What is Apocalyptic Eschatology?

The term "apocalyptic" describes an element within a worldview that "reveals" a previously hidden facet of a divine plan.

In classical Judaism and Christianity this often describes an "eschatology" - that is a story of the end of time as we know it.

So, "apocalyptic eschatology" is not just a multi-syllabic phrase that you will want to know in order to impress people at cocktail parties. It describes a set piece of beliefs that speaks about revealing to the select few the details of the impending end of time, the end of civilization as we know it, and the initiation of a new more perfect order.

Its story goes that for society to end and be transformed there needs to be first a global struggle of the forces of good against the powers of evil. We will know the time is upon us by the signs of changing events which are revealed to the select.

More often than not, the community in the throes of an episode of apocalyptic eschatology will produce an increase in social conflict growing out of a paranoia, will engender a phase of hyperactive preaching offset by political passivity, and will experience a growing sense of the ominous as the group edges towards the expected dramatic end of time.

Our concern in the past has been to explore some of the apocalyptic moods and motivations that we identified in recent phases of Orthodox Judaism.

We originally wrote an essay in 1987 to analyze some of the characteristics that we started to see more pronounced within Orthodox Judaism at that time. We posted this in 2005 with revisions that we made in 1994, taking into account Rabbi Schachter's responsum regarding women's prayer groups.

In this assessment we didn't consider the violence committed by Yigal Amir and Baruch Goldstein, important events with religious apocalyptic contexts.

We have taught a university course several times called, "War and Peace in Judaism, Christianity and Islam" where we did take into account those traumas and other relevant data.

Here is the opening of my essay:

Fundamentalist spokesmen in Orthodox Judaism of late have grown more vocal and militant. Recent protests, proclamations, and actions of Orthodox Jews have not just risen in intensity. Rather a substantive transformation has overtaken a segment of the Jewish community. It does not suffice to categorize Orthodox groups as "reversionary" "ultra" or "right-wing". We must explain what generative conception distinguishes one group claiming to be Orthodox observers of Torah and mitzvos (commandments), true to the ideals of halakhah (Jewish law), and loyal to their rabbinic figures of authority, from another group claiming the same traits, but appearing to form its social life and defend its ultimate goals in recognizably different manners. Some forms of fundamentalist Orthodoxy have become apocalyptic styles of Judaism. This form of Judaism has coherent world views and particular ways of life that thrive on conflict, that live on the margins of society and that employ predictable modes of discourse.

more of the article...

...our other articles, reviews, independent study courses and more...

Times' Frank Rich Eulogizes Gay Bashing in America

In our opinion it's still a little premature to declare that same-sex marriage is a nationwide done deal. But Frank Rich thinks so - quite eloquently in his Times op-ed today. It's his judgment that a recent anti same-sex marriage TV ad marks the tipping point in the shift of public sentiment and legal momentum on the issue.

The u-turns by right wing religious leaders play a key role in his assessment:

More startling still was the abrupt about-face of the Rev. Rick Warren, the hugely popular megachurch leader whose endorsement last year of Proposition 8, California’s same-sex marriage ban, had roiled his appearance at the Obama inaugural. Warren also dropped in on Larry King to declare that he had “never” been and “never will be” an “anti-gay-marriage activist.” This was an unmistakable slap at the National Organization for Marriage, which lavished far more money on Proposition 8 than even James Dobson’s Focus on the Family.

While Rich may be too optimistic, I cannot recall any other issue on which prominent conservatives have flip flopped quite so dramatically.

LA Times: Reform Seminary to Close Campuses in a Serious Retrenchment (or is this a fund-raising ploy?)

President Rabbi David Ellenson of the Hebrew Union College is one of our favorite people. He is a straight shooter and a practical man. That's why we take this news seriously. He's not a person who'd engage in doomsday fundraising. Anyway, it is clear that once you rumor the closing a campus, you can't expect it to flourish.

The LA Times has this catastrophic story about potential closure of the HUC campus there. It's a major setback for Jewish studies on the coast ("The Los Angeles campus, which opened in 1954, is adjacent to USC and, in a cooperative arrangement, offers credit classes for USC students in Judaic studies. Its library holds more than 125,000 volumes of Judaica as well as large holdings of microfilm and recordings.")

This is also a signal to the other Jewish seminaries to follow suit and begin closing facilities.

Jewish seminary considers closing two U.S. campuses
Facing a $3-million deficit this year, the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion may keep one of three locations in Los Angeles, New York and Cincinnati.
By Larry Gordon

The Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, a seminary and graduate school for Judaism's Reform movement, is facing such deep financial troubles that it is considering closing two of its three U.S. campuses, which include a location near downtown Los Angeles.

In a letter sent this week to members of the college community, its president, Rabbi David Ellenson, said pension funding problems, flat donations and declines in its endowment had placed the institution "in the most challenging financial position it has faced in its history -- even more so than during the Depression."

As a result, Ellenson wrote, Hebrew Union's board of governors will meet next month to discuss such scenarios as whether to keep just one of its three U.S. campuses in Los Angeles, New York and Cincinnati, where the college was founded. Other alternatives include merging some academic programs but keeping more than one of its U.S. campuses open, he wrote in the letter, which was released by his office. A decision is expected in June. ..more...

Times to New York Jews: OK to Have a Bagel Now

Two rabbis in Teaneck gave conflicting advice today from their pulpits about when to start eating chametz after Pesach. One said to wait a week and another said to wait an hour.

The "rabbis" at the Times though have no hesitation to encourage New York Jews to resume their bagel fressing ASAP.

Passover’s Over, and Bagels Are Back, Big
By JAMES BARRON

Giasuddin Ahmed ran through the timetable. “The guys arrive at 4:30 a.m. to make the bagels,” he said. “At 5:30 a.m., the coffee. Open, 6 a.m.”

He left out one step. Someone had to tear down the white paper that had been taped over the plate-glass windows of the store he runs — and the signs that said the store, 72nd Street Bagel, on the West Side, would be closed for Passover.

Mr. Ahmed and other bagel makers say that the first business day after the holiday ends — Friday — is typically one of their busiest days of the year as Jewish customers line up to observe the passing of at least eight days of yeast privation.

Bagel makers spent Thursday contemplating the end of Passover. Some, like Mr. Ahmed, gave their ovens and mixing bowls the once-over after time off during the holiday, which started at sundown on April 8. His store follows kosher dietary rules and treats Passover as an eight-day holiday, as many observant Jews do. (Reform Jews typically celebrate Passover for seven days, said Rabbi Andy Bachman, the senior rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn.)...more...

Talmud Tractate Bava Me-Senate: Franken and Coleman Dispute the Case of Two Jews Holding on to a Seat

The antics over in Minnesota of the two Jews disputing one seat (in the senate) have frequently reminded us of the Talmud.

Beginning Talmud students often start their learning with the Babylonian Talmud Tractate Baba Mezi'a where two Jews are disputing the ownership of one garment,

MISHNAH. TWO [PERSONS APPEARING BEFORE A COURT] HOLD A GARMENT. ONE OF THEM SAYS, 'I FOUND IT', AND THE OTHER SAYS, 'I FOUND IT'; ONE OF THEM SAYS, 'IT IS ALL MINE', AND THE OTHER SAYS, 'IT IS ALL MINE', THEN THE ONE SHALL SWEAR THAT HIS SHARE IN IT IS NOT LESS THAN HALF, AND THE OTHER SHALL SWEAR THAT HIS SHARE IN IT IS NOT LESS THAN HALF, AND [THE VALUE OF THE GARMENT] SHALL THEN BE DIVIDED BETWEEN THEM. IF ONE SAYS, 'IT IS ALL MINE', AND THE OTHER SAYS, 'HALF OF IT IS MINE', HE WHO SAYS, 'IT IS ALL MINE' SHALL SWEAR THAT HIS SHARE IN IT IS NOT LESS THAN THREE QUARTERS, AND HE WHO SAYS, 'HALF OF IT IS MINE' SHALL SWEAR THAT HIS SHARE IN IT IS NOT LESS THAN A QUARTER....(Soncino Translation)

For those of your who wish to start learning Mishnah and Talmud today, start here with Learn Mishnah.

Here is the latest on the senate dispute from the Star Tribune. Now that the three judge Minnesota "beis din" has found in favor of Franken, public sentiment is turning against Coleman.

Coleman explains his continued legal efforts
By KEVIN DUCHSCHERE and BOB VON STERNBERG, Star Tribune staff writers

Republican Norm Coleman said he will appeal Democrat Al Franken's court victory in the U.S. Senate race next week. But for now, he said, he's hoping to relieve the frustration many Minnesotans feel about the five-month recount process that has still left the state one senator short.

Coleman, who was featured in a New York Times article on Wednesday and has done several interviews with local media this week, said he recognizes that people are frustrated with the length of the recount and that it's important to explain why he's continuing to contest Franken's 312-vote lead.

"In spite of what some say, that somehow this is an effort to delay something -- no," he said today in a meeting with the Star Tribune's editorial staff. "There are very legitimate, important constitutional questions regarding whether or not people's vote should count.

"There are thousands whose votes haven't been counted, and this is the one path to make that happen."

Coleman was referring to 4,400 rejected absentee ballots that his campaign says are similar to ones that have been counted.

He said that he expects an appeal to be filed early next week, well within the 10 days that state law gives him. Joe Friedberg, the noted defense lawyer who led his legal team during the recount trial, will argue the case before the Minnesota Supreme Court, Coleman said.

Coleman said he is focused on the state appeal and declined to say whether he would take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary, although he wouldn't rule that out.

He also said he wasn't concerned that extending the recount might damage his political prospects should he lose.

"I say this humbly, I don't spend 30 seconds worrying about my political future," he said.

Meanwhile, although Coleman handily beat Al Franken last fall when it came to endorsements from the editorial boards of Minnesota's newspapers, that support is starting to erode.

In the wake of Coleman's setback this week at the hands of the three-judge panel overseeing the U.S. Senate contest, a growing number of newspapers that endorsed Coleman are advising him to throw in the towel.

The editorial boards at daily newspapers in Owatonna, Albert Lea, Worthington and Faribault have said he should step aside. All of those papers endorsed him last year.

The St. Cloud Times, which endorsed independent candidate Dean Barkley, has also called for him to give up his fight. So has the Winona Daily News, one of the few papers that endorsed Franken.

Editorialists at the Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the state's biggest papers, have said he should continue to make his case to the state Supreme Court.

Even the New York Times has weighed in on the Senate contest with an editorial headlined, "It's Over, Norm. OK?"

Voz iz neis? A Yiddish GPS

Chicago Jewish News by Joseph Aaron reports enthusiastically on the new positive Jewish accomplishments in our world. He deserves attention. Here is my favorite item from his April 10 posting about the iGo Yiddish GPS:

Get ready now. You've heard of a GPS, that amazingly little device you put in your car which gives you directions to where you are going, telling you where to turn and all the rest necessary to get you from one point to another?

Well, now in Israel they have a GPS that provides those directions in Yiddish. One of the many wonders of having a Jewish state is that the Jewish language is the language of everyday life. For most Israelis, that's Hebrew and there have long been GPS devices that speak Hebrew. But because many Orthodox Jews in Israel are most comfortable speaking Yiddish, yes, there is now a GPS that does just that.

So Yiddish-speakers can use the product to locate more than 10,000 Jewish points of interest - including the addresses and telephone numbers of thousands of synagogues, mikvehs (ritual baths) and kosher restaurants. Meanwhile, more secular points of interest - such as nightclubs, non-kosher restaurants and Internet cafes - are not in the database.

Amazing. And yet there's more. When the device is switched on, the user is automatically shown the Travelers' Prayer. Instead of pressing "OK" to skip to the next screen, the option is instead "Amen."

Aaron doesn't tell us what the GPS says when you make a wrong turn. Instead of the simple announcement that we get from our Garmin - "Recalculating..." - does the Yiddish GPS kvetch and berate you for being such a shlemiel?

False Priests Pretend to Protect Notre Dame from Contamination by Barack Obama

Last week we read about the Obama Notre Dame controversy in "Degrees of Acceptance at Notre Dame," an op-ed by RICHARD V. ALLEN in the Times:

THERE is turmoil in South Bend, Ind. — and around the country. The Rev. John Jenkins, the president of Notre Dame, has invited President Obama to deliver the commencement address at the university on May 17 and to receive an honorary degree.

As a result, many alumni are up in arms denouncing the decision. Priests, bishops, archbishops and cardinals have criticized the university and its president. South Bend’s own bishop, John D’Arcy, has announced that he will not attend. At the same time, other members of the Notre Dame community have responded, with similar force, that Mr. Obama should be allowed to speak...

This debate has provoked us to think on the issue of what we are calling, protecting a university from contamination by an unclean speaker.

Apparently functionaries have appointed themselves the guardians of the precincts of religious universities. They make a fuss now and then about how one particular party or another needs to be kept away from the sacred space of the holy school.

We saw this on a small scale not long ago in a debate about whether a certain bible scholar should have been allowed to speak at the Orthodox Jewish Yeshiva University. But that was small potatoes.

We are seeing this played out on a larger scale now with the outcry over whether President Barack Obama ought to be given an honorary degree and be permitted to speak at the graduation this spring at the Catholic Notre Dame University.

Sure it's easy enough to reduce all this hollering to brute politics and dismiss it out-of-hand. Some ardent religious conservative wants to ascend a bully pulpit and this type of occasion gives him just the ladder he needs to climb up and demand attention.

We've never been a big fan of pure reductionism as a means of religious analysis. We are eager to believe that there is more going on than just that superficial process of finding a place to yell loud about your pet social or political peeves.

Accordingly, we think its important to examine the dynamics of these "guarding" activists and try to abstract some deeper cultural meaning or understanding from the hue and cry that they are raising.

We note well that keeping a holy precinct free from contamination of uncleanness is a classical role that priests play in the major religious traditions of the world. Perhaps the specific examples from Yeshiva and Notre Dame permit us to explore how this process plays out in our modern society.

The contemporary religious university does present us with an essential quandary. It's an institution that has to function as an open society of inquiry because it is a university. Yet the religious university is also a symbolic presence of the religion that it stands for – a quasi-sacred space – an eruption of the holy into the profane world around it.

Of course there are all kinds of gradations of the holy precincts in all religions. Universities can never be classified on the level of holiness as pure places of worship (though they surely will have within the campus walls some actual places of prayer).

Still, we recall with a smile the classic Peanuts cartoon wherein one of the cartoon's characters declares to another, an anxious student who is fretting aloud in a religious way before an exam, that "Hoping and praying should never be confused with studying."

Students of classical Judaism will recognize the concentric circles of spatial holiness that the ancient sources documented, namely, in increasing levels of sanctity, all other countries on earth, the Land of Israel, the city of Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, the Temple structure itself, and within that, the Holy of Holies.

In modern times we find more complex and often overlapping notions of sacred space. But our premise says that people have decided Notre Dame and Yeshiva are sacred spaces, regardless of what kind of real inquiry or behavior goes on inside the brick and mortar structures of those American religious campuses.

The premise thus established, the struggle can commence over who ought to be allowed to enter and be honored in such precincts.

If that is the case, we think this struggle sorely lacks subtlety. Opponents of the potentially defiling commencement speech by Obama at Notre Dame say nothing about whether he can enter and speak at a classroom at the Law School on the campus. Apparently that would be just fine. They say nothing about whether the library ought to purchase and lend out Barack's books. If the guy is not kosher, should we even let him into the house? Well you get my point.

This lack of refinement over the presence of the defiling agent in the spaces of holiness makes us abandon analyzing the whole debate as if it was a bona fide religious struggle to maintain purity in some pristine priestly precincts.

We've replayed now the tape of what we think is going on here in the Obama versus Notre Dame affair. And yes, as the referee at the football game would say, upon closer examination, we've got to say that it's not a legitimate touchdown, that a foul has been committed.

Our replay indicates that purely political actors have wrapped themselves up in the garb of priests to act as if they were holy men guarding the holy sanctuary. These spokesmen pretend to be holy and thereby attempt to prohibit their opponents from defiling speech.

In fact, they are in no way holy, they guard nothing, they just want to make pure political points, to stand on the back of religion to help broadcast their messages and aggrandize their own images.

Our bottom line conclusion then, by their cheapening actions, these would-be priests in fact debase their own religious traditions.

(Published in the Jewish Standard, April 17, 2009.)

Mazal Tov Minnesota Senator Al Franken (again)

MINNEAPOLIS, April 13 (UPI) -- A three-judge panel ruled Monday that Democrat Al Franken defeated Republican Norm Coleman in Minnesota's 2008 U.S. Senate race...

StarTribune: Postville Kosher Agriprocessors Manager Pleads Guilty

Most troubling - "thousands of state child labor law charges" remain.

Former Iowa kosher slaughterhouse personnel manager pleads guilty to immigration charges
By AMY LORENTZEN
DES MOINES, Iowa - A former personnel manager arrested after a massive immigration raid at a kosher slaughterhouse pleaded guilty Monday to federal immigration charges.

Elizabeth Billmeyer, 48, of Postville, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to harbor undocumented aliens for profit and one count of knowingly accepting counterfeit resident alien cards. She faces up to 20 years in prison and a $500,000 fine.

Billmeyer was working at the Agriprocessors Inc. plant in Postville, once the nation's largest kosher slaughterhouse, when federal agents arrested 389 people in an immigration raid last May.

Over a five-year period leading up to the raid, Billmeyer conspired with others to harbor illegal immigrants at the plant for commercial advantage and private financial gain, according to a release from the U.S. attorney's office.

The company and other top managers, including former plant vice president Sholom Rubashkin, were charged last year with conspiracy to harbor undocumented immigrants for profit, aiding and abetting the harboring of undocumented immigrants and conspiracy to commit document fraud, among other counts.

Agriprocessors has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and at one point ceased production, although some lines have since reopened.

Billmeyer and others at the plant still face thousands of state child labor law charges.

She remained free on bond, and a sentencing will be scheduled after a pre-sentence report is prepared.

A telephone message left for Billmeyer's attorneys wasn't immediately returned.

New York Magazine: The Sad Tragedy of the Mumbai Hasidic Missionaries

New York Magazine continues to amaze us with its substantial writing on subjects that intrigue us and hit home.

The sad tragedy of the Mumbai Hasidic missionaries brings tears to our eyes in the current article, "God’s Work," By Jesse Green, with its description and ensuing details, "Newlyweds Gabi and Rivki Holtzberg heeded the Rebbe’s call to bring the joy of their faith to every part of the world. But the world did not respond in kind."

It's a story that is so close to us because my son and daughter-in-law met and befriended the couple in Mumbai when they first arrived there on their mission in 2003...