a screen. It is a sensation I have missed and longed for, and yet it feels unfamiliar and not as easy as it was in my childhood. A few times during my GTU journey we were encouraged by our professors–and rightly so–to print out the materials and read them on paper or to purchase the books in hardback or paperback. I’m sorry to say I didn’t always take them up on their invitation to engage with the text in a more tactile way, for a simple reason: I commute by bicycle and train and carrying a lot of books or printed paper with me is much more of a chore than carrying a MacBook Air. It’s true that reading from a screen opens the door to online distractions, and even though I use software that locks down the worst offenders, the temptation nags at me. Believe me, the irony of typing about this onscreen for people to read onscreen, and also the irony of teaching using an electronic casebook, have not escaped me, but the convenience can’t be beat–nor can the price, in the case of multiple hefty textbooks.
While here, though, I’ve started to read Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home, about the impact that digital reading and engagement has on our cognitive process. She focuses mostly on children, because they don’t have the analog background that us “olds” do, but honestly, after decades of working on a screen, I know exactly what she’s talking about. It feels like the synapses in my brain have changed to accommodate a completely new way of thinking, and I miss some aspects of my old cognitive ways. I’m finding the printed page challenging to engage with. My mental acuity, focus, and concentration are not what they were, and it’s probably not just aging–it’s aging while living digitally.
There are a bunch of things that remind me that I’m aging. Layers of superfluous stuff are being shed. Comfort in my own skin takes precedence. My faith in knowing The Truth (or that it can even be known, or held exclusively by one group or one side) has eroded, and I’m more comfortable asking questions and listening. Chronic conditions and issues start amassing, things that need attention. More and more precious people are gone, more lights are dimmed, and a lot of new stuff fades into irrelevance. Alongside these things comes an urgency to preserve and improve my mental acuity, and a big part of that is to learn to read again off a printed page, redevelop long-term concentration, and choose what and how I read intentionally and with care.
I’m especially enjoying reading new takes and angles on classic works that have accompanied my life. Being a big lover of Jane Austen, I Appreciated Ruth Wilson’s The Austen Remedy, and I now enjoy engaging with works that expand and challenge my view of the classics: Jo Baker’s Longbourn, which tells the Pride and Prejudice story from the perspective of the servants, and Claudia Gray’s mystery series featuring the second generation of some Austen characters. Along the same lines, I’m enjoying Percival Everett’s James, which retells the Huckleberry Finn story from the wry, witty, and compassionate perspective of Jim, the enslaved man who is so infantilized and ridiculed in the original. Same deal with Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which sheds a Dickensian light on some of the poor of this land (my new book engages with Bleak House and with Oliver Twist, so I have a new fondness for seeing how these perennial stories play out in different times and places). Charles Finch’s mystery novels are a delight to revisit. And I’m enjoying revisiting the flawed and complex heroes at the heart of Ann Cleves’ mystery novels: the Matthew Venn and Vera Stanhope series. I’m also enjoying reading about natural history–especially about trees and mushrooms–and about the impact of music, exercise, art, the outdoors, etc., on the human mind and body.
It was interesting to think about reading on page and off page when taking the Dead Sea Scrolls class. Most of my classmates, who are not native Hebrew speakers, challenged themselves–and did admirably–with the Hebrew text (with no nikud). To take on an equivalent challenge, I tried to read each scroll in the original, which is to say, from a digital imaging of the original papyrus. It’s still a screen, of course, but it made some of the experience palpable in the sense that it provoked the excitement of looking at words that another person wrote by hand. I want to invite that challenge, and that pleasure, back into my cognition this year.
I’m not sure yet how to balance this with the convenience (and ecological prudence) of reading things offscreen without printing them out. Perhaps I can resolve to read on paper whenever I read for pleasure or whenever a book is assigned (and will purchase the physical book, rather than its Kindle rendition).
In 2011 I swam a 10k race in the Applegate lake in Oregon. It was a four-lap race around a circular course of buoys that spanned a big chunk of the lake. Open water races with repeated laps are psychologically difficult–at least, for me–because, when you’re already exhausted, it’s really difficult to rally your spirits and override the morosity of “here we go AGAIN.” I remember finishing the third lap near what would eventually be the finish line–the wind had changed directions and intensified by then, and every stroke was a challenge–and thinking, “if I came out of the water now, who would know?” It was the sort of cognitive miasma that tends to hit, at least for me, at about 75% of the race–though sometimes it takes the form of what am I doing here? Why am I doing this? Normal people are just waking up for brunch. Who does this? Willingly? By the time the Oregon race rolled around, I was a fairly experienced open water swimmer (though new to marathons), and I already knew negative self-talk for what it was. When your brain starts vomiting garbage at you during an endurance race, if you know yourself well enough to expect it, you can identify the poisonous thought in your mind, like the Buddha greeting the demon Mara. I like to say to myself, “hello, Darkness, my old friend.” Usually it evaporates right away. Thing is, it would never occur to me–not in a million years–to actually exit the water after three laps of a four-lap race unless I was injured and intended to report as DNF right away. Not because I’m such a virtuous person–far from it–but because what would be the point? Didn’t I sign in to swim 10k? Why would I want to swim 7.5k and claim I swam 10k? what’s to be gained? And how would I look myself in the eye in the mirror later?
A couple of years later, a few of us were chatting over at the Marathon Swimmers Forum, and someone mentioned that he had overheard two (presumably) triathletes at the start line of that same race casually chatting about how they intended to only swim two or three laps, depending on how they felt like. We all found this very jarring, especially given how difficult it is to police open water races as it is. Everyone looks the same in the water with their race caps on, and no one is particularly invested in dogged surveillance of some particular dude, out of hundreds of others, getting out of the water a couple of laps earlier than he should.
This whole incident came back to mind when I read today’s article on Shvoong, an Israeli news source for everything endurance/adventure. Apparently, some guy ran the Ha-Yarkon Park Half Marathon wearing his own bib on his chest but keeping his friend’s bib in his pocket. Since this guy also happened to be very fast–he ran the race in 1:15–the ghost runner who “paced” him aroused suspicion, and the guy ended up confessing.
The interesting bit was that the story went viral in the online running community, and this guy actually replied to the post:
“Hi everyone, I’m commenting here because I think it’s about me. I ran with my chest bib according to the rules. In addition, there was an extra kit for a guy who could’t participate in my pocket. Out of my misunderstanding, I took the whole thing lightly, in perspective, without thinking too much about my ‘crime’. I learned this Friday from veterans in the running community that I wasn’t behaving with sportsmanlike ethics. I take full responsibility for my actions. I certainly learned from this and won’t do it again. I wish everyone quiet days.”
Later on, the same runner answered another commenter and expanded: “I’ll honestly say that, thanks to this incident, I learned a lot from veteran runners about the athletic unfairness, deeply, about what I’ve done… I tried to write something about my mistake/silliness/stupidity without hurting colleagues… I take full responsibility. I admit it was purely wanting to help a friend’s goal, who also did not understand the severity of the deed and I didn’t think it was such “deception” or immoral. The most important thing for me is that I learned from it and understood deeply the meaning of what I’d done. By the way, my results were disqualified as well and I’m glad justice was done.”
I find this absolutely fascinating, both as an athlete and as a criminologist. On one hand, true remorse is rare to find and difficult to identify, and if that’s what this is, then all’s well that ends well. On the other hand, how can a fairly fast runner–someone who finishes a half in 1:15 has (literally!) been around the block many times–fail to fully grasp the fundamental unfairness of what he’s done? Is it not plainly obvious that the concept of a race is that everyone competes under equal conditions? Have we not witnessed decades of quibbling over costumes, shoes, prosthetics, etc., in races to understand how important it is to keep athletic competitions fair? What’s there to misunderstand here?
The story sent me down a rabbit hole and I found out that marathon cheating is extremely common, to the point that a man named Derek Murphy has made it his life’s mission to catch the cheaters. The article expresses the same mystification I have with cheating; the only way to understand someone like Rosie Ruiz, the infamous Boston Marathon cheater, is to assume some form of individual clinical pathology. But the Ottawa Citizen ran a phenomenal in-depth story on marathon cheating, in which Jonathan Lasnier, a University of Ottawa sports psychologist, offers additional possibilities:
“Somebody can be task-oriented, and another can be ego-oriented,” he says. It’s the ego-oriented people who tend to be the cheaters. Rather than run the race for the sake of running it, “they will use other reference criteria to evaluate their competence,” says Lasnier. “They will focus more on the other people instead of themselves, and they will define success as superiority over others.”
Their mentality seems to be this: “when winning is everything, it is worth doing anything to win,” says Lasnier. But surely, not everyone who is motivated by ego and vanity is given to cheating? Surely there are some moral narcissists out there?
Lasnier says that it comes down to more personal factors. “I think it depends on your identity as an individual,” he says. A hypothetical: “Let’s say you’re an athlete and your identity is solely based on the fact that you are an athlete, and you want to perform and want to show competence toward others, because it’s the only thing in your life that’s supporting your identity. I think this can be dangerous, in a way.”
To Lasnier’s analysis I would add that the stakes of any given event are not the same for all people. Open water marathoners swim marathons because that’s what they do. But triathletes, like the two anonymous cheats that my friend overheard at the Applegate lake, probably register for open water races as prep for triathlons, which is the sport they really care about. They might have thought of the race as a nice opportunity to train for the swim leg and didn’t give a shit about the fact that the rest of us swam for time. Is it selfish? Sure. Does it reflect a common sort of solipsism, where you are only preoccupied with yourself and your goals and everyone else sort of fades into the background? Probably.
Similarly, someone who runs a marathon for time–for the sake of that very race–has a very different mentality than someone who runs it to qualify for another marathon (say, Boston). Indeed, one of the ways Derek Murphy catches Boston qualifier cheats is by comparing their qualifying time to the time they actually logged in Boston. This raises the inevitable question whether these people really believe that faking their results would produce an astonishing performance in Boston. To qualify for Boston, a woman my age (in the 50-54 age group) has to run a marathon in 3:50:00. In 2022, I ran the Oakland Marathon in about 5:15 (I’m slow and my knee caved in at mile 19). Wouldn’t it be weird if I qualified for Boston in less than four hours, only to run the actual race in more than five?
Still, if Lasnier is right, maybe the answer lies not so much in psychopathology but in sociology. I’m thinking specifically of Gresham Sykes and David Matza’s classic article Techniques of Neutralization (1958). Sykes and Matza wrote the article during a golden age of scholarly interest in juvenile delinquency, making a revolutionary (for its time) argument: juvenile delinquents do not have some warped sense of values and moralities that are opposed to ours. Indeed, they are on board with “our” (the supposedly law-abiding middle-class folks that Sykes and Matza envisioned as their audience) basic notions of justice and fairness. They therefore argued that “much delinquency is based on what is essentially an unrecognized extension of defenses to crimes, in the form of justifications for deviance that are seen as valid by the delinquent but not by the legal system or society at large.”
Sykes and Matza identify five such justifications: denial of responsibility (e.g., “it was an accident!”), denial of injury (e.g., “I just borrowed their car, what’s the big deal” or “they have insurance”), denial of the victim, (e.g., “that shop owner had it coming!” or “he had no business coming on to me at the pub”), condemnation of the condemners (e.g., “rich people steal all the time by evading taxes”), and appeals to higher loyalties (e.g., “I had to help my mom pay the bills.”)
The article itself is not based on empirical evidence, but rather on secondary observations of other people’s research, which are not without their flaws. Sykes and Matza do not consider, for example, the possibility that the interviewees might have actually held opposing values, but chose to explain what they had done in terms that they thought would appeal to their interviewers. And even though it is easy to see that these techniques of neutralization are framed in a way that does lend them persuasive purchase (after all, the question of damages, for example, is central to the disposition of tort cases, and the question of higher loyalties is fundamental to the necessity defense), it is not entirely clear why different people draw the line in different places on what seems to be persuasive. The Ha-Yarkon park runner, for example, relied on some of these: “I didn’t intend to” is a denial of responsibility; “I didn’t think anyone else was harmed” is a denial of injury and victim, and “I wanted to help a friend” is an appeal to higher loyalties. It doesn’t seem that folks bought his rationale, and his contrition does appear to reflect a sense of deeply buying into a set of norms that were, previously, extrinsic to him.
This is quite a sobering week to think about this stuff. First of all, it’s quaint to consider that, in 1958, a major innovation in criminology would have been to argue that delinquent teenagers are “just like us,” holding similar values and feeling guilt and shame, on a week in which the American people have voted for a man who still holds fast to the 1980s superpredator theory of juvenile delinquency (and who still openly and proudly espouses that the emblems of that flawed theory, the Central Park Five, who were exonerated by DNA evidence years ago, were guilty; they are suing him.) I have my own theories and opinions about the election, but the last thing we all need, I think, is more tiresome punditry about that, so I’ll keep it to myself. But in the spirt of “what is old is new again,” it’s interesting to consider that Sykes and Matza were writing against the grain of many delinquency scholars of their time in arguing that we share values in common even with people who appear to be doing things we all oppose, i.e., crime. Most people in the field at the time might as well have thought that folks of a different class and subculture lived on a different moral planet. I’d like to think, like Leonard Nemoy’s Spock in Star Trek, that there are always possibilities, and the coming years will provide ample opportunities to explore them.
This month I’m very lucky to be taking a demo class at Hebrew Union College with the awesome AJ Berkowitz, whose research focuses on Jewish life between the Alexander the Great conquests (ca. 332 BCE) and the rise of Islam (ca. 622 CE). The course, called The World of the Rabbis, examines rabbinical engagement with the surrounding cultures and narratives. Which is how I came across a wacky, offensive medieval book called Toledot Yeshu (“the chronicles of Jesus”).
Toledot Yeshu is a mockery of the gospels, and it’s an instructive exercise to compare it to, say, Matthew. It is by no means the first example of a counternarrative designed to offend and undermine people of a different faith; Prof. Berkowitz reminded us of Apion’s revisionist history of the Exodus, as an example. What stands out immediately is how Toledot Yeshu revisits Jesus’ parentage and birth story. This undermines a crucial aspect of the Gospels – the whole story revolves around Jesus’ divinity, the virgin birth, etc. Instead, Joseph–an affectionate stepfather who refrains from approaching Mary intimately once she becomes pregnant–is recast as a vile rapist by deceit, Mary is morally blemished, and Jesus is a bastard who is (properly, apparently) ostracized. The whole thing seems carefully calculated to be as offensive as possible to Christians.
Knowing that Toledot Yeshu is likely a medieval text is helpful in understanding how and why someone would go to such lengths to produce such an aggressive refutation of the heart of Christian doctrine. I think this business is best understood against the backdrop of medieval Christian antisemitism and the Christian/Jewish polemic. The oppression and persecution of Jews in medieval Europe focused on Christian readings of the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) as a prelude to the arrival of the new messiah, viewing Judaism as made obsolete by Christianity. Worse, Jews are cast in Matthew as Christ’s killers (my choir, and many others worldwide, include a historical note/disclaimer in the program when performing Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion for this very reason), the basis for various blood libel permutations. Confronted with daily hatred, discrimination, and violence, pre-modern Jews might have found the aggressive refutation of Christianity in Toledot Yeshu comforting, as it seeks to undermine the basis for their plight.
It’s worth noting, though, that there are more constructive examples of interreligious polemics in Jewish texts, my favorite of which is Yehuda Ha-Levi’s Sefer Ha-Kuzari. The book is structured as the imaginary journey of the king of the Kuzari people who, troubled by prophetic dreams, is looking for a new philosophy to live by. He talks to a Greek philosopher, an Edomite (= Christian), an Ishmaelite (=Muslim), and finally to “the friend,” who represents Judaism and is a proxy for Ha-Levi himself. Despite the fact that the work clearly posits Judaism as superior to all other philosophies, it is quite respectful to the other worldviews. Ha-Kuzari, as my hippy-dippy friends would probably phrase it, “vibrates from a much higher place” than Toledot Yeshu, and is an approach I want to believe that I would find considerably more appealing, but that’s easy to speculate, of course, from the standpoint of a 21st-century person with appreciation for free speech and the marketplace of ideas that would hardly be a factor in medieval Europe.
Thing is, the strategy of, not to put too fine a point on it, pissing on what is holiest to your adversary is still alive and well around us. One of the things I learned from my teacher and mentor Malcolm Feeley is that there is nothing new under the sun. Malcolm is a master of identifying thinking patterns and ideas across time and place, such as his masterful comparison between convict transports in the 17th century and electronic monitoring in the 21st. It is a mark of the many years I spent working with Malcolm and learning from him that I enjoy spotting these repetitive thinking patterns, and whenever I do, it makes me happy because it reminds me that I’m “Dumbledore’s man through and through.”
Anyway, it looks like some folks in current archaeological circles seem to vibrate from the same low place as Apion and the author of Toledot Yeshu. Archaeologist Brett Kaufman, whose work I’ve mentioned here before, has written a pretty depressing compendium of all the ways in which folks in his field who really should know better have been pretzeling themselves to deny Jewish indigeneity since October 7. It’s not just that the academic dishonesty and fabrication are shameful (though they are: archaeologists denying irrefutable material culture are making a mockery of their profession)–what I marvel at is the fact that people seem to feel that the current conflict and the massive suffering it is wreaking on all sides of the border should be resolved based on the kindergarten notion of “who was here first.” Nina Paley has expressed this grim ideology in this incredible animation:
Nina Paley, “This Land Is Mine”
[This wacky reasoning, in turn, reminds me of something I wrote about a long time ago: the way pro- and anti-same-sex marriage folks look for ideological support in biology. Every time a fruit fly is found to exhibit some sexual variation it’s weaponized as an argument for same-sex marriage; other evidence from the animal world is marshaled against it. Same story looking for sexual presentation in the animal kingdom. Why can’t the argument on behalf of same-sex marriage (which, by the way, CA voters will be invited to constitutionally affirm this week, and I hope you will, by voting “yes” on Prop 3) be made, simply, that we respect other people’s choices and lives, without getting into the question whether they are innate or predetermined? Why the preference for etiology over practicality? What difference does it make whether something is an “orientation” or a “lifestyle” if the people involved, in practice, on the ground, are happy and not hurting anybody else? But I digress.]
My frustration with the who-came-here-first answer to the current war is not just with the bad archaeologists who lie and twist. It’s also with the folks who have their history right but believe that ancient history should determine the conflict one way or the other. The idea that what seems right to you, or your birthright, or your God-given right, prevails over the realities on the ground, is terribly misguided. The situation right now is that there are multiple people with investment in, and claims to, the land, who must somehow learn to peacefully coexist if we don’t want the whole region to go up in smoke (it is already halfway there, to my great horror and sorrow).
This is what I would probably say to the Toledot Yeshu author: you can mock the virgin birth story all you like, defile your neighbors’ holiest figure, and draw some comfort from that as they defile your own history and heritage, but the endgame here is that everyone ends up filthy and disgraced. Or you can try to figure out a way to coexist with other people without hurting them or stepping all over them. The only question is who makes the choice to “vibrate from a higher place”, and how to make the benefits of putting an end to the besmirching outweigh the costs.
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.
I’m a month and a half out from the beginning of my HRT journey and it’s a good time to review my health and fitness scenario. Many reasons to despair of the world, but I’m trying to keep as upbeat as I can through it by pursuing sources of inspiration. One of these is David Chapman and Patricia Vertinsky’s fabulous book Venus with Biceps, which offers a 200-year history of muscular women and strongwomen and their exploits through art and photography. Another has been the marvelous Team USA Gymnastics; my family and I went to see the Gold Over America Tour last night and marvel at the feats of athleticism and grace.
My personal favorite in this astounding group is Brody Malone, whose miraculous comeback from a horrific knee injury in time to be a massive contributor to the MAG USA team’s heroic bronze medal was an incredible tour de force of spiritual fortitude, discipline and grit. I’ve had to come back from far smaller setbacks–shoulder tendon things, broken toes, and sprained ankles–the latter only four months before I ran the Oakland Marathon, and remember well how grueling that was, so I am filled with awe. There are a lot of other reasons why I admire this guy so much–in the current, aggressively polarized state of this nation, it’s no small thing for a guy from a small town in Georgia to spend formative college years at Stanford and handle the culture clash with such grace (Brody, if you’re reading this, I would love to meet you! You and your family are welcome in my home anytime, and also, we need to have a conversation about animal rights). But everyone else in this group is phenomenal as well, and we had a wonderful time reveling in the breathtaking routines and delightful choreography of the whole thing.
It’s to the credit of the new HRT regime, as well as some newfound room to breathe while on research leave, that I owe what seems to be an upswing in my fitness. I’m improving in the weight room in ways that surprise me–not only in adding weights and reps, but also in being humble sometimes and staying with the same weights until I see better form. My benching and squatting have improved and I’ve noticed that my deadlifting gets a huge boost from listening to cheesy encouraging music when I add plates. I’ve also thrown in some olympic weightlifting sets on occasion, inspired by the remarkable Olivia Reeves. Really grateful to coaches Karina Inkster and Zoe Peled for their no-BS advice and coaching in the weight room and in the kitchen.
Things are looking up in the swimming pool as well, and although I’m treating this as the beginning of a comeback, I’m not yet sure what I’m coming back to. Maybe other parents of young children manage to somehow weave marathon swimming and training into their day, but our rhythm at home will not come close to allow me to spend the kind of time in the pool that I did when I trained for Tampa, the Sea of Galilee, or even something shorter like the Thames Marathon. Technique takes one only so far, and for serious marathoning one has to swim big volumes, and those take time. So maybe I’m looking at racing only within the 6-to-10-mile range. I’m not sure yet.
There’s one thing I’m doing better than when I was racing, and that’s cross training. I was, and still largely am, a disciple of Terry Laughlin and Total Immersion, and a big part of that was swimming races and long sets with a very slight two-beat-kick. The idea was to keep the quads, which eat up a lot of oxygen, for later, but “later” never seemed to come, and I don’t think I ever learned to kick properly. The difference is that I used to spend all my workout time in the pool, whereas now I spend half of it at the gym. Putting in the effort to build leg muscles in the gym is paying off in the sense that I have muscles I can now recruit, and this is going to be what I rely on to bring my times in the pool back to where they were. I still have several months of work to shave some seconds and minutes off my time, but I’m already seeing some times that I wasn’t expecting, so this addition of a small and fast six-beat-kick is already paying off in the second half of each interval. I’m still benefitting a lot from the months I spent working with coach Celeste St. Pierre on this and from her sage advice on stroke refinement and on midlife in general.
To give you an idea of what things look like these days, here’s an overview of my week. I’m now doing some form of cardio and some form of strength almost every day, and the combination seems to work well. Things do change some from week to week, because pool and gym proximity can be an issue and OW is getting cold (I’m more of a wuss than I used to be). Thankfully, San Francisco has lots of fantastic stairways, and choosing a different one every week to do some repeats is fun.
Monday
Lower body lift
Swim (with pull drills, short intervals) or stairs, or hills
Tuesday
Upper body lift
Swim (with kick drills, short intervals)
Wednesday
Abs
Plyo + trampoline
Thursday
Lower body lift
Swim (more short axis)
Friday
Upper body lift
Krav Maga (sometimes also swim)
Saturday
Pilates + mobility
Swim (OW or short) or stairs
Sunday
mobility + foam rolling
leisurely morning walk
Typical weekly workout schedule, summer/fall 2024
Add to this the fact that I commute by e-bike, and I think it’s a pretty active week for someone who turns 50 in November and is just beginning to find a way out of the perimenopausal woods of woe. The key is to schedule this around research and family; I want to finish the biblical prison book in a few weeks, and I also want to be a present and energetic parent. The time expenditure is not trivial; we’re talking about 90 mins of physical activity not including the bike commute, so at least some of it has to happen before my kid wakes up and some of it while he’s in school. In general, this calls for more productivity and less dawdling in the library and in the classroom, and I find that the HRT bought me some mental clarity that helps with that.
As far as food goes, I try to hit 100g of protein a day, which requires some aggressive strategizing when it’s plant-based. I usually succeed if I start the day with 30-40 grams right out of the gate, which require some combination of tofu/tempeh, high protein vegan yogurt, and/or protein powder. The easiest thing to get this to happen is with a giant protein smoothie, full of fruit and greens; it’s not a culinary sensation, but it’s fast, simple, and effective. Being strategic about snacks (my go-to is a bag of lupini beans) helps a lot. My fiber goal (hovering around 40-50 grams) is much easier with plant-based diets, and I usually hit it without even making an effort. I take a multi that includes iron, zinc, and of course B12, and also creatine (usually in my morning smoothie). The next step will be to add some probiotics to the mix, as there seems to be research that supports the connection between a healthy gut and increased estrogen production.
The perimenopausal weight gain is not budging, but it’s been rearranging itself differently, and there even seem to be some glimmers of a physique that are really gratifying (the muscular women’s book is a real inspiration!). I’m avidly following marvelous Olympic rugby star Ilona Maher for some liberating inspiration and am enjoying her wisdom very much. My main goal is to get as strong as I can, to increasingly improve my quality of life, and to figure out the next steps in my swimming comeback. Honestly, the fact that the weepiness, constant periods, and nightly sweat lodge seem to be in the rearview mirror is a LOT, and just the fact that I have the energy to do all this makes me very happy.
One factor that seems to be outside my control is the resting scenario. Even with optimal conditions–pitch dark room, reasonable bedtime, ice-cold tart cherry juice before bed–and even with the HRT-induced improvement in my insomnia–it’s still difficult to sleep straight through the night. Grief and fear are very much in the picture, the news intrude into my nightmares, and even though I meditate at night and have a short and beautiful prayer routine upon awakening, there’s only so much I can do with world events and personal trauma against the backdrop of perimenopause. If this is what’s jamming the wheels of my journey, there’s precious little I can do about it that I’m not doing already, and as the Serenity Prayer reminds us, the wisdom to know what we can and cannot control is priceless.
There’s one more thing to add to this snapshot, and that seems to be that my new pastimes seem to be organized around themes of butchy resilience and competence. I started learning to play drums in February, in a really supportive group led by master teacher Brian Gorman, where the hilarious, no-nonsense Gen X energy feeds my soul. I’m in love with this! I’m also in love with my new krav maga class; the new realities of living in this environment have reminded me that knowing how to defend oneself is an important life skill. I don’t need robes, belts, or gurus–I just need to know how to beat the crap out of people if the need arises, and that’s exactly what they teach us at Tactica. It’s terrifying and exhilarating.
All of this reinvention may seem a bit odd, but remember that many life events have hastened it: the death of my beloved father and resulting changes in our family dynamics, the horrors of October 7, the ensuing war, and the resulting devastation of my professional environment, are all part of this. The older I get, the more I feel that what we do–jobs, hobbies, even relationships–is really not who we are. Very little, if anything, of what comprises my daily life is an inalienable part of my identity. The smaller the ego becomes, and the less is wrapped up in it, the better I feel, and these new things that are healthy and life-giving right now are no more a part of me than, say, flute playing or singing or meditation teaching were in the past. It’s just what feels right to do at the moment, and I can revisit as the seasons of my life continue to change.
This fall I have the great joy of auditing James Nati‘s excellent course on the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered in Qumran in the late 1940s and led to a huge quest to procure the corpus, which dispersed into a variety of hands in the following decades. One of the most successful quests to obtain the archaeological artifacts and bring them back, the scrolls have now been digitized, and we read the primary text and some commentary on it in class. To challenge myself, I try to read it out of the original papyrus, imagining myself touching and smelling the manuscripts.
It’s been particularly intriguing to read this stuff as someone who knows next to nothing about the cults at the time, but knows quite a bit about movements, sects, etc., in the 1960s and 1970s. When I studied Israelite/Jewish history in middle and high school, it was common to lump the Dead Sea folks together and refer to them as the Essenes (a term that comes from Josephus and Philo) and assume that they were a bunch of hippies in white robes who liked to bathe a lot. I’m finding out that newer historians and theologians now believe that the scrolls are not necessarily the work of one isolated sect, but rather of people who might have had considerable ties to the outside; the Community Rule includes some references to behavioral norms when outside of the compound. Also, the Yahad people, to whom the Community Rule refers, and the composers of the Damascus Document might have been two different groups.
Stuff like this makes me wish I could time-travel and see how that scene differed from what I saw when I looked at the cults and new movements of the 1960s with all their eccentricities and splintering. The idea that these folks would have to at least trade with the outside world makes a lot of sense to me, because they lived in the desert and would have had to procure food somehow, at the very least. Also, the idea that their splintering might be about personal ego clashes as much as about theological differences resonates with what I know about the 1960s. The eschatological stuff reminds me a lot of the narratives of various cultish sects even today, who assume that at some point all the wrongdoers will perish while the righteous folks will remain or be taken to the heavens. Do we have, as a species, some sort of cult blueprint that repeats itself in various groups?
A couple of decades ago I came across Isaac Bonewits’ tool for evaluating cults. I wish we had a good enough picture of the Yahad people and/or the Damascus Document people to apply the tool and figure out what was really happening there. The eschatological stuff reminds me a lot of the narratives of various cultish sects even today, who assume that at some point all the wrongdoers will perish while the righteous folks will remain or be taken to the heavens. Moreover, it certainly seems that a big part of the righteousness is about strict norms and regulations (e.g., what to do on the Sabbath, ritual and meal planning, hierarchy, personal and spiritual cleanliness) that far exceed those that presumably were practiced in mainstream society. One has to wonder: do we have, as a species, some sort of cult blueprint that repeats itself in various groups? Is there anything new under the sun?
One of the major assumptions of modern penologists is that prison, as an artifact of modernity, came to replace other forms of punishment: executions, maiming, etc. Overall, I think there are three main approaches that support this idea:
The legalistic approach
Some punishment scholars—primarily those who study incarceration from a formal, doctrinal perspective—rightly point out that the legal definition of prison differed greatly in antiquity and in modernity. The modern conceptualization of criminal punishment adheres to the Enlightenment-Era logics regarding the rule of law: laws forbidding undesirable behavior must be preemptively enacted, universal in their verbiage, fairly and impartially applied by an independent judicial entity, and prescribe the minimal amount of set punishment that satisfies retributive and/or utilitarian goals. Descriptions of incarceration in antiquity (and, in particular, in the bible) rarely, if ever, conform to this model: determination of guilt is not a necessary precursor to incarceration, and when it occurs, it does not necessarily reflect what modern doctrinalists would regard as a fair, impartial judicial trial. Sentences, if meted at all, are not necessarily determinate in length. The entry and exit points of ancient confinement facilities are not always well defined and, as we will see, often reflect erratic, casuistic decisionmaking by monarchs in the throes of whims and dreams.
If the argument dismissing incarceration in antiquity relies on legalistic comparisons, it is seriously undermined by the fact that the study of incarceration in modernity has long ago transcended such formal categories. For decades, scholars have been studying the function of legal institutions on the ground, unlimited by the rational or articulated goals of said institutions. The entire field of law and society is concerned with the gaps between “law in the books” and “law in action,” often identifying the ways in which the actual operations of institutions deviate from their legal definitions. More specifically, current scholarship about the modern carceral state applies to an entire body of institutions, facilities, and practices, of a dazzling variety of shapes and sizes, and encompassing multiple goals and functions. Adopting a limiting, legalistic project of studying incarceration would miss out on a wealth of scholarship about pretrial detention, immigration detention, bail, electronic monitoring, parole conditions, and postrelease supervision, as well as on illuminating comparisons between correctional facilities and other forms of extractive confinement, such as cattle towns and private sector surveillance.
In other words, save for when stating the obvious—that confinement systems looked different and served different purposes thousands of years ago—clinging to formalism is not particularly instructive when studying the incarceration experience.
The arc-of-enlightenment approach
By contrast to the legalistic approach, some sociological pioneers have examined penal changes over the longue durée, attributing the emergence of incarceration as the most salient form of punishment to large-scale social transformation. In his classic text The Division of Labor in Society, Emile Durkheim analyzes the shift from simple societies, in which collectivity is a function of sameness and conformity, to complex ones, based on diversification and socio-economic exchange. This shift manifests in numerous ways, one of which is the emblematic penal regime. In a later essay, titled The Two Laws of Penal Evolution, Durkheim observed that punishment would change as societies became more complex: laws designed to address transgressions through repression would shift toward restitution, and corporal punishment would shift toward incarceration. Durkheim, then, tied incarceration to social complexity, which he identified with modernity.
Setting aside the many critiques of Durkheim’s identification of “simple” and “complex” societies, which exceed the framework of this book, it is notable that prison symbolized, for him, a progressive step. Other sociologists were even more explicit in identifying prison with progress. In The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias advances the idea of a gradual reduction in interpersonal violence as a political and cultural shift. Post-medieval times, Elias argues, saw a top-down trickling of new standards regarding violence, sexual behavior, bodily functions, table manners, etc., from courtier society to lower societal strata, reflecting sublimation and self-restraint. The formation of this more rarified etiquette paralleled the emergence of the modern state. As monarchs amassed and consolidated power, Elias argues, they assumed a monopoly over legitimate physical violence, centralizing the infliction of punishment and eliminating violent forms of dispute resolution between individuals.
Elias’ observations are echoed in the work of other people who documented long-term trends in crime and punishment. V.A.C. Gattrell notes a decline in bloodthirstiness and delight at spectacles of public savagery in Early Modern England. Robert Nye documents the increasing regulations and limitations on, and eventually decline in and disappearance of, dueling as the modern state assumed a monopoly on punishment. And Pieter Spierenburg notes the gradual disappearance of more savage forms of punishment and the turn toward confinement. In The Spectacle of Suffering, Spierenburg painstakingly documents the gradual disappearance of public executions and the emergence of penal restraint. Importantly, these scholars, especially Spierenburg, shy away from praising these trends as an unqualified good, describing them in neutral language.
The neutrality seems appropriate, given a considerable flaw in Durkheim’s take on the evolution of punishment: the transition from repression to restitution is a premise that careful historical observation does not bear out, and even if plausible, it would not necessarily dovetail with a transition from corporal punishment to incarceration. As Leon Sheleff has observed, social complexity often generates repressive forms of punishment, and as Martin Killias’ careful study of dozens of historical and modern societies shows, a rise in incarceration often occurs alongside repressive efforts.
Moreover, the extent to which these works, which focus on the emergence of the Early Modern European state, can offer useful insights about punishment in antiquity, is very limited. Durkheim and Elias were inspired by dramatic social transformations that occurred in their time and place—the long industrialization process—and likely did not give much thought to their application to a completely different setting. If the emergence of centralized state power represses savagery and interpersonal violence, one might wonder what these big-picture sociologists and historians would make of ancient empires, including those reflecting great levels of sophistication and social complexity, such as ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, and Rome. It is hard to responsibly draw comparisons between these empires and the emergence of the European modern state, and even harder to speak of penological parallels, but there are indications that Fourth century Athenians, for example, believed that institutionally channeling anger through formal punishment was beneficial.
The body-to-soul approach
A more sinister take on the emergence of the prison in modernity is Michel Foucault’s influential Discipline and Punish. Foucault observes the emergence of “great confinements” in hospitals, military barracks, schools, and prisons, as a new form of governmentality. At the outset of the book, Foucault contrasts a scene of royally prescribed torture for a regicide, culminating in drawing and quartering the condemned, with a monotonous daily schedule for inmates at a juvenile facility. The shift from the former to the latter, Foucault argues, reflects a turn from centralized, dramatic displays of governing power focused on the body of the condemned to something much more pervasive: a vague but widespread web of institutions designed to produce changes in the soul through surveillance and supervision. As his central metaphor for the carceral, Foucault relies on Jeremy Bentham’s famous prison design: the panopticon. Housed in cells organized in a circle, facing a central tower, inmates have no way of knowing whether they are being watched, and thus begin to control and modify their own behavior to comply with the institutional standards, internalizing them.
Plenty of works about the emergence of the modern prison have adopted Foucault’s observations, finding evidence that control and fear increasingly shape behavior in societies with mass incarceration, identifying carceral features in many settings and areas of life beyond physical prisons, and focusing on the growing classification of people according to risk. There is also evidence that certain punishments, such as the death penalty, are increasingly regulated, medicalized, and removed from the public eye. But importantly, just like Durkheim and Elias, Foucault focuses on the transition from a European court society to the modern state, and the applicability of his framework for understanding antiquity is limited.
When Foucault identifies incarceration with modernity, he is describing a very particular form of incarceration: one that is highly regulated and operates on a massive scale, according to the government and administration principles of Weberian formal rationality. The basic premise of Foucault’s analysis does not discount the possibility that ancient societies might have had a very different sort of prison, one that exhibits some common features with the “gloomy festival of punishment” era.
Another challenge to Foucault’s observations, as well as those of the other two approaches, has to do with the classification of incarceration as categorically distinguishable from other forms of punishment, often referred to as corporal punishment. And I have to say, the more I think about the history of punishment over the longue durée, the more I realize that the boundary between incarceration and corporal punishment is false. Not only, as I’ve said many times before, is prison itself corporal punishment, but it often comes hand in hand with corporal mortifications of various kinds. People on death row, for example, are incarcerated. People put to hard labor are incarcerated. People awaiting deportation are incarcerated. People awaiting public humiliation are incarcerated.
In other words, incarceration and other forms of punishment do not have the sort of see-saw correlation that simplistic accounts of penology would have us believe. One does not necessarily rise when the other one falls. What throws us off is that the scale of incarceration in modernity is so immense that it dwarfs the other accompanying things. But that doesn’t mean that incarceration wasn’t always there.
Samson Captured by the Philistines
Today’s example of this is Samson, whom, as I’ve just realized, I haven’t yet discussed in the context of the book. The story of Samson’s capture, incarceration, and suicide, is told in Judges 16. If the Joseph/Daniel/Esther trio can be classified as exilic fantasy/folktale and Jeremiah as political thriller, Samson is definitely in the action/adventure category, and while we have plenty of evidence for the existence of the Philistines (though their ethnicity is debated, see here, here, and here), the Samson stories are superhero fiction. By contrast to other judges, characterized by their wisdom, righteousness, and/or military strategic acumen, Samson is, first and foremost, a man of astounding physical force. David Grossman’s terrific reimagining of the Samson story casts him as a man of contradictions: his blessing is his curse, he is a terrifying antagonist of the Philistines but is fatally attracted to Philistine women, and his desire for vulnerability and openness is his undoing.
What leads to Samson’s incarceration is his disclosure to Delilah that his physical prowess stems from his long hair. Once he falls asleep, she cuts his tresses, and begins to torture him. Interpreters differ in how they understand this torture: some believe she called someone else to cut Samson’s hair, and some believe that she started taunting him physically to test whether, indeed, his power has dissipated. Then she calls out that the Philistines are upon him, and they charge, and immediately inflict horrific torture: they gauge out Samson’s eyes. They then take him to Gaza, place him in “beit ha-asurim” (literally: the house of prisoners), where he is put to work at the grinding mill. Rabbi Steinzaltz explains that the grinder works in a circle, so Samson did not need his eyesight to engage in this labor: it was well fitted for his new disability. Radak posits that prisoners had to earn their keep and therefore ground the mill.
But Radak offers an additional, and more sinister, take on Samson’s forced labor: he sees “grinding” as a euphemism for sexual slavery. According to Radak, Samson, not to put too fine a point on it, was put to stud, to impregnate Philistine women (one wonders why: did they still believe that he possessed some special supernatural powers and was therefore a valuable progenitor?) Generally, this reading dovetails with what I saw in some medieval readings of Esther: really unsavory sexual undertones and a fleshing out of the power differential stuff, which suggests that these commentators might have read the Biblical material through the lens of medieval punitive savagery. Which is not to say, of course, that sexual slavery was not within the realm of the imaginable in antiquity (we have plenty of examples). What is interesting about the Samson story is the emasculation of Samson but the preservation of his manliness for the utility of his captors (I’ve read a couple of queer readings of the Samson story that make a lot out of this stuff.)
In any case, the Philistines hold a big party at their temple, and they bring in Samson to mock him in his weakness. Unbeknownst to them (and this is a truly genius literary device from the author of this tale, I think) Samson’s hair has begun to grow back while at the prison, and when he is brought to the temple, he asks the youth who minds him to place him between the columns of the temple. He begs for God to restore his power so that he can avenge one of his eyes, and calling out “Let me die with the Philistines!” he demolishes the temple, slaughtering more Philistines than he had killed in his life. This, by the way, is often a spectacular moment in operatic productions of Samson and Delilah.
Samson and Delilah production at the Metropolitan Opera
The Samson story is instructive in several important ways. First, it offers an example of incarceration that goes hand in hand with torture, humiliation, and forced labor. Second, it offers some notions of what would have been imaginable to those reading and interpreting what was surely a work of complete fiction in terms of the scope of carceral torture. And third, this story–not unlike the Jeremiah incarceration story–does a terrific job capturing the deep rage and desire for revenge by someone treated so cruelly by his captors.
One of the creepier, more Gothic stories in the Sherlock Holmes canon is The Adventure of the Creeping Man, in which Holmes and Watson are retained by the secretary of an academic, Professor Presbury, when the professor begins to behave in a peculiar and alarming manner. Recently engaged to a woman much younger than himself, the professor becomes irascible and menacing and his body language is altered: he climbs and creeps like a monkey, at some point climbing up to his daughter’s window. In addition, the professor is very secretive about packages he receives from Europe, and his own dog begins to attack him.
Skip this paragraph if you want to avoid spoilers (but I hope you won’t, because otherwise the rest of this post won’t make much sense): Holmes figures out that the professor’s behavior is cyclical–he seems to be taking some behavior-altering substance every nine days. It turns out that he sought suspicious rejuvenating treatments from a shady European practitioner (one in a long line of shady antagonists from the continent in the canon) in anticipation of his future nuptials to the young woman.
I’ve probably read this story dozens of times, alongside the rest of the canon, and like any person who has a decades-long loving relationship with an artistic or literary work, it hits me different each time. In her gorgeous book The Jane Austen Remedy, octogenarian author and literary scholar Ruth Wilson tells of her evolving understanding and relating to Austin’s novels, which she has been reading and rereading since 1947. I have the same sort of relationship with Arthur Conan Doyle. His works enrich and educate me, and sometimes piss me off, in ways that evolve throughout my life. I just recently rediscovered the terrific, chilling film adaptation of Lot no. 249 and my life hasn’t quite been the same since I saw it. But I digress–let’s get back to Professor Presbury and his mysterious medication.
Earlier in my life I found Presbury pitiful and creepy in equal measures, and as a modern reader, identified with the deep distaste that Presbury’s daughter Edith and his secretary, Bennett, have for the huge age gap between Presbury and his fiancée. It’s easy to mercilessly dismiss Presbury as a pathetic old man, desperately attempting the impossible: to bend evolution to his will using the Victorian version of Viagra so as to turn back the wheel of time. But when I started studying criminology and learned of the emergence of positivism, a lot of this stuff made more sense to me. As I have explained elsewhere, Doyle started writing the stories when Darwinism was already a sensation in England, and his enthusiasm about the marriage of science and crime is palpable in the stories. Shortly before Doyle began writing, Italian doctor and academic Cesare Lombroso published his book L’Uomo Delinquente, in which he argued that criminals were atavists, evolutionary aberrations, who could be identified by physical markers such as their measurements and facial features. If you visit Museo Lombroso in Turin, an experience I highly recommend, you’ll get more of a sense of the life and times of Lombroso, as well as of the sociopolitical underpinnings of his theory, and you’ll see his huge collections of skeletons, skulls, and death masks of criminals. You can also read David Horn’s fantastic book about Lombroso. This also explains why Holmes offers such aggressive censure of Presbury toward the end of the story, when all is revealed: “When one tries to rise above Nature one is liable to fall below it. The highest type of man may revert to the animal if he leaves the straight road of destiny.” To subvert the natural course of events by injecting one with the extract of monkey glands is to reverse the ape-to-human evolution. It is an aberration, it is recurrence to atavism, and it must not be attempted.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Professor Presbury lately because of my own physical predicament. Normally I have heaps of distaste for tiresome, self-centered Internet confessionals crafted to “raise awareness” to the suffering and misery of the author, so of course I ask your forgiveness in advance for burdening you with more of this annoying genre, but this is such an unspoken issue that it can benefit from some exposure. I’m in perimenopause and in the thick of an entire buffet of horrible symptoms. It is difficult to describe the bad feeling to anyone who is not experiencing it. Everything you’ve read about–the brain fog, the weight gain, the irritability, the heart palpitations, the sudden drop in aerobic capacity, the frequent and unpredictable periods, the hot flashes and night sweats–is true, of course, but underlying it all is a deep, unrelenting feeling of malaise beyond definition, that makes one want to crawl out of one’s own skin and flee far, far away. I’ve tried to remind myself that this could also be a product of my grief over my father and the appalling antisemitic climate I experienced this year, but the physical suffering cannot be denied and it is immense. I’m not a crybaby, I’ve swum marathons in frigid water without complaint, but perimenopause has truly brought me to my knees, and shortly before my 50th birthday I found myself asking my doctor for HRT.
Hormone replacement therapy takes a different form for each woman. In my case, it involves 12 days a month of progesterone, taken orally in enormous capsules, and estrogen patches that are supposed to be waterproof but don’t fare 100% well if one swims a strenuous workout. Anyway, we’re a month in, and the sense of relief is palpable. I feel alive. I have my life back. My period was short and predictable. No more sweating, no more weeping, mental clarity is back, and my lifting and swimming have both improved.
I’m mentioning this because I sense there is still some stigma attached to taking hormones. For one thing, it presents one with one’s Professor Presbury-ness: I’m now older, I miss being younger, I’m pathetically trying to bring back my juice by taking hormones my body no longer reliably produces. It’s embarrassing and humbling and, oddly, has brought about a wave of sympathy for Presbury (and for another pathetic and scary heroine of a book I read in childhood, She by Henry Rider Haggard.) I get it now. I get no longer recognizing your vessel and longing for the sense of vitality you’d taken for granted. Watching (and being enthralled by) the Olympics certainly drove the point home. I am captivated and inspired by the athletes and their stories. Like so many people worldwide, I was swept into the drama, joy, camaraderie, and astonishing performance of the USA Men’s Artistic Gymnastics team and their heroic capturing of the bronze medal. I could daydream about performing astonishing feats of strength, endurance, and agility on the international stage, but I’m not an insanely talented kid in his or her early twenties who spent hours at the gym every day of their life; instead, I’m a middle-aged family woman and where I am in life is a lot more reminiscent of the athletes’ parents, shown cheering for them in the audience. But the joy on the faces accomplishing their incredible athletic goals made me also crave the sense of feeling strong, capable, confident in my body, the way I felt a decade ago when I was swimming open water marathons. HRT has brought this sensation back. I feel at peace inside my vessel. It is much easier to be an Instrument of God’s Peace, as per the Prayer of St. Francis, when your body works in predictable and satisfying ways.
There’s also the health stuff: many women are still terrified of HRT because of misleading science, which made many friends of mine who are now in their sixties miss out on a medically provable, low-risk solution to abject physical misery. If you follow only one link in this blog post, make sure it’s this superb, science-based NYT exposé of how women have been cheated out of this important remedy (you’ve read thousands of screeds about misogyny in medicine, so insert one here). Risks of cancer with HRT are associated only with start of use after one turns 60. Start using hormones before you’re 60, and the benefits often outweigh the risks.
Finally, there’s this notion that we must accept what is happening naturally and resort to herbal remedies and meditation. HRT, we are warned, will not do the trick if we are too lazy to eat well, exercise, and reduce stress. I find this message patronizing and insulting, not only to me, but to many women in the same condition. I eat extremely healthy, plant-based, and maximize lean protein and fiber beyond what doctors and coaches prescribe active people. I work out approximately 90 minutes a day, combining strength and cardio, I lift heavy, I do plyo, I do intervals and sprints in the pool, I do pilates and abs and conditioning, I stretch, and I commute by bicycle. “Reducing stress” as a prescription for women with kids and aging parents and mounting responsibilities at work and elsewhere is a risible proposition, but I’m a meditation teacher, I do engage in contemplative practices and know how to do it. Why try to sell me on black cohosh and St. John’s Wort rather than on the hormones my body has produced naturally for decades–estrogen and progesterone–and give women who resort to the latter the sense that they have somehow failed to take proper control of their health? I’ve spoken to several friends who have started taking HRT. It’s not an openly talked about issue, which, lemme tell ya, is a damn shame, because there is a wealth of information in these stories. For one thing, the hormonal dosage and delivery method do require attention and, frequently, tweaking along the way. But every single woman I talked to has raved about the vast improvement to her quality of life taking hormones. Why not take them? Do some investigating, talk to your doctor, and take your life back. Feeling comfortable in your own skin is your birthright.
Oh, and please read Stacy Sims’ excellent book Next Level, which is a phenomenal primer on menopause and perimenopause physiology for active women, accompanied by superb action items and recommendations, or take her fantastic menopause online course. This is happening in your body right now. You’re living it. You’re not in the waiting room, holding out for something better. This is your one and only body, your one and only precious life. I’m rooting for you to improve it, to seize it by the horns. Kind of like Professor Presbury tried to do, but science-based and practical. Not on the sly, not in the shadows. In the open, so that we can all talk about this and make the best medical decisions for ourselves.
