The Wronging of Alan Turing: Sex, Shame, and the Complexity of a Human Being

Cross-posted to State of Formation.

Are you reading this on a computer? Then thank the guy on the left. The English mathematician Alan Turing, who would have turned 100 this June 23, is widely regarded as one of the pioneers of modern computer science. As Jack Copeland writes:

Turing conceived the principle of the modern computer. He described an abstract digital computing machine consisting of a limitless memory and a scanner that moves back and forth through the memory, symbol by symbol, reading what it finds and writing further symbols…The actions of the scanner are dictated by a program of instructions that is stored in the memory in the form of symbols. This is Turing's stored-program concept, and implicit in it is the possibility of the machine operating on and modifying its own program.

Turing was also a pioneer in artificial intelligence: the “Turing Test, in which an artificial intelligence would be judged intelligent if another human could not tell the difference between the responses of a human and the artificially intelligent machine,” remains the ideal toward which AI continues to strive. Additionally, Turing’s work in cryptography played a critical role in the Allied victory in World War II. He developed codebreaking machines and algorithms, which revealed the positions of Nazi Germany’s U-Boats and detailed Hitler’s communications with his generals. Copeland suggests that the contributions of Turing and his team may have shortened the war by two to four years, which translates, by his calculations, into 14 to 21 million lives saved.
For his outsized contributions to the war effort and for revolutionizing the shape of modern sciences, economies, and societies, you might expect Turing to have been lauded as a national hero. Instead, in 1952 Turing was convicted of “gross indecency” after reporting a petty burglary that a male lover of his participated in—homosexuality being illegal at the time. He was offered a choice between imprisonment, and chemical castration through injections of a synthetic estrogen. He chose the latter. In 1954, he died of cyanide poisoning; an event many suspect was a suicide—though Copeland contends that the evidence for this is scant. In 2009 then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an official apology for the government's treatment of Turing.
What does all this have to do with Jewish ethics? As it turns out, plenty. We can read Turing’s ordeal at the hands of British indecency law as a modern example of what the Talmud calls “verbal wronging.” Commenting on Mishnah Bava Metzia 4:10, which states, “Just as there is [fraud by] overreaching in buying and selling, so there is wrong done by words,” b. Bava Metzia 58b records the following discussion:

R. Johanan said on the authority of R. Simeon b. Yohai: Verbal wrong is more heinous than monetary wrong…R. Eleazar said: The one affects his person, the other [only] his money.  R. Samuel b. Nahmani said: For [monetary wronging] restoration is possible, but not for [verbal wronging.]
A tanna recited before R. Nahman b. Isaac: He who publicly shames his neighbor is as though he had shed blood. Whereupon he remarked to him, “You say well, for I have seen it [as a result of such shaming], the ruddiness departing and paleness supervening.”[1]

This passage does a couple of interesting things. First, and most obviously, it understands a form of unquantifiable, non-material damage as greater than material wrong—precisely for the reason of its unquantifiability. If I know exactly how much someone has lost due to a wrong, I stand a chance of being able to make it up to them; and if I know a person has lost something material, I know that there is a tangible means by which I might be able to make restitution. To use Abraham Joshua Heschel’s language, monetary wrong is a wrong done in space, and a change to a space at least stands a chance of being undone. Verbal wronging, on the other hand, is a wrong done in time.[2] Once someone has seen or heard something, I cannot (short of erasing their memory in some way, which would likely involve grievous physical harm) make them unsee or unhear it, because I cannot erase the moment in time in which the perception took place.
Second, it recognizes that not only a person’s psyche, but their social self as well, is integral to their being. Furthermore, these aspects of the self are just as vulnerable to real injury as the physical aspect—the text goes so far as to explicitly compare, in somatic, visual terms, the result of shaming to that of physically drawing blood. In doing so, the text recognizes that a person is complex and interconnected, irreducible to a single feature, and vulnerable in many different ways.
If Turing did in fact commit suicide as a result of his ordeal, this would be a case where verbal wronging quite literally resulted in bloodshed. It would also not be the only case in which bloodshed has literally resulted from verbal wronging—one need only look at the recent rash of queer teen suicides in response to anti-gay bullying. Even if Turing did not commit suicide, however, his case and others like it stand as testimony to the pettiness of such shaming, and to the tangible damage it can do.
Consider that Turing’s sexuality harmed no one. Consider that his sexuality was exposed in the process of his actually performing a civic duty—reporting an actual crime. For this he was rewarded with a prosecution that besmirched his name and wasted public time and money, as well as his own. In the end he was offered a choice a choice between two significant injuries: the loss of his freedom and career, or the loss of his sexuality. I would suggest we consider the number of lives he saved and his contributions to a discipline without which all our lives would be radically different, but the truth is, what was done to Turing would have been just as wrong had it been done to anyone else.
There is one sense, however, in which comparing the pettiness of Turing’s shaming to the vast weight of his accomplishments serves to highlight an especially sinister feature of verbal wronging:  it makes a person’s life entirely about the ways in which they differ from a prescribed standard.  The whole person—their accomplishments, their interests, their loves, their sense of self—become inconsequential. They are reduced to a single act or characteristic that has been marked as worthy of derision, and in this way they are marked as other, and dehumanized. This is true of the all-too-common phenomenon of slut-shaming, which I discussed in a previous article. It is true of the anti-gay bullying which continues to drive too many youth to suicide, it is true of Turing’s treatment, and it is true of countless other cases in which we publicly shame people over actions or characteristics which have no bearing on our own lives (but which may be immensely and legitimately important to the victim of that shame). And it stands in direct contrast to the broad and complex vision of humanity suggested by our Talmudic text.
This photograph, of a sculpture of Turing at Bletchley Park, England, was taken by Jon Callas. It was retrieved from Wikimedia Commons and is used in accordance with a Creative Commons 2.0 license.

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[1] Soncino Translation.
[2] See A.J. Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1951, 1979)

"Rules By Which They Could Not Live:" My Bat Mitzvah Drash

Cross-posted to State of Formation.

The parshah I’ve worked on for my Bat Mitzvah is, given my graduate research, apt—and not entirely accidental. My research deals with sexual ethics—and queer sexuality in particular— in Judaism. And as you follow along in your Chumashim, you will notice that parshat K’doshim-Acharei Mot contains perhaps two of the most controversial verses in the Hebrew Bible: Leviticus 18:22—“you will not lie with a man as with the lyings of a woman”—and Leviticus 20:13—“If one lies with mankind as one lies with womankind, they have both committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death.”
In my research, naturally, I have had to deal with these verses, and with possible mitigating interpretations of them. I can tell you the following—first, many such interpretations exist. Second, all of them, to my mind, are some degree of unsatisfying.  There is always the feeling that these interpretations are trying to turn the text into something that it is not. They always, to my mind, fail to erase the stark punch to the gut these verses in their plain sense are to a reader.

At this point, I’d like you to imagine me, at twelve, just starting to realize that I like girls, reading Leviticus for the first time.  And then I would like you to imagine, after that experience, how you, as a twelve-year-old, would respond to the suggestion that you commit to a faith that holds this text as sacred. These verses are alienating. No matter how we try to turn them, they are disturbing. And if you are queer, like me—no matter the interpretation, no matter the academic distance you may try to put between yourself and your subject—ultimately, they still hurt. Any effective and honest response to them, therefore, must begin by acknowledging that.

Futhermore, such a response should, in my opinion, not attempt to retroactively paint the past meanings of the text as something it is not. We have, as a species, a strong tendency to confuse is and ought. That is, we assume that because a thing is the status quo—because it’s “natural,” or “traditional,” or so on—that it is therefore ethically valid. Or, conversely, we might assume that, because we find a thing ethically valid, that it therefore must reflect the natural or original state of affairs.
But these assumptions are erroneous. Just because a thing is “natural” or “traditional” doesn’t make it right—after all, murder, sexual violence, tribalism, and racism are all natural states of affairs. And just because a thing is right doesn’t mean it reflects some primordial state of perfection—racial and sexual equality, for instance (despite assertions to the contrary), appear to be fairly recent concepts.

Effective advocacy for equality or justice, then, needs to start from the understanding that there is a problem to be fixed—that there is something in the world that is wrong and broken. I would suggest that in some cases, the same is true for effective engagement with religious text. David Weiss Halivni posits that Rabbinic interpretation is generated in response to what he describes as the “maculateness” of the Biblical text—that is, the text, as a result of existing within human history, has problems or inconsistencies within it whose function is to generate interpretive responses. He writes, “When the people of Israel congregated once more—at long last and of their own accord—they found not Moses and the pure and perfect Torah of the wilderness, but Ezra and his composite Torah, mad maculate by centuries of human history.” (Peshat and Derash, vi.)
I’d like to go one step further—the text has actively unethical commands in it, whose purpose is to teach us to recognize them. These texts are meant to reflect and demonstrate the brokenness of the world, and goad us into doing something about it.

I would add at this point that we do not have a very good track record when it comes to responding to such texts. Indeed, a look into the prophetic literature reveals that God anticipates this. In Ezekiel 20:25-26 we find the chilling admission: “I gave them laws that were not good and rules by which they could not live: When they set aside every first issue of the womb, I defiled them by their very gifts”—that is, instead of consecrating the firstborn to the temple they sacrificed them—“that I might render them desolate, that they might know I am Adonai.”

God, in other words, knew that the Israelites would get the commandment tragically, horrifically wrong—and handed it down anyway. Suffice it to note, by the way, that while theodicy (that is, the justification of God in the face of suffering or evil) is not the main focus of this drash, the fact that God would take such action, at such terrible consequence, anticipating our brokenness and fallibility, raises deeply troubling questions about the very nature of God.

Despite our poor record thus far, there nevertheless are Rabbinic precedents for this sort of interpretation. Perhaps the best-known example is found in the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin 68b-72a. This sugya engages the Biblical edict (Deut. 21:18-21) that “if a man has a [stubborn and rebellious] son…they shall bring him out to the elders of his town at the public place of his community…[and] the men of his town shall stone him to death.”

Clearly, the Rabbinic interpreters are deeply troubled by this text. First the mishnah (Sanh. 8:1-5) and then the Gemara restrict the definition of the stubborn and rebellious son to the point of absurdity, until the Gemara finally says, “There never has been a stubborn and rebellious son, and never will be. Why, then, was the law written? That you may study it and receive reward.” (71a)

Notice what this interpretation doesn’t do. It doesn’t say that the law used to apply but no longer does. It doesn’t try to excuse it, or to erase it. It brings it forward in all its bald horror, allows it to punch us in the gut, and then goes about making sure that it will never be carried out. Yet in doing so, it preserves a purpose for the law—it is there to learn from. It is there as a witness, as a thing to study—and we should bear in mind that in Talmudic parlance, there is a very real sense of fighting and struggle implicit in study and learning. (For more on this, see Jeffrey Rubenstein’s excellent book, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud.)

There are clearly some differences between the Exodus and Sanhedrin texts, and the ones we have in front of us. Against the assertion that “there never was such a son,” there have been, and continue to be, many, many LGBTQ people who have been hurt, directly or indirectly, as a result of the texts we’ll be chanting shortly. And I’d argue vociferously against the notion that there is personal reward to be gained from learning these texts—we should instead be hanging our heads in shame. But as for why the law was written? “That you may study it” may be the only interpretation I can accept.

In studying this text, I am confronted with a world that is so broken that even the Scriptures given to it, even the laws contained within those Scriptures, contain ethical abominations, contain violent and dehumanizing prescriptions. I am also powerfully confronted with an obligation to help fix it. I am reminded that this law was written, not so that I may “study and receive reward,” but to force me to think critically about it, to stir me and make me uncomfortable, to punch me in the gut so that I may “study and DO SOMETHING.” Shabbat Shalom.

This image is used under a Creative Commons 3.0 license and was retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.

Rise up, Sotah: Contraception, Religion, and Slut-Shaming

Cross-posted to State of Formation.

I have a truly shocking announcement: I am a woman, and I enjoy sex.

Apparently, admitting to this makes me a slut.

I am not, of course, unusual. For many of us, sex is fun. For many of us—cis-women[1] who sleep with cis-men, thereby risking pregnancy, included[2]—sex is a thing that brings joy to life and contributes to its being worth living. One of the great things about the technological age is that we have a range of medicines and devices that make it possible to have a fulfilling sex life while significantly reducing the risk of an unplanned pregnancy. By all measurable standards of human flourishing, this is awesome. And yet, society has a problem with us saying this out loud.

According to “Finally, a Feminism 101 Blog,” slut-shaming is “the idea of shaming and/or attacking a woman or a girl for being sexual, having one or more sexual partners, acknowledging sexual feelings, and/or acting on sexual feelings. Furthermore, it’s “about the implication that if a woman has sex that traditional society disapproves of, she should feel guilty and inferior” (Alon Levy, Slut Shaming).”

If it please the court, I’d like to present (only the latest) exhibit A:

"What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic] who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex -- what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex."

As we are likely all well aware by this point, Rush Limbaugh directed the above screed at Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke, who testified before a congressional committee in support of the Obama administration’s contraception coverage mandate. Never mind that Limbaugh’s statement betrays a gross misunderstanding of how hormonal birth control actually works. (For those who are curious, you have to take it every day, regardless of how much sex you are or are not having.)

Never mind that much of Fluke’s testimony was directed towards the use of hormonal birth control for non-contraceptive purposes, or that it never mentioned her own sex life, or even whether she personally uses hormonal birth control, once. It was enough that a woman unapologetically acknowledged that birth control was a real need in women’s lives.

However, much as Limbaugh might prefer to think otherwise, this article is not about him. Rather, his comments were an especially egregious representation of a larger cultural trend—a trend, unfortunately, which has significant roots in religious traditions.  One of the stranger and more disturbing episodes in the Hebrew Bible describes a test as to whether a woman suspected of adultery is guilty:

"After he has made the woman stand before the Lord, the priest shall bare the woman’s head and place upon her hands the meal offering of remembrance, which is a meal offering of jealousy. And in the priest’s hands shall be the water of bitterness that induces the spell…Once he has made her drink the water—if she has defiled herself by breaking faith with her husband, the spell-inducing water shall enter into her to bring on bitterness, so that her belly shall distend and her thigh shall sag; and the woman shall become a curse upon her people. (Numbers 5:16-27, JPS)"

The point here is that unrestrained female sexuality represents a threat to the social structure: in this case, a material threat, since it made establishing a child’s paternity difficult. The best way that structure could restrain it was to place not just legal sanctions but social stigma on the suspected adulteress, or sotah. The ritual was meant to physically mark her; her body itself became a kind of scarlet letter that told everyone who saw her: this is a slut.

The ritual sounds arcane and anachronistic, but don’t we take women’s bodies and how they appear as physical markers of their supposed sexual virtue? Tight or low-cut clothing, or even physical features women may not have any control over—large breasts or buttocks, for instance—we assume that these markers aren’t for the women themselves, but for us, to signal their sexual status.

Similarly, the admission that a woman uses birth control, and especially the acknowledgement by a woman that yes, sex is an important part of her life, isn’t assumed to be about her own needs and desires, but about broadcasting her sexual availability to the rest of us. And that is assumed to be shameful.

Why is this a problem? For one thing, a culture that shames an open conversation about women’s sexuality is a culture that is going to make it more difficult for women to get the reproductive healthcare that they need—especially women with limited resources, or women who might be in urgent or dangerous situations.

For another, the assumption that women’s sexual choices aren’t for them but for our collective benefit leads to a horrifying degree of victim-blaming in cases of rape and sexual assault. Slate’s Emily Bazelon notes that this even manifests itself in rape law:

"Rape law also still treats certain kinds of sexual conduct as unacceptable for women, by exempting it from the rule that places a woman’s sexual history outside the bounds of evidence that can be admitted at a rape trial…In many cases, it’s deviance that’s deemed to make a woman’s history distinctive, allowing the court to give the jury the chance to conclude that a particular’s woman’s claim of rape is less legitimate."

This has to stop. And because religious traditions have helped build this structure, religious voices have a moral responsibility to be a part of what stops it. Can we step up? In subsequent posts I’ll explore resources within my own tradition that I think can be useful for doing so. But I hope dearly I won’t be spitting into the wind.

Do our traditions contain the resources to build a truly feminist, inclusive, sex-positive sexual ethic? I hope so. I think so, and I want to believe so, but I am honestly not sure. Are there texts and rituals within our traditions that contain theological and philosophical grounds upon which such an ethic can be based? Yes, there are. Do our traditions furnish us with methods of interpretation and practice that can help us emphasize those parts and confront and repair destructive ones? Absolutely. Is there the human will—the intellectual bravery and moral conviction—to use those methods? I cannot answer that question. I can be one part of the answer, but the rest is up to everyone else.

Original artwork, "Scarlet Letters," by author.

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[1] A cisgender person is someone whose gender identity, as understood within their culture, matches their phenotype and sex chromosomes. Contrast with a transgender person, whose gender identity in some way does not match their phenotype and/or sex chromosomes. A transsexual person is someone who has undergone some degree of medical gender reassignment—hormone therapy, gender reassignment surgery, etc.—to bring their physically expressed sex characteristics in line with their gender identity. Not all transgender people are transsexual. For a fuller treatment of Trans 101, see the Sylvia Rivera Law Project’s helpful rundown. [2] It is absolutely not my intention to erase transpeople who have not yet undergone gender reassignment surgery or have chosen not to and who might therefore also run the risk of impregnating someone or of becoming pregnant; rather, this post is about a social phenomenon that overwhelmingly applies to people who can become pregnant and are perceived as female. Transphobia—in general, and with specific regard to sexuality and to religion—is a huge issue of its own, and something I hope to address in future articles with the depth and attention it deserves.

The Times We Shouldn’t Defend Our Traditions

(Cross-posted to State of Formation.)

“Philosophers,” says Martha Nussbaum, “don’t write like prophets….they have to believe, I think, that at least a part of evil is not innate or necessary, that at least a good part of it is based on error, whether societal or personal.” For prophets, on the other hand, “the urgency and magnitude of the evils they see admit of no delay, no calm and patient dialogue…Suppose Jeremiah had said, ‘the heart of Israel is corrupt utterly, but on the other hand there are some very nice people there.’” (Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice, 1999, 240-1)

Nussbaum’s own inclinations and ultimate sympathies lie with the philosopher—and most of the time, mine do, too. Often, I firmly believe that attributing a problem or an evil to an entire religion, or religion as a whole, is not only inaccurate and unhelpful, but actively destructive. I often jump into the fray to point out concrete examples of principles and themes of a tradition, or groups or individual practitioners within a faith—mine or any other—that I truly believe are at work for the good. I truly believe that religion is not a monolith, and that it can do, and has done, great work in the service of humanity and of our universe. And I truly, deeply believe that the God I serve is good.

Yet both Nussbaum and I—precisely because of “the philosopher’s interest in the nuances of individual cases” (Nussbaum, 1999, 241)—are sometimes compelled to admit that the prophet has a point. Sometimes, stating the nuance and the capacity for good in a tradition that has hurt people is deeply inappropriate. Sometimes, devotion to the underlying goodness of a tradition and to its prerogative to practice as it sees fit comes at great cost to the lives of real people.

This past week, Rolling Stone published a heartbreaking article, "One Town's War On Gay Teens," detailing the toll of anti-gay bullying in Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin school district. In 1994, according to the article, the conservative, evangelical group Minnesota Family Council (MFC) pushed the Anoka-Hennepin school board into adopting a districtwide policy, “which pronounced that within the health curriculum, ‘homosexuality not be taught/addressed as a normal, valid lifestyle.’” While the language was specific to the health curriculum, the policy practically erased discussion of homosexuality “in any context.”

When queer students—or even students who were perceived as such—complained to teachers and administrators of anti-gay bullying, they received no relevant support, and the homophobic smears continued unabated. The policy may have been quiet, but its toll is now known nationwide. Since 1999, nine students, many of whom were queer or taunted as such, committed suicide, most famously 15-year old Justin Aaberg in July of 2010.

In many of the progressive circles I frequent, both online and in real life, variations on a theme of the same angry, horrified response to the Rolling Stone article came up: Is this truly what “Christian love” looks like? Is it true that people like the MFC can’t be made to see the grave harm they’ve caused? And the conclusion often was: no, these people knew exactly what they were doing. To make the non-conformers this desperate was precisely the point.

And as much as I want to believe otherwise, I find myself agreeing with this conclusion. According to the article, MFC activist Barb Anderson blames “pro-gay groups for the tragedies”:

She explained that such "child corruption" agencies allow "quote-unquote gay kids" to wrongly feel legitimized. "And then these kids are locked into a lifestyle with their choices limited, and many times this can be disastrous to them as they get into the behavior which leads to disease and death," Anderson said. She added that if LGBT kids weren't encouraged to come out of the closet in the first place, they wouldn't be in a position to be bullied. (emphasis mine.)

And Nussbaum notes with astonishment that Roger Scrunton argued—in 1995!—that “schools ought to teach revulsion toward homosexuality, on the grounds that the perpetuation of this revulsion is ‘a human good.’” (Nussbaum 1999, 192) I will pause for that statement to fully sink in. If one truly believes that, well, what are a few suicides?

It is, in a way, ironic that one of the go-to Scriptures for anti-gay activists is the story, in Genesis 18 and 19, of Sodom and Gommorah. Because according to many (to my mind, convincing) interpretations, the sexual sins of those cities of the plain were not homosexuality, but gang rape—sex used in the service not of pleasure, but of terror employed to enforce submission and conformity. Rabbi Steven Greenberg writes:

While the event that sealed the fate of the Sodomites was their demand for Lot to bring out his guests so that the mob might “know” them, this was still not seen so much as sexual excess as hatred of the stranger and exploitation of the weak…[in Sodom] no difference was tolerated. (Greenberg, Wrestling With God and Men, 2004, 65-6)

The invocation of sexualized violence to assert dominance and enforce conformity should ring familiar. For make no mistake—the bullying that drove people like Justin Aaberg to suicide, both from his classmates and, more sinisterly, from the supposedly moral, responsible adults of the MFC is nothing other than psychological and spiritual gang rape. Its purpose was none other than to strip people like Justin of all individuality, of all self-respect, of all autonomy, to break him until he shaped up—or disappeared.

So when I encountered these generalizing statements about Christianity, or religion, or despairing for the humanity of those pushing anti-gay policies, my first response was to jump in and correct the generalizations. I then decided against it. Because in the wake of such tragedies—in the wake of the real threat of harm, or of actual, already perpetrated harm—someone for whom it is most important to jump to the defense of an institution rather than to demand justice for the people that institution has hurt is, forgive me, someone who has their priorities deeply screwed up.

Our traditions and our faith communities are important to us, as they should be.  But we cannot let them become ends in themselves.  Abraham was right to argue that, for the sake of ten righteous, the city should be spared; truly, there are far more than ten righteous in the cities that are our traditions. Yet when violent crimes occur in our cities, our first response should not be to say, “we’re not all like that!” Our first response should be to root out the perpetrators, and to seek justice for the victims.

Image: John Martin, The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (1852). This image has passed into the public domain and is used courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Obligation to Vaccinate: "Health Freedom" and communal responsibility

Cross-posted to State of Formation

While visiting my hometown over winter break, I stopped by the local natural foods store. As I waited at the cash register, I noticed a poster on the wall.  Above a stock photo of a (white) mother blissfully cradling a newborn read the caption, “Oppose Mandatory Vaccination.” Two thoughts came to mind. First, “I will no longer spend money here.” Second, “What beliefs and fears is this poster trying to exploit?” With the language of “mandatory,” the ad clearly speaks to a fear of loosing the individual freedom to make choices about health. But is freedom really the best framework to use in this scenario? Or was the ad a demonstration of how individual freedom is a poor premise on which to base discussions of public health?
The anti-vaccine movement, in its contemporary iteration, began in 1998 when the British doctor Andrew Wakefield published a paper in the medical journal The Lancet, positing a link between the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. Subsequent studies failed to corroborate Wakefield’s claims; indeed, evidence strongly suggesting that Wakefield’s work was not only incorrect, but actively fraudulent, has since come to light. None of this has stopped the vaccine-autism claim (which grew from a specific focus on the MMR vaccine to equally inaccurate claims about mercury-based preservatives and about “too many vaccines too soon” overwhelming the immune system) from sweeping the public consciousness in a big way, aided most notably by figures such as David Kirby, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Jenny McCarthy.
Tragically, the spread of this claim has had consequences: Measles, which in the mid 1990s was on the verge of eradication in the United Kingdom, has returned to endemic levels. This past year saw the largest U.S outbreak of measles in 15 years. And in Charlottesville, VA, where I live, there was a measles outbreak centered around the local Waldorf school this May.
In addition to the fact that the claims on which the entire movement is based are incorrect, and that the drop in vaccination rates precipitated by the movement is likely responsible for actually killing people, there are several other troubling premises behind it: can we, for instance, pause to note the breathtaking ableism of the assertion that risking a child’s death from infectious disease is preferable to risking autism? Equally troubling is the callous disregard of scientific consensus in favor of conspiracy theory, as well as the “Appeal to Nature” fallacy. (I would suggest that those who oppose vaccination because it does not confer “natural” immunity cease, in the name of intellectual consistency, any use of corrective lenses, contraceptives, refrigerators, computers, and so forth.)
I am most interested in here, however, in vaccine refusal as a “right.” I think this language has a particularly strong pull within religious communities. Certainly the idea of being forced to take actions contrary to one’s strongly held beliefs is anathema to many people of faith, particularly those who belong to minority traditions. And the language of “health freedom” often used in arguments for vaccine refusal echoes that of “religious freedom”—after all, if what we do with our souls is a matter of the most personal choice, surely this is also true for our bodies? Don’t we have the right to make whatever healthcare decisions we wish, however ill-advised, for ourselves and our families?
Not quite.  Not all bodily decisions are created equal. As the rise in measles rates indicate, the decision not to vaccinate has consequences for more people than those who make that decision. Indeed, as Steven L. Weinreib, M.D, pointed out in a recent New York Times op-ed, high vaccination rates are an essential bulwark against infectious disease for those who, because they are too young, have certain allergies, or are immuno-compromised, cannot be vaccinated:

Young babies, the immuno-compromised and people who get chemotherapy are not able to process most vaccinations. Live vaccines in particular, like those for measles and chickenpox, can make us sick. But if 75 percent to 95 percent of the population around us is vaccinated for a particular disease, the rest are protected through what is called herd immunity. In other words, your measles vaccine protects me against the measles.

Weinreib’s point demonstrates that the language of individual rights is insufficient when considering the ethics of vaccination and similar public health issues. Instead of thinking, “It’s my right to refuse a vaccination for myself or my child if I want to,” we should be thinking, “It’s my responsibility to vaccinate myself and my child for the health of the whole community.”
In Health Care and the Ethics of Encounter: A Jewish Discussion of Social Justice, Laurie Zoloth argues precisely this point:

At issue here is not what feels right to the individual, guided by an individual heart, but ‘What does it take to live an honest life within this particular community?’ Hence, a number of actions may be argued for, but all ought to be directed toward the community interest, not only the self. (Zoloth, 1999, 158)

Furthermore, Zoloth argues, the Jewish tradition provides a framework for such community-centered ethics: “Autonomy…is neither a presupposition nor a goal of Judaism…[a person is not] ‘entitled’ to act in complete freedom; he or she is required to act in community, in covenant with God, and in accordance with halakhah.” (Zoloth, 158)
One source for the primacy of communal obligation is the book of Ruth (in which Naomi’s family flees a famine-stricken Bethlehem for Moab, and is afterwards stricken with the deaths of all its male members), from which she derives several principles of an “ethics of encounter.” The first of these is particularly salient here: “To leave the community at a time of scarcity/danger is wrong. There is no personal escape from collective scarcity:”

Why does disaster fall upon this family? Who is [Naomi’s husband] Elimelech? The rabbinic response is that he must have been a man of substance, who abandoned Bethlehem at the first sign of trouble…Elimelech is the prudent libertarian. [He] chooses his individual solution, leaves the land and the community, and disaster strikes. Rather than turn his face to the face of the other, he turns away and heads in the opposite direction. (Zoloth, 204)

If we replace “scarcity” with “risk” in Zoloth’s formulation, we find it applies perfectly to the issue of vaccines and herd immunity. It’s true that vaccines are not without risk. A small minority of people do react badly, and there is the occasional fatality (at rates, it should be noted, that are miniscule compared to the toll of infectious disease). To vaccinate is to take a risk, albeit a very small one, for the sake of a greater personal and communal good. With vaccination rates as high as they are in the developed world, any given person can go unvaccinated and will likely remain quite safe; this is also what protects those who cannot be vaccinated or for whom vaccine-conferred immunity does not take. But too many defections, and the herd immunity that newborns, immune-compromised individuals, individuals for whom the vaccine did not work, and those who voluntarily refuse vaccination depend on will collapse. Those who refuse vaccination based upon a claim of individual autonomy thus behave exactly like Elimelech in this story—fleeing the community at the first sign of risk, and disclaiming their membership therein.
That the eradication of infectious disease depends upon a community upholding its responsibility to protect its citizens cannot be overstated. Precisely because of the nature of infectious disease, it is impossible to protect oneself by withdrawing from the community. Unless you can figure out how to stop breathing air, stop drinking water, stop eating food, and stop engaging in any physical contact with anything else, you will come in contact with vectors for infectious disease as a consequence of existing. This is a risk we share as a community; its amelioration is a responsibility we similarly share as a community. The vaccine issue is an object lesson as to the validity of Zoloth’s argument for the value of an ethic based on communal obligation in issues of health.
This public domain image is a work of the Federal Government and appears courtesy of Wikimedia.

Building Hedges: What the Rabbis Taught Me About Managing ADHD

(Cross-posted to State of Formation)

The [Great Assembly] originated three maxims: "Be not hasty in judgment; Bring up many disciples; and, build a hedge for the Torah."

-Pirkei Avot 1:1

End-of-year report, first grade:

“Rebecca has the ability to be an outstanding student. She has a tremendous amount of knowledge and is eager to learn. Although she has wonderful ideas, she has produced very little work that would give evidence of this. Her inability to attend to the task at hand and to complete her work has caused her great frustration this year.”


By fourth grade, I have learned to perform reasonably well in school. But my work is disorganized, and I’ve picked up the nickname “Hurricane Rebecca,” reflecting the disaster area that is my desk. 


By the time I’ve reached high school, I’ve learned to game the system. Despite my disorganization and last-minute work habits, the work is easy enough for me that I build up an eminently respectable academic record, and manage to graduate in three years.

I enter college with designs on a biology major, but first-year bio and chem classes prove my undoing; the pass-fail option is my salvation. Religious studies is interesting enough to me that I put serious work into it. But I still start papers at 3 am the day they’re due. I worry that someone will discover that I’m not working hard enough, and as I get more seriously into the subject, the stakes get higher. Somehow, I graduate with high honors. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time until I get caught.


In my second year of grad school—last fall—I meet with my advisor for my independent reading. He tells me to shut the door. “This is not graduate-level writing,” he says. “You’re in graduate school, and you need to get serious.” He pauses. “How many hours a day do you work?”


The jig is up. 


I tell him that I’ve suspected for a while that something’s wrong with me, but that I can’t afford to see a therapist regularly right now. 


“Then sell your books and see one. Your brain is your most important tool. If you were a dancer you wouldn’t make excuses about not taking care of your feet.” He continues, “I wouldn’t be telling you this if I didn’t think you were smart enough to do this. It’s clear that you are. But you’ve got to decide to undertake the discipline necessary. What we do in the academy is a discipline. It’s unnatural. You have to train yourself to do it.”


That February, after spending two months not writing the thesis I need to have a draft of by April first, I finally get my butt to a therapist. I get an official diagnosis of inattentive-type ADHD, and begin a course of Adderall.


The first night I take it, I read and annotate two books in three hours. What’s more, I haven’t wasted energy stalling, so I actually enjoy it. By the end of March, I have a complete draft of my thesis. This semester, ten months later, I haven’t pulled a single all-nighter, because my work gets done on schedule. And for the first time, I’m completing work that isn’t required for my classes.

For the vast majority of this improvement, I have to credit drugs and therapy. However, learning Rabbinic texts (a practice I began regularly this summer) has helped me understand the way my brain works-- and the ways to manage that--much better.
After my first academic taste of Talmud [1] as an undergrad, I seem to recall joking about it being “religion with ADHD.” The way the sages seemed to leap from one topic to another, seemingly unrelated one, was comical, albeit uncomfortably familiar to me. Consider Bava Batra 73a, which begins as a commentary on a mishnah concerned with the proper protocol for selling a ship. By the next page, 73b, we have gotten here:

"Rabbah bar Hanah further stated: I saw a frog the size of the fort of Hagronia. (What is the size of the fort of Hagronia? Sixty houses.)"

Yet, if Talmud was religion with ADHD, it was also religion for the clinically anal-retentive, built upon series of rules and practices that were so obscure and finicky as to be absurd—Mishnah Berakhot 7:3, for instance, prescribes a lengthy and specific blessing for a meal with ten thousand guests. But, if ten thousand and one are present, the prescribed blessing is short and generic. The documents themselves are separated into categories within categories—first, general orders, or sedarim, then tractates within the orders, chapters within the tractates, verses within the chapters. And the methods for commenting on texts within the Rabbinic genre are themselves subject to very particular rules.

What seemed a ridiculous contradiction at the time made much more sense to me once I started learning about ADHD. In their 1994 book, Driven to Distraction, psychiatrists Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey write, “Structure makes possible the expression of talent. Without structure, no matter how much talent there may be, there is only chaos…The ADD mind is like spilled mercury, running and beading. Structure is the vessel needed to contain the mercury of the ADD mind, to keep it from being here and there and everywhere all at once.” (Hallowell and Ratey, 1994, 221)

Talmud, and Rabbinic texts in general, might be understood to work the same way. When one interprets a text, whether a mishnah or a verse of Bible, the order of the day is atomization: each verse is a complete unit in and of itself, and any other verse from the canon is fair game to use as an intertext—that is, a text to throw against it, to react with it, and to generate an interpretation—as long as the interpreter can make it work. Which feels a lot like free-associating, and seems like it could easily disintegrate into interpretive chaos.

But. There are rules in place, structures to contain the madness. There is an end that must be achieved, an interpretive problem that must be resolved. Often, the impetus for the interpretive chaos in the first place is some problem or irritant in the original text, something that doesn’t fit with another text or with a larger principle. In Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds, Christine Hayes writes, “[a given mishnah may be] ambiguous in the sense that it contains a gap of information. The gemaras must work to fill that gap.” (Hayes, 1997, 57)

The initial stimulus—a problem to be solved—structures the whole interpretive section, reeling it back in at the end to the original text. The discussion may go far afield, but it always has to bring itself back to the text at hand. Eventually, it must come up with some sort of resolution to the task it has set itself.

The quotation at the top of the page, from Pirkei Avot (“Chapters of the Fathers,” a collection of ethical maxims found in Tractate Avot of the Mishnah)—specifically the line about building a hedge around the Torah— is one that has bedeviled me ever since I was introduced to it.

The traditional interpretation is that one must guard the commandments of the Torah from transgression by strengthening them (so, if the Torah says, “don’t go to thus and such place,” I should not even go within, say, a mile of it) I always read it as an expression par excellence of stiffness, hideboundness, of religious or doctrinal inflexibility.

Now, I see an alternate meaning. Building hedges—building limitations around one’s behavior—is a way of structuring one’s day-to-day life. In setting myself a schedule for the day, in insisting I accomplish a certain number of tasks before I can goof off, in creating small rituals (my cup of tea, my morning crossword, the sweatpants I wear to work) around which I structure those tasks—I am building hedges. By limiting my initial options, I increase the number and variety of things I can accomplish.

ADHD forced me to see the need for that lesson. The Rabbis taught it to me.

---

[1] “Talmud” refers to the collection of Rabbinic legal texts, or “Oral Torah”, which has two parts, Mishnah and Gemara. The Mishnah is a collection of legal traditions from the Tannaitic period (70-200 CE); the Gemara is a collection of commentaries on the Mishnah from the Amoraic period (200-500 CE). There are two Gemaras, the Palestinian Talmud (closed c.a. 400 CE), and the Babylonian Talmud (closed c.a. 500 CE).

Oh, the Clergyperson and the Scientist Should Be Friends: one social role of religion.

Note: The following is my own speculation, and I have not grounded my assertions in data unless noted otherwise. Read accordingly.

I suspect that a faith in the existence of a force in the universe that cares about you in some personal way--a moral force, a just force, a loving and caring force--is, for many, a basic psychological need. I also suspect that this need is one major catalyst--and continued motivation--for the human phenomenon of religion. Furthermore, as the sciences learn ever more about the nature and origins of the universe, I think that this motivation may be the "last one standing." And, humans being what they are, I doubt that it will ever be toppled.

I also think it is fairly clear that that force, whatever it is, is not nature-- at least, not in the purely physical sense of the word. For every anecdote purporting to demonstrate the innately compassionate character of natural systems, there is one to demonstrate the ruthless and brutal character of the same. Altruism and cooperation may be natural, but so are rape and murder; Jane Goodall may have shown the world the chimps Mel and Spindle, but she also showed them Passion.* Nor can we say that the physical and mental development of any given species demonstrates any particular regard for the survival and happiness of particular individuals. The mortality statistics regarding human childbirth before the development of modern obstetrics, for instance, should put to rest the notion that nature gives a flying fuck about whether a given person survives the very experience that is supposed to bring them into the world.** Natural systems "care" whether a design works well enough to maintain a population at or above replacement rate. Any subsequent casualties are merely collateral damage.

BUT. The above conclusion isn't necessarily easy to come to unless you have some kind of basic familiarity with the natural sciences (and specific cases within them), and a functional (if simple) understanding of how evolution works. Given the current condition of science education (at least within the US), that is a pretty big "if" for most people.

Now. Imagine you are an average person with this psychological need. Then, imagine that you have been functionally convinced, for whatever reason, of the non-existence of God (in whatever form) and/or the destructiveness/irrationality/foolishness of religious institutions. So, religion (in the sense that it is a vehicle for some sort of faith in some sort of God) is out as a way to satisfy your need for a sense of being loved on a cosmic level. Where do you go? Even the most basic understanding of world history will tell you that systems of government, for instance, can't be trusted on a deep level, nor be expected to care for you to the degree that will fulfill your need.

On the surface, especially given the preponderance of anecdotes pushing a vision of it as fundamentally gentle and compassionate, nature seems like a pretty good option. For some reason, (probably cultural, given that the dominant Western religious narratives have been pretty allergic to pantheisms) personifying nature and ascribing benevolent intent to it doesn't initially appear to smack of theism. And since you're locating these qualities within an entity that for all functional intents and purposes can conclusively be demonstrated to exist, I suspect it can pass the initial "sniff test" among those who want to see themselves as rational or science-minded in some way.

Unfortunately--at least from a purely physicalist perspective-- it's also wrong, and wrong premises can lead to wrong conclusions. All too often, I suspect (I have no data to rest this point on, though I'd be interested to know if psychological or sociological data can back my hypothesis up), basing your understanding of how nature works on the premise that nature as such gives a damn about you makes you easy prey for all manner of pseudoscience.

Let's go back to the obstetrics example. If you believe, for instance, that nature cares about you, and that therefore nature "designed" you (as a cis-woman) with a physique perfectly suited to giving birth, you might be likely to eschew hospital birth and obstetric care in favor of homebirth, either unattended or attended by a lay midwife. And you might really believe that this is the safest option. Unfortunately, you'd be wrong. CDC data consistently indicates that homebirth with a lay midwife carries three times the risk of death to the infant  as hospital birth attended by a certified nurse midwife, and double that of a hospital birth attended by an OB (the discrepancy between CNM and OB rates is attributable to the fact that OBs see far more high-risk patients that do CNMs.) The linked source, by the way, provides in turn a link to the CDC data, so you can look at the numbers yourself.

So scratching this particular itch with nature as such isn't only inaccurate, it's potentially dangerous. It's also extremely damaging as a whole to the public understanding of science. Which is why I'd like to propose that in some forms, religion may be helpful to science as a whole. If a religious institution doesn't make foundational claims about the nature of the universe such that it puts itself in conflict with the sciences, but rather provides a social space in which a person can believe that there is some kind of a moral order to the universe, generated by a cosmic force that loves them and cares for them, I think that that institution is answering a critical social (and for many people, psychological) need.

This isn't to say that religious belief makes a person immune to pseudoscience or to attributing a compassionate persona to nature-- far from it. I would suggest, however, that if a religious institution functions as I think it ought to-- not as a generator of foundationalist claims, but as a space for fellowship, for openness to this force its participants believe in, and as a moral and spiritual impetus for just, reasoned, and compassionate action (e.g, the American Civil Rights movement)-- then it is capable of functioning for many people as a bulwark against just those sorts of errors.

* Spindle was an adolescent chimpanzee in the Gombe Stream chimp community who "adopted" Mel, an unrelated orphan chimp for several months. Passion, on the other hand, was a high-ranking female in the same community who went on an extended spree of killing and eating the infants of other females for no apparent reason (e.g, food was abundant, the other females hadn't demonstrated any aggression toward her, etc.) Goodall, Through a Window: My Thirty Years With the Chimpanzees of Gombe. Mariner Books, 1990.
** The specious claims of the Natural Childbirth movement notwithstanding.

The Value of Discomfort: Why I won't make peace with my Torah portion

I have begun to compose my d'var Torah, or drasha (an interpretation, often delivered orally, of the weekly Torah portion) for my Bat Mitzvah. My portion, not coincidentally, includes what are perhaps two of the most controversial passages in the Hebrew Bible: Leviticus 18:22--"you will not lie with a male as the lyings of a woman, it is an abomination"-- and Leviticus 20:13--"If a man lies with a male as the lyings of a woman, the two have done an abominable thing; they will surely be put to death, their blood is upon them." (translations mine)

I note in my drasha that in my research, I have encountered many mitigating interpretations of these texts, some more rigorous and thoughtful than others. However, on an academic and a religious level, at the end of the day I find all of them some kind of unsatisfying. And despite all these interpretations, on a personal level, the verses still hurt.

Both the personal hurt and the intellectual dissatisfaction are compounded by the fact that, as a lived, practiced Scripture with social and spiritual impact, their lived history is part of their being. A new interpretation, whether religiously or historically grounded, cannot remove that baggage. To say, for example, "these verses can be interpreted in terms of sexual violence" (c.f, for instance, Rabbi Steven Greenberg) or "these verses came into being in a context which could not conceive of a loving same-sex relationship" (c.f. Rabbi Bradley Artson)*-- these are good readings, some of the best, and accurate and useful as they go-- but they do nothing to address the history of the verses, and their consequences, historical and current, for pretty much any queer inhabitant of the West (and recently, the 2/3 world-- witness, for example, Uganda.) Nor can they erase the fact that when I stand before the Torah in April, I will be chanting words-- understood, if only then, in that ritual space, as God's words--that at once condemn me (as a queer person) and make me invisible (as a queer woman).

As I read them, all these interpretations ask me in some way to make peace with these texts. This is not something I am willing to do, for two reasons.

First, and more specifically, to make peace with this particular text requires me to forgive the history it carries with it. Not only am I not willing to forgive this, but I lack the authority to do so-- that belongs to those who have been hurt by it more gravely than I.

Second, and more broadly, I don't believe in making peace with Scripture in general. I think that on a practical level, this leads to a dangerous complacency. If we've made peace with a troubling Scripture, we're a great deal less likely to deal with its consequences-- and a great deal more likely to pat ourselves on the back amid self-congratulatory, patronizing intonations: "It's so wonderful we're past that, isn't it? Now let's forget it's a part of our history." Such inaction allows us to feel good about ourselves without taking much concrete action.**

On a spiritual level, I think that making peace with Scripture is perhaps not the way Scripture wishes us to interact with it. Passive acceptance is not a fitting way to receive the foundational texts of our tradition, and parts of the Hebrew Bible reflect this. Abraham negotiated with God for the lives of the Sodomites. Jacob wrestled with the messenger of God. Sarah laughed in God's face, and Miriam spoke out against Moses's arbitrary privilege.

This minor list of narratives isn't an attempt to promote a single interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, and it isn't meant to give a simplistic reading of those stories-- all of which have a dark side. God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah anyway, and when Abraham himself was asked to do something abhorrent, he went right along. Sarah and Jacob, for their moments of bravery and integrity, had more than enough douchbaggery on their tallies to balance it out, and Miriam's reward for her integrity was leprosy and shunning. Yet these dark sides, I think, prove my point: Scripture is complex and troubling. It provides no unblemished (human) role models, no uncomplicated morals, and plenty of "What The Hell, Hero?" moments--many in which the hero in question is God. To make peace with it is to do a grave disservice to a wickedly complicated, history-soaked, deeply divine, and profoundly human text.

It's a lot easier to give an interpretation of a text that makes it palatable, than it is to grapple with the implications of belonging to a tradition whose Scripture is so vexing and whose history is so morally ambiguous. But in my opinion, anyone who tells you that religion is supposed to be easy, or even comforting, is full of shit.

If you are a theist, then theism-- inasmuch as it functions in a faith that the universe cares about you in some way, or that something about you is eternal-- yes, that's comforting, because that's fundamentally divine. But religion-- the social, textual, cultural, historical, and moral context into which you place that belief-- religion is a human thing. Religion is HARD. It should force you to take a hard look at the interaction between the better angels of whatever divinity you believe in and the reality of your existence-- and if you're looking at that honestly, you will realize that you will always come up short. You will also realize that as long as you keep working, that that fact is OK. Honest engagement with religion requires you to live with ambiguity and paradox. It should always keep you just a bit off center. It should demand that you think critically about yourself and about it, and it should require that when you see something that isn't right, in it or in yourself, that you speak up and DO something.

Obviously, throughout history, there are countless examples of religion failing to function in that way, and the consequences have often been horrendous. The consequences of the texts in my parsha are but one body of testimony to that fact. That, too, is part of our shared Scripture as practitioners of religion. That, too, we must grapple with. And that is why, as a practitioner who loves my tradition and my Scripture(in the same challenging, frustrating, adversarial way that I love my species, despite semi-regular exclamations to the effect of "I HATE people!")-- I will not make peace with my parsha. I will chant it with respect and awe, with frustration and profound anger and hurt. And I will stand at the bimah and deliver a d'var torah in which I tell those assembled that in no way should they forget, excise, or avoid this text. Instead, they should wrestle it, as Jacob wrestled God's messenger.

And then they should try not to be as much of a douchebag as he was afterwards.

*In no way do I wish to imply that either Greenberg or Artson fail to do the hard work of engaging the texts and their vexation. Both do a masterful job of it. I am simply using interpretations that they use as part of this process as stand-alone examples here.

**I also do not wish to imply that providing a welcoming and inclusive worship space does not count as valuable action, but I would suggest that avoiding these texts without then making concrete changes-- for example, actually making queer worshipers visible and performing queer life-cycle events-- does not actually count as providing such a space.

Making Comics

(All content in this post, images and otherwise, belong to me. If you wish to reproduce an image you have found here, please ask me first.)

As everyone who knows me in real life knows (because I won't shut up about it!), I'm currently working on my M.A thesis. And as many who know me in real life also know, I'm working on a graphic prologue and epilogue to it.

In the past, I've done comics the old-fashioned way-- pencil, paper, felt-tip pen, correction fluid, and a whole lot of erasers. For short, one or two page graphic essays, this is probably quicker. Anything longer, though, and it becomes quite labor-intensive. Further, the paper-and pen method has very little room for error-- too much correction fluid and it's obvious, too much erasing and you risk tearing the paper, etc. And because I do everything that you're not supposed to do when I draw, I need to work with a medium that lets me screw up several times until I find the line I like. Finally, paper and pen scanned in just doesn't look as professional. There are eraser marks, smudges, built-up bits of white-out, etc.

So, bearing all this in mind, this summer I invested in a Wacom Cintiq 12x graphics tablet and some graphics software (Photoshop Elements and ArtRage Studio Pro). Best. Decision. Ever.

Now that I have something *fairly* close to a completed page of my prologue, I thought I would post the steps I use to get there. Click on an image to embiggen.

1. First, I write a script in M.S word. I organize it by panel and set apart the text that goes in speech bubbles, etc.



2. Next, I draw out a panel sequence in Photoshop, using the line tool.




3. Still in Photoshop, I add the narration text.




4. I then import the Photoshop file into ArtRage. Here, I start thinking about where in each panel the drawings will go, and I add the speech-bubble text.




5. I add a new layer, and do rough sketches of each panel using the pencil tool. I do this in blue so I can see where my sketches were when I draw over them in my final medium (pen, in this case).




6. Drawing time! I start by going over my sketches in black pen and correcting flaws in my line. This usually involves a lot of scribbling, erasing, and redrawing-- one reason I'm so grateful for how forgiving the tablet is! Then I begin shading. In this case, I'm continuing to use felt pen for this and doing the shading in greyscale. I've always loved comics, a la Edward Gorey, that use lots of tiny, precise cross-hatching to shade, but at this point I have neither the technique nor the patience to do that for more than about two panels.




7. Sometimes I will add a watercolor wash for background shading or more dimension. Then, once I'm satisfied with what I have, I'll remove the blue pencil layer. Ta-da! Actually, this page isn't quite done-- the bottom panel, as you can see, needs some more work. But for now I will leave it alone and move on to the next page!




And that's how a comic is made. By me, that is.

Do Religion Scholars Solve Problems?

The following is a recent email exchange between me and S.'s dad. I had sent him the intro to my thesis after he inquired about its accessibility to the educated layperson. I asked him specifically to comment on its readability, and any other general reactions he might have. He sent this response:

I just read the introduction. It sounds very interesting, but left me wondering (since I know nothing of your field) - given that there are no facts in the scientific sense of the word around religion, is this in a sense a Talmudic argument where you quote the sources and draw your conclusions? This isn't a criticism, but a real question - in my field, a purely opinion piece, even well cited, isn't a thesis if it doesn't provide a new method for solving a problem (or even explaining a problem), but I guess a solution isn't part of your field?

This question was an unanticipated result of having someone outside my field read my work. Within our own disciplines--and even our broader fields, as I think this is true of the humanities in general--we tend to assume that, while a layperson may need jargon defined and may lack the grounding to understand more complex arguments, the basic gist of "just what it is that we do in religious studies/philosophy/etc." ought to be fairly self-evident.

I sent the following response:

As you correctly note, in my field there aren't necessarily discrete "problems" and "solutions" in the same clear-cut sense that there are in yours-- though there are facts about the texts we examine: one cannot accurately say, for example, that the shema is a duotheistic creed. And it is true that in some sense my field is purely composed of opinion pieces, though we attempt to make them consistent and logically plausible.

Nevertheless, I think that many of us in religious studies are concerned with real world problems-- how, for instance, ought a member of x tradition act in y situation? How can a Christian and a Muslim engage in a peaceful and mutually respectful dialogue that does not glibly elide real particularities of tradition and differences of belief? Or, as I think the base problem my thesis attempts to engage may be reduced to: how can a religious legal system which mainly bases itself upon received tradition engage constructively and justly with modern scientific knowledge, such that it may best serve those who subscribe to it?

I want to interject here to clarify that the question "What is it that religious studies does" is something of a misnomer, because there are multiple subdisciplines of religious studies. Someone who is mainly a text (e.g, Hebrew Bible) scholar is going to be asking completely different questions and have a mostly different toolbox in terms of secondary literature, languages, historical knowledge, etc., than someone who is mainly a theologian, though the questions and toolkit one scholar brings to the table will often be of great help to the work of the other.

Even in the less "applied" parts of religious studies, there are problems and solutions: one biblical verse, say, poses an interpretive problem that throws off the interpretation of its larger text. Is there a way to understand it, whether by translation or historical context or what have you, that it makes more sense in context, or is the reader to conclude that her interpretation of the larger text is mistaken? Alternately, is she to conlcude that the verse does not belong in this text at all and was inserted by a later redactor who found the message of the larger text problematic? And what are the implications of all these possible solutions for those who believe in this text-- or for those who study the time of the text's origin, or the history of the tradition?

Ultimately, if one buys the arguments of various epistemologists, all disciplines basically involve the action of the mind (reason) upon input of some sort (data)-- whether that be sense (empirical) data, received tradtion, revelation, or internally generated data. This is as true of the sciences as it is of the humanities. The difference between the two is that, since the sciences work with sense data which can be independently verified and in which variables can be controlled and isolated, these disciplines can work with a greater degree of certainty and specificity. In Kantian terms, the sciences deal with judgments of experience-- that is, anyone, given the same tools and conditions, will experience an object in the same way and such that they will come to the same conclusion.

The data those of us in religious studies work with mainly involves what Kant would call judgments of perception-- the experience of the object will be different from person to person. We deal with the vagarities of belief and emotion; of experiences that cannot be objectively verified; with moral questions that, because the belief in a supernatural other is involved, cannot be put in purely utilitarian terms. So clearly, we can't work in terms of "problem x requires solution y, due to factors l, m, and n." This doesn't mean, however, that we don't think in terms of problems and solutions-- we simply accept (if we are intellectually honest and respectful of other people; seeing them, warts and all, as equal human subjects) that many times these solutions will be messy and imperfect (not that science doesn't deal with messy and imperfect, but this is our baseline!)

I think that ultimately what a scholar of religion does is to process in some way the data of human belief. Neurologists and psychologists approach it from a scientific perspective as a physical phenomenon. We apporach it from a non-scientific perspective as a cultural and often (though not always-- I have known my fair share of atheist and agnostic religion majors!) as a divine or supernatural phenomenon. For us this data includes sacred texts, sacred art, food, ritual practices, ritual objects, personal testimonies, etc.

As far as solving problems is concerned, I suspect most people accept that religion is a major factor in a number of human problems, if for no other reason than it is an integral part of human life. The argument can be made, of course, that the solution is to remove religion from human life. This is a legitimate contention, but one which I think betrays a shallow understanding of history and culture, not to mention causality; furthermore, I think that for better or for worse religion will not disappear from human society any time soon. A more pragmatic approach, and one that I think the best religion scholars take, is to understand how religion functions in society. If we do that, it will be far easier and more effective to work within diverse religious traditions to ameliorate problems that are directly related to them.

And, for that matter, problems that aren't. Decades out, the American Civil Rights movement remains one of the most powerful testimonies to the ability of a religious movement to create positive social change. (My friend Kelly has done academic work related to this.) Understanding just how religion worked in such a context may prove an invaluable blueprint toward solving other issues-- issues of justice and freedom-- that cut across all divisions of culture, ethnicity, and belief.

My entirely personal, non-academic opinion regarding the live sex demonstration at Northwestern

Presumably many of you by now have heard of the event linked below, in which a professor at Northwestern held a live sex demonstration at an optional, after-class lecture and discussion that was tied to a human sexuality course:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chibrknews-northwestern-to-pay-for-live-sex-toy-demonstration-20110302,0,3942305.story

Since I seem to spend all my time these days writing about sex and ethics, I feel as though I ought to weigh in on the subject, for the benefit of the approximately 1 percent of people I know who actually read my (very infrequent) blog posts. Therefore, keeping in mind the appropriate disclaimers --I am neither a professor, nor an administrator, nor a lawyer, I wasn't there and therefore cannot verify the particulars of the event, etc., etc.-- there are conditions under which I would not condemn, and perhaps even encourage, a sex demonstration in an educational context.

These conditions are as follows:

1. All involved parties must be fully informed in advance that they will be witnessing sex acts.

2. The event must be optional-- there can be no coercion involved.

3. Pursuant to the above conditions, all involved parties must explicitly consent to being involved in (whether as witnesses or active participants) the acts in question. This presupposes that all involved parties are of legal age, etc. to be able to consent.

4. Due to the power dynamics involved, students may only participate as witnesses.

5. The demonstration must be directly and demonstrably related to the course material.

Based on the (limited) reading I have done about the specific event in question (and bearing in mind again that I wasn't there), it seems as though all of these conditions were met, though really any demonstration should have been planned in advance rather than added on the spot. Nevertheless, once it was clear the demonstration would take place, it appears that the audience was warned several times as to the graphic nature of the demonstration and given ample opportunity to leave the room. (I do think, however, that the lectures ought to have asked the class specifically whether the proposed demonstration was okay with them.) Since the lecture was tied to a class on human sexuality-- which, according to the course description quoted in the above article, "[treats] human sexuality as a subject for scientific inquiry" (presumably therefore including observation...)-- it was clearly relevant to the course material. Furthermore, "the...demonstrators led an hour-long discussion after their shocking act." [1] Obviously this wasn't performed for the sole purpose of titillation-- the students found the demonstration thought-provoking at the very least.

Obviously I have not touched on-- nor am I qualified to speak to-- the legal issues involved here, or the probably massive headache this has caused for the school's administration due to these legal issues. However, speaking strictly from my own ethical perspective, I don't think it was necessarily wrong. Was it, practically speaking, a dumb thing to do? Most likely. But no one was victimized, no one was hurt, and a bunch of college students (who, as Dan Savage points out, "[have] access to, and [have] accessed worse, via Northwestern's online network." [2]) actually got to have an intelligent, non-judgmental discussion about sex after seeing a sex act. To quote Savage again, "every kid on campus watching fucksawandworse porn should be so lucky as to have that exposure followed immediately by a discussion lead by one of the country's preeminent sex researchers."

(A final disclaimer-- it appears that the professor in question has an iffy history with some trans and other sexual minority communities. I honestly don't know enough about the guy to comment one way or the other, but in any case, I'm not writing specifically about him; rather, I'm writing about the ethics of an action he happens to have taken.)

[1]http://www.theawl.com/2011/03/that-northwestern-human-sexuality-class-was-the-best-course-i-ever-took

[2]http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/03/07/joseph-bernstein-does-not-own-a-fucksaw

Risk and Reward

I don't enjoy exercising.

There, I said it. I-- I who complain that Americans are not active enough, that we live in a culture of laziness, that a big chunk of our CO2 emissions could be cut if we just got up off our lard asses and walked places, that health policy doesn't focus nearly enough on preventative care like exercise-- I am part of the problem.

I was, as you might imagine, the nerdy kid for whom gym class was usually a living hell: scrawny, uncoordinated, afraid of the ball despite a valiant effort in third grade on a kids' soccer team. You could say I found religion in my fervent elementary school hope that we wouldn't, please God!, be playing dodgeball today.

Not that I didn't like being active. I ran all over my back yard, climbing trees and getting muddy. I had a brief and semi-successful middle school track career as a middle-distance runner, and I rode horses from fourth grade all the way through college. And I still like being active today-- I walk all over the place, I enjoy hikes and bike rides, and hope to take up riding again once I can actually afford it.

Yet going running for running's sake, despite my best efforts at attitude transplant, does not inspire me. It feels like a chore. Yoga is fun when I'm in a class, but I have neither the time or money for that right now, and doing it on my own is similarly chore-like. And given my current workload, the opportunities for hiking and bike rides are few. I had started biking to school at the beginning of the semester, but given the hills around here I would flop into my apartment feeling like I wanted to die, and I'd still have dinner to cook and homework to do. So right now I'm not as active as I probably should be, and certainly not, as my dad always used to harangue me that I should be, "part of a physical culture."

To which, frankly, I am surprisingly indifferent.

I realize that the above paragraph is full of excuses, and that if I wanted to I certainly could find time for exercise. But that's just it-- I don't, really. There are other things I'd rather use that time for. And since I still walk a fair amount and eat a fairly healthy diet, I'm a reasonable weight, and I feel pretty physically okay, I'm fine with that.

Would I be a healthier person if I exercised more? Of course. I'd also be healthier, no doubt, if I completely eliminated caffeine, white sugar, and white flour from my diet. But you know what? I LIKE pastries, and eating one once or twice a week happens to make my day that much more enjoyable. When I cook at home, I always use unrefined sugar and at least 1/3 whole wheat flour. I eat a mostly vegetarian diet, with plenty of whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. So I think my semi-regular apple danish habit is just fine.

Of course, I would be healthier if I did X, Y, and Z. But everyone calculates some level of risk to their health against their day-to-day pleasures. Even exercise nuts. When you exercise frequently and strenuously, you run the risk of injury. Presumably if you are an exercise nut, you exercise because it is pleasurable to you, in addition to being healthy. So you too are balancing risk, benefit, and pleasure.

Personally, little pleasures like an apple danish, a cup of earl grey with cream, or some good-quality lounging are important to maintaining my mental health. My body does what I need it to do. If it seems likely at any point that my risk/pleasure calculation is such that my body will stop doing what I need it to do, then I'll reconsider. In the mean time, however, I shall stick to the motto, "Moderation in all things, including moderation."

On the sexualization of pre-teens: A sex-positive, feminist viewpoint

Current Music- I Watched The Temple Fall (The Shondes)

This is partly in response to my cousin (first cousin once-removed, I believe? Or is it second cousin? I always confuse these things) Miryam's post on "Juicy" clothing (which I had to look up, as I'd never heard of it) and the sexualization of pre-teen girls.

A couple of caveats: first, I'm not a parent, and I accept that my views on this issue are lacking the experience and perspective that comes with being one. That said, I WAS a teenage girl fairly recently, which brings with it a different sense of perspective.
Second, as the title of my post indicates, I'm a queer, sex-positive feminist. This means that I come at this issue with certain pre-determined beliefs and assumptions about sexual morality and gender.

Like Miryam, I'm bothered by the implicit message of the "Juicy couture" line of clothing (though it's worth pointing out that this line is HARDLY the worst offender: Feministing highlights some really egregious examples)-- namely, that the body of a pre-teen girl is prime real estate for the advertisement of commercialized sexuality.

My concern, however, has less to do with sexuality per se; rather it has to do with the fact that this kind of clothing is a result, as well as a perpetuator, of a culture that sees female sexuality as object rather than subject and defines the ideal of female sexual attractiveness as passive, submissive, and childlike-- "Lolita-chic", if you will. I also think this culture tells girls that their greatest asset is their nascent sexuality-- in other words, why bother studying when you can marry a nice doctor? And make no mistake-- the vast majority of this marketing is directed at girls-- you may see padded bras sold to six-year-old girls, but I doubt you can find correspondingly padded underpants marketed to boys.

The other side of this coin is that it's female sexuality that's seen as dangerous and as a sign that our collective morality is slouching downward. We criticize the behavior of sexually forward teen girls, and yet our concept of manliness is based in part upon a man's conquests. For a further exploration of these double standards, by the way, I highly recommend Jessica Valenti's informative and entertaining book, "He's a Stud, She's a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know"

And I don't believe this culture is a result of being too open about sex; on the contrary, I think NOT talking about it makes it worse. Blaming feminism and sex-positivity for this phenomenon also overlooks the fact that objectifying young women is nothing new; for instance, a quick look through my iTunes library turns up several British folk songs about fair young maidens falling in to bad situations with handsome rakes, rambleaways, and saucy sailor lads; indeed, one, "The Gentleman Soldier", sounds like an 17th-century rendition of "Bitches ain't shit":

It's of a gentleman soldier, as a sentry he did stand
He saluted a fair maiden with a waving of his hand
So boldly then, he kissed her, and passed it off as a joke
He drilled her up in a sentry-box, wrapped up in a soldier's cloak

"Oh, come, my gentleman soldier, now won't you marry me?"
"Alas, my dearest Polly, these things can never be,
"For I have a wife already, and children have I three,
"Two wives are allowed in the army, but one's too many for me!"

And the drums are going a rap-a-tap-tap
And the fifes they loudly play
Fare thee well, Polly my dear,
I must be on my way.

I also don't think it's a question of secular vs. religious; I find the father-daughter purity balls common on the Christian Right profoundly creepy, for many of the same reasons. The marriage of teenage girls to older men is common among Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints-- and again, the same trope of the prepubescent, submissive woman as the height of attractiveness is at work here. On the other hand, I know of many relatively secular parents (including my own!) who didn't buy such clothing for their daughters, mainly for the reasons I've described.

So I don't like these clothing lines one bit. But I don't necessarily think they exist because our current culture is any more sexualized than any other. I think they exist because our current culture is particularly consumerist, and the makers of this clothing are simply capitalizing on well-established misogynist trends. (Note that this doesn't excuse them one iota!) I don't think the answer is less sexual freedom or sexual frankness. On the contrary, I think the answer is more frank (and age-appropriate) talk about sexuality, within a cultural context that teaches teen girls--and boys-- to respect themselves and others as whole beings.