Sword and Shovel (Me and John Harbaugh)

The fourth chapter of the Book of Nechemiah describes the eponymous character's attempt to complete the fortifications of Jerusalem in the face of opposition from local tribes. Verses 4 and 5 (and possibly 6) describe how the Jews were demoralized and on the verge of despair until Nechemiah created a plan for completing the wall and gave them a pep talk to boost morale.

The basic plan was that Nechemiah divided the people into two groups, a work detail and a security detail. The security detail was stationed around the wall, and the work detail all carried weapons with them in addition to their work tools. Nehemiah then equipped the defenders with horns, so that if there was trouble the workers could swarm to the point of attack.

When I podcasted this chapter for the OU Nach Yomi program over the summer, I described this strategy as being "similar to the Baltimore Ravens' defense" (you can listen to the pocast; the reference appears in minute 9 and the beginning of minute 10 of the podcast).

Here's where it gets eerie. Last week, after locking up a playoff berth, Ravens' Coach John Harbaugh gave a pep talk where he explicitly referenced that chapter in Nechemiah. He even brought out props - a sword and a shovel - to emphasize the point that they had to continue working while suffering the barbs of the naysayers. Here's a video of the pep talk:

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I doubt that John Harbaugh or anyone else in the Ravens' locker room listened to the Nach Yomi podcast. At the same time, I thought it was pretty cool that I referred to the Ravens' when describing a passage in Nechemiah, and that the Ravens' coach referred to the same passage when talking about what his team faced. A marvellous coincidence.

The type of defense that I described in the podcast was on full display yesterday: swarming to the ball at the moment of attack, forcing short gains, lost yardage, incompletions, and interceptions.
[I doubt that Harbs was trying to make a political statement about the status of Jerusalem and the resilience of the contemporary bearers of "sword and shovel", but there's that as well.]

Harbaugh explains his Nechemiah 'drasha' just after the 1-minute mark of this press conference:
 

Go Ravens!

My New Hobby

Blogging was my primary hobby for about 4 years. It was a good hobby. It helped me hone my writing skills to the point where I now write (and edit and translate) for a living. However, once writing became my primary occupation, it lost some of its luster as an outlet.

So I’ve found a new hobby: Teaching. While teaching and rabbinating, writing was an outlet. Now that I have been out of teaching for over a year, and now that I no longer have to engage in it professionally, with all that entails, I can return to it as an amateur, and be quite happy doing so. I just completed teaching Ezra and Nechemiah to a small group at Camp Moshava’s Beit Midrash Program, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. It certainly helped that I felt no pressure to perform or to do anything other than what I simply wanted to do. It did not have to be ‘like an angel’. And – I thoroughly enjoyed the experience (this shiur was the dry-run for my OU podcasts on E-N, but with much more banter and tangents). Thanks, talmidim and talmidot, for restoring my love of teaching. It’s been a lot of fun.

I know now that I will never go back to teaching professionally, but that I will continue to make it a real part of my life.

Podcasting

A while ago, I started blogging about the book of Ezra, then stopped. I am, however, doing the OU's Nach Yomi podcasts for Ezra/ Nechemiah, and the first 2 shiurim are up. They will average about 20 mins in length, though Ezra chap. 2 is a bit longer. Enjoy!

The Joys of Reading

At some point on Shabbat, the following three books were together on the dining room table (at the home of relatives):
a. Understanding Tzniut, by Rav Yehuda Herzl Henkin
b. Bread and Fire: Jewish Women Find God in the Everyday, edited by Rivkah Slonim
c. Carnal Israel, by Prof. Daniel Boyarin

An interesting juxtaposition, to say the least.

I was reading the latter. I’m very much enjoying it, in fact.

During my ongoing semi-hiatus from blogging, I have rediscovered the simple joy of reading. Sometimes it’s the pop-trash variety, and sometimes it’s serious reading. In the latter category, thus far this summer I’ve been working on said Boyarin book as well as his “Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash”, “A Thousand Splendid Suns” (pop, but not trash), and “Roots”. I’m also still slogging through “The Poetics of Biblical Narrative”, which is simply dazzling once you can decipher his very tight writing style and invented terminology. Finally, I’ve been learning through the works of Rav Yehuda Leib Graubart with a family member of his (this is technically a translation job, but a thoroughly enjoyable one). Fun stuff. Maybe I’ll podcast some of the sessions.

Regarding Roots, by Alex Haley, my readers know that I’m always fascinated by comparisons between Jewish and African-American history. There were a few interesting aspects here as well. One is whether the issue of oral culture and history. We are much more familiar with the idea of a ‘living book’ from Babylonian Jewish culture. In fact the shift from oral to written culture characterizes the shift from the era of the Geonim to that of the Rishonim in a manner similar to the way that the shift from the written to the printed word characterizes the shift from the era of the Rishonim to that of the Acharonim, but I digress. A less understood issue is the orality of Israelite culture in biblical times. We tend to project written culture onto all of Jewish history, and Chaza”l bifurcated the Torah to distinguish oral from written elements of Torah culture. I wonder, though, whether there were Israelite griots running around in the pre-Ezra days. What really threw me was the account of how griots memorized centuries worth of genealogies. Haley’s entire (fictional) project is essentially an attempt to construct a narrative from a genealogy. Food for thought.

Burka Sighting

My wife saw a woman wearing one of the new Jewish burka-style clothing. Totally candid, not posed or anything, just walking down the street in Ramat Beit Shemesh.

She's still freaked out by it. I am, too, though in a much less visceral way. I get terrified that it's really all like this, that everything we do developed like this, that some group once decided to take "and you shall bind them as a sign to your hand" literally, and so we now strap leather boxes to ourselves. We also shake twigs and circumcise our males; and the only reason that we consider one to be sane and the other to be crazy, is because we have an ancient tradition that these latter things are what God wants us to do, and no tradition regarding the former (textual interpretation can both promote the former, see below, or discourage the latter, with the exception of circumcision).

But when I look at these newfangled practices, it gets me worried that our collective memory is a very fragile thing. How long will it take for practitioners of this custom to forget that they were once a fringe group of whackos? How long did it take for double-head-coverings and upsherin to be read back into traditional narratives, and for the memory of their absence to be erased? Memories, amongst many segments of Judaism (and believe me, it's not just chareidi), are being manufactured and altered all the time. I find that terrifying, because it generates real uncertainty about the authenticity of the narratives around which I organize my life and which I am attempting to perpetuate through my children and students. But who says that I didn't receive these narrative through some gullible or ignorant ancestors, who, when some religious figure told them that 'this is your tradition', they bought into it. And what if they were taken to an isolated community, or if others were kept out of the community, so that alternative narratives could not be heard? To tell you the truth, it scares the hell out of me. I've come up with an apt metaphor for this problem, which is essentially an application of the famous 'Ship of Theseus' philosophical problem, but with the added dimension that someone might be trying to sell a new ship and pass it off as that of Theseus. I hope to write about it soon.

Interestingly, the source for the newfangled burkas is a statement of Rashi which he himself says is not peshat. Bereishit 38:15 states that Yehuda did not recognize Tamar, because she had covered her face. It is clear from the previous verse ("and she removed her garments of widowhood, and covered herself with a veil, and wrapped herself"), that the 'burka' that Tamar wore was actually her prostitute get-up.

Rashi explains the peshat and then quotes a Midrash (perhaps he was bothered by the fact that the Torah repeats the news that Tamar covered her face) that states that Yehuda 'did not recognize her because she covered her face' when she lived in his house. She was so modest that her own father-in-law had never even seen her face. This midrash has now been transformed into normative practice by a scant few.

Note that I put an 'Ezra' tag on this post. Ha-maven yavin.

Ezra

At the beginning of the year, I promised that I would serialize my classes on the book of Ezra (incl. Nehemiah). As it turns out, I will not be teaching Ezra this semester. Nevertheless, I've been meaning to start typing up my handwritten notes, if I can find the time. Last time I learned and taught it, I found that it issues and dilemmas have a very contemporary resonance. Ezra remains a somewhat underappreciated character even though, as a leader and lawgiver, he is second only to Moshe. If I can post one shiur a week, starting next week, I'll be happy.