With Gratitude to Hashem…

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a very long time. Perhaps it’s appropriate that I finally got around to it on Thanksgiving.

Among the many mildly insulting things I’ve been told by people trying to explain to me why Judaism is the Truth is the charge that I’m ungrateful. God created us, the argument goes, He provides for us, and we should be grateful to Him and follow His rules, which are themselves only meant help us live better lives.

I’d like to take this argument apart. First, the claim that we should be grateful to God because He created us. This implies that he did so at least partly for our benefit. Yet that is impossible. According to Jewish belief, before God created the world, there was nothing. Not even souls waiting to be born. We, whatever that word may imply, simply did not exist. Therefore the only Being that stood to gain anything from creation was God.

In my experience, many people have trouble with the concept of their own non-existence. They have a fuzzy notion that their consciousness was waiting off in the wings somewhere, waiting for God to call it into existence. With such a model, existence is clearly better than non-existence. The non-existent are condemned to wait forever in the wings while the existent get to fulfill their purpose.

Of course, this model makes a mockery of the concept of non-existence. A consciousness that is waiting must already exist. If God created us, then He was not merely moving us from one state of existence to a fuller, more meaningful state of existence, but was calling us into being ex-nihlo. Had I not been created, I wouldn’t miss my existence. I simply wouldn’t be.

Some concede the point, but then say that although only God stood to gain from my creation before I was created, now that I was created I should be grateful that I exist. But this is missing my point, which is that God did not do something that I need to be grateful for. That once I exist I prefer existence to non-existence has no bearing on whether I was created for my own benefit. And as I showed above, it is impossible that I was created for my own benefit.

To use an often-cited analogy, does a child have to be grateful to his parents because they were feeling frisky one day and got themselves pregnant? They weren’t having sex for his benefit, but for their own. Even in the perhaps more analogous case of a couple who desperately want a child and are deliberately trying to conceive, they aren’t doing so for the benefit of the unborn child, but for their own benefit – to fulfill their need to have a child.

So why do we expect children to be grateful to their parents? Because parents provide for and nurture their children. Someone who was abandoned at birth and adopted is not expected to show gratitude to his birth parents, but to the couple who raised him.

This brings us to the second part of the argument, that we should be grateful to God for providing for us. Even though God created us for His own benefit, now that I exist I stand to benefit from continued existence and should be grateful to God for maintaining my existence and providing me with everything I need.

Our gratitude for what others do for us is usually in proportion to the effort they expend. If someone donated a kidney to save my life, I could be expected to be grateful to that person for the rest of my life. The person who passed me the juice at dinner, not so much.

We are expected to be grateful to our parents because of the enormous effort that goes into raising a child. Yet for God, everything is effortless. Perhaps despite the complete lack of effort, we could be expected to be grateful to God because we are benefiting from his beneficence, but the gratitude expected would be on the level of the gratitude towards the person who passed the juice, not the one who donated the kidney.

Literary Narcissism

Inspired by DovBear’s post of an old meme, I’ve done something purely narcissistic and complied an arbitrary list (under a pretentious post title) of the first hundred fiction books and series I could think of that I’ve read so that I can feel more cultured than anyone who hasn’t read all of the same books.


1) The original 14 "Oz" books by L. Frank Baum
...........1. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
...........2. The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904)
...........3. Ozma of Oz (1907)
...........4. Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908)
...........5. The Road to Oz (1909)
...........6. The Emerald City of Oz (1910)
...........7. The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913)
...........8. Tik-Tok of Oz (1914)
...........9. The Scarecrow of Oz (1915)
...........10. Rinkitink in Oz (1916)
...........11. The Lost Princess of Oz (1917)
...........12. The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918)
...........13. The Magic of Oz (1919)
...........14. Glinda of Oz (1920)
2) “The Chronicles of Narnia” by C.S. Lewis
...........1. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)
...........2. Prince Caspian (1951)
...........3. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)
...........4. The Silver Chair (1953)
...........5. The Horse and His Boy (1954)
...........6. The Magician's Nephew (1955)
...........7. The Last Battle (1956)
3) The “Psammead Series” by E. Nesbitt:1.
...........Five Children and It (1902)
...........2. The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904)
...........3. The Story of the Amulet (1906)
4) The “Magic Series” by Edward Eager
...........1. Half Magic (1954)
...........2. Knight's Castle (1956)
...........3. Magic By the Lake (1957)
...........4. The Time Garden (1958)
...........5. Magic Or Not? (1959)
...........6. The Well-Wishers (1960)
...........7. Seven-Day Magic (1962)
5) The “Harry Potter” series by J.K. Rowling
...........1. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
...........2. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
...........3. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
...........4. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
...........5. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
...........6. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
...........7. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
6) “Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe
7) “Treasure Island” by Robert Louis Stevenson
8) “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” by Robert Louis Stevenson
9) “The Swiss Family Robinson” by Johann David Wyss
10) “Anne of Green Gables” series by Lucy Maud Montgomery
...........1. Anne of Green Gables
...........2. Anne of Avonlea
...........3. Anne of the Island
...........4. Anne of Windy Poplars
...........5. Anne's House of Dreams
...........6. Anne of Ingleside
...........7. Rainbow Valley
...........8. Rilla of Ingleside
...........9. The Blythes Are Quoted
11) “Little House on the Prairie” series by Laura Ingalls Wilder
...........1. Little House in the Big Woods (1932)
...........2. Farmer Boy (1933)
...........3. Little House on the Prairie (1935)
...........4. On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937)
...........5. By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939)
...........6. The Long Winter (1940)
...........7. Little Town on the Prairie (1941)
...........8. These Happy Golden Years (1943)
...........9. The First Four Years (1971)
12) The “Talent” series by Anne McCaffrey
...........1. To Ride Pegasus (1973)
...........2. Pegasus in Flight (1990)
...........3. Pegasus in Space (2000)
13) “The Black Stallion” series by Walter Farley
...........1. The Black Stallion (1941)
...........2. The Black Stallion Returns (1945)
...........3. Son of the Black Stallion (1947)
...........4. The Island Stallion (1948)
...........5. The Black Stallion and Satan (1949)
...........6. The Blood Bay Colt (1951)
...........7. The Island Stallion's Fury (1951)
...........8. The Black Stallion's Filly (1952)
...........9. The Black Stallion Revolts (1953)
...........10. The Black Stallion's Sulky Colt (1954)
...........11. The Island Stallion Races (1955)
...........12. The Black Stallion's Courage (1956)
...........13. The Black Stallion Mystery (1957
...........14. The Horse Tamer (1958)
...........15. The Black Stallion and Flame (1960)
...........16. Man o' War (1962)
...........17. The Black Stallion Challenged (1964
...........18. The Black Stallion's Ghost (1969)
...........19. The Black Stallion and the Girl (1971)
...........20. The Black Stallion Legend (1983)
14) “The Little Princess” by Frances Hodgson Burnett
15) “The Secret Garden” by Frances Hodgson Burnett
16) “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott
17) “Little Men” by Louisa May Alcott
18) “Arabian Nights”
19) “The Iliad”
20) “The Odyssey”
21) “The Epic of Gilgamesh”
22) “The Foundation Trilogy” by Isaac Asimov
...........1. “Foundation” (1951)
...........2. Foundation and Empire (1952)
...........3. Second Foundation (1953)
23) “Farenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury
24) “Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert Heinlein
25) “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells
26) “The Invisible Man” by H.G. Wells
27) “The War of the Worlds” by H.G. Wells
28) “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” by Mark Twain
29) “The Prince and the Pauper” by Mark Twain
30) “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer“ by Mark Twain
31) “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain
32) The “Redwall” series (those published before I got too old for the series)
...........1. Redwall (1986)
...........2. Mossflower (1988)
...........3. Mattimeo (1989)
...........4. Mariel of Redwall (1991)
...........5. Salamandastron (1992)
...........6. Martin the Warrior (1993)
...........7. The Bellmaker (1994)
...........8. Outcast of Redwall (1995)
...........9. The Pearls of Lutra (1996)
...........10. The Long Patrol (1997)
33) “Pollyanna” by Eleanor H. Porter
34) “Starship Troopers” by Robert A. Heinlein
35) “WorldWar” and “Colonization” series by Harry Turtledove
...........1. Worldwar: In the Balance (1994)
...........2. Worldwar: Tilting the Balance (1995)
...........3. Worldwar: Upsetting the Balance (1996)
...........4. Worldwar: Striking the Balance (1996)
...........5. Colonization: Second Contact (1999)
...........6. Colonization: Down to Earth (2000)
...........7. Colonization: Aftershocks (2001)
...........8. Homeward Bound (2004)
36) “Mary Poppins” series by P. L. Travers
...........1. Mary Poppins
...........2. Mary Poppins Comes Back
...........3. Mary Poppins Opens the Door
...........4. Mary Poppins in the Park
...........5. Mary Poppins From A to Z
...........6. Mary Poppins in the Kitchen
...........7. Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane
...........8. Mary Poppins and the House Next Door
37) “Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates” (1865) by Mary Mapes Dodge
38) Roald Dahl’s children’s books
...........1. James and the Giant Peach (1961)
...........2. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)
...........3. Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972)
...........4. The Twits (1982)
...........5. The BFG (1982)
...........6. The Witches (1983)
...........7. Matilda (1988)
39) “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series by Douglas Adams
...........1. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
...........2. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
...........3. Life, the Universe and Everything
...........4. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
...........5. Mostly Harmless
40) “The Martian Chronicles” by Ray Bradbury
41) The “Tripods” series by John Christopher
...........1. The White Mountains (1967)
...........2. The City of Gold and Lead (1968)
...........3. The Pool of Fire (1968)
...........4. When the Tripods Came (1988)
42) The “Dragonriders of Pern” series by Anne and Todd McCaffrey
43) The “Chrestomanci” series by Diana Wynne Jones
...........1. Charmed Life (1977)
...........2. The Magicians of Caprona (1980)
...........3. The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988)
...........4. Witch Week (1982)
44) “Bicentennial Man” by Isaac Asimov
45) “Tom’s Midnight Garden” by Philippa Pearce

At this point I got tired of looking up the authors names and the individual books in each series. Maybe I’ll finish it another time.

46) “The Boxcar Children” series
47) Little Lord Fauntleroy
48) A Logic Named Joe
49) The Machine Gunners
50) The “So You Want to be a Wizard” series
51) The Devil’s Arithmetic
52) The Lord of the Flies
53) The “1632” series
54) Peter Pan
55) Morte de Arthur
56) The Bobbesy Twins
57) The Three Investigators
58) Five Little Peppers and How They Grew
59) “The Hatchet” “The River”
60) Charlotte’s Web
61) The Phantom Tollbooth
62) Mrs. Piggle Wiggle series
63) The Death Gate Cycle
64) A Tale of Time City
65) Gulliver’s Travels
66) The Time Traveler’s Wife
67) “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” by Charles Dickens
68) The Three Musketeers
69) The Scarlet Pimpernel
70) Johnny Tremain
71) The “Xanth” series by Piers Anthony
72) “Peter Rabbit” series
73) Dr. Suess’s books
74) “Harold and the Pruple Crayon” by Crockett Johnson
75) “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L'Engle
76) Stuart Little
77) The Rats of NIMH
78) Beverly Cleary’s children’s books
79) Alice In Wonderland
80) Through the Looking Glass
81) “The Trumpet of the Swan” by E. B. White
82) Black Beauty
83) “The Borrowers” series by Mary Norton
84) “The Littles” series
85) “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”
86) “Journey to the Center of the Earth”
87) “Heidi”
88) "The Door in the Wall" by Marguerite de Angeli
89) “Dr. Doolittle” series
90) “The Indian in the Cupboard” series
91) “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm”
92) Aesop's Fables“The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas
93) “Pygmalion” by George Bernard Shaw
94) “Planet of the Apes” by Pierre Boulle
95) "Tarzan of the Apes" by Edgar Rice Burroughs
96) Jurassic Park
97) The Lost World
98) How to Eat Fried Worms
99) “My Teacher is an Alien” series
100) The “Tom Swift” series


It was harder than I thought it would be to come up with a hundred books. I don’t remember the titles of most of what I’ve read, and I haven’t read fiction regularly in years. It was a fun trip down memory lane.

So, how superior do I get to feel? ;-)

Eisav HaRasha?

I have a vivid memory of a poster of Eisav that hung in my Kindergarten classroom. Eisav, built like an ogre and covered in squiggly red hair, stands at the head of his four hundred men, a murderous scowl on his face. I was afraid of that poster, and would try to avoid looking at it.

The commentaries paint the picture of Eisav as an evil brute, and, in contrast, Yaakov as pious and saintly. Yet these seem to be informed attributes. Eisav never does anything truly evil, and Yaakov never does anything righteous. Quite the opposite. Eisav cares for his father while Yaakov sits in the tent. The commentaries assume that Yaakov was in some sort of early-day kollel, but the chumash never implies that.

When Eisav comes home, hungry after a day out in the fields, Yaakov refuses to feed him until Eisav parts with something of value. Sure, Eisav is rather callous towards his birthright, but that’s hardly evil. Yaakov’s refusal to feed Eisav, on the other hand… Imagine two brothers, living in their parents’ house. One is cooking dinner when the other comes home half-starved from a long trip and asks for some of the food. The cook refuses to part with the food until his brother hands him the title to his car. Which brother is virtuous? Which is evil?

There’s a midrash that tries to make Eisav extra-evil in this story by explaining that Eisav had just come from committing a murder. And who was it that he had killed? Nimrod, the man who had tried to burn his grandfather Avraham alive, a man who is himself portrayed as evil. Killing Nimrod may not have been good, per se, but it was hardly as if Eisav was out slaughtering innocent children for the fun of it.

Later Yaakov lies to his father to get the brochos. The commentaries scramble to explain why it wasn’t really a lie, but the justifications are laughably weak. When Eisav finds out he is murderously angry and Yaakov flees to his mother’s family. It isn’t good that Eisav wants to kill Yaakov, but it’s hardly unmitigated evil. Eisav is justifiably angry over having his inheritance stolen. Yet somehow, Yaakov is the virtuous one and Eisav is the evil one.

Years later when Yaakov is returning to his father’s house, he is told that Eisav is coming to kill him. Again, not a good thing, but it is understandable. Yaakov sends Eisav gifts and Eisav, far from what we would expect of a thoroughly evil man, accepts Yaakov’s apology and welcomes his brother home with love. The commentaries vilify Eisav by claiming he didn’t really accept the apology and that he was trying to bite Yaakov rather than kiss him as the pasuk says, but this runs counter to the plain meaning of the text.

If we weren’t told early on that Eisav is evil and Yaakov is good, I think we would see both characters as having at best a grey morality. Eisav is violent, but Yaakov is an extortionist, a liar, and a thief. Yaakov is hardly a righteous tzaddik, and Eisav is not an evil rasha.



[I wonder if the characterization of Yaakov as good and Eisav as evil might reflect a moral system that abhorred violence as evil but saw clever trickery – such as getting Eisav to part with the birthright, or fooling Yitzchak into giving Yaakov the brochos – as amoral or perhaps even as an admirable skill.]

“God Himself Couldn’t Sink This Ship”

According to legend when the Titanic was launched a White Star Line employee claimed, "God Himself couldn’t sink this ship!". Of course, the Titanic famously did sink. On April 15, 1912 during her first trans-Atlantic trip she hit an iceberg and went down in the North Atlantic. Over 1500 people drowned or froze to death before the nearest ships could reach them.

I remember hearing the story of the Titanic in school. The part about the claim that God couldn’t sink it was always told with grim self-satisfaction. The message was clear: don’t challenge God, or He’ll show you who’s boss. We the believers were a superior group, and the people who had flippantly challenged God with an unsinkable ship had gotten what was coming to them.

The story itself is probably apocryphal, and to be fair, I don’t think that any of my teachers and rabbeim really thought that the Titanic sank just because of what one person said. They probably never really thought about it at all; it was just a cute story to illustrate a point and make us all feel righteous about our belief in God.

The implications of the story, however, are not flattering to God. God apparently gets upset when a mere human challenges His power. Upset enough to kill 1500 people in a fit of rage. This is comparable to a father who gets upset when his three-year-old proudly claims that, “Not even Daddy could break my fort!” and in a fit of rage smashes the cardboard fort and seriously hurts the children playing inside.

Why is it that so many people don’t realize that stories like this one portray God as a petty, vindictive megalomaniac?

I suppose I should just be happy that at least in the Titanic story, God is acknowledged as the Cause of the iceberg. Usually the disaster is attributed to bad luck while those who managed to survive praise God for the miracle of their rescue.

Tiferes Yisroel Update

I objected strongly when Tiferes Yisroel implemented their policy of mandatory monitoring of student’s families’ internet usage, so it seems only fair that I should note that they seem to have thought better of it. I’ve been told by people with kids in the yeshiva that the policy hasn’t been enforced. Many of the parents never signed up for Web Chaver, and many of those who did are now letting their accounts lapse. It’s outrageous that the policy was ever implemented, but at least in practice sanity has won out.

Debugged Kashrus

A few months ago ( I think while the fish-worm nonsense was going on) I half-jokingly predicted in a comment somewhere that pretty soon the only food that would be considered kosher would be vegetables grown in cleanroom-like greenhouses. I’m sad to say that over yom tov I saw an ad for what may be the first step towards that eventuality.

“Eden”, a company that markets vegetables to the kosher market, ran an ad in Jewish newspapers that reads in part:

“Cauliflower, broccoli, and many other vegetables are home to tiny insects that are nearly invisible to the untrained eye, and are quite impossible to remove. That’s why Eden doesn’t just try to get rid of insects; we keep the insects out, from the moment of planting.…

“Eden keeps insects out by growing its vegetables in greenhouses… So if you want to keep the food in your home truly kosher, trust the brand that has… a greenhouse –that keeps the tiniest intruders away.”

Now this is an advertisement, not a halachic ruling, but much like pre-washed vegetables, I can see greenhouse-grown vegetables becoming a widespread convenience bought “just in case;” then a communal norm; and finally a standard to be kept without which the vegetables may not be eaten.

And so Orthodoxy becomes ever-more restrictive. Here’s hoping I’m wrong.

Euphemisms, Shema, and Paradigms

Nothing groundbreaking here, just something that’s been rattling around inside my head for a while.

When I was a kid, my mother would say Shema with my brother and me before we went to sleep each night. When my wife puts my daughter to bed, she does the same. Lately, my daughter has been asking me to say Shema with her when I put her to bed (which is most nights).

Shema has a central place in Jewish prayer. It is one of the first tefillos we learn as children, and it is supposed to be the last thing we say before we die. Along with Shemoneh Esrei, it’s what daily davening is built around. It is generally taken to be a statement of Hashem’s monotheistic supremacy. Yet anyone who takes a moment to read it literally can see that it makes little sense as such.

I think most people in the frum world, perhaps even in the religious Jewish world, never read Shema literally. As a kid I was taught that Shema translated as, “Hear Israel, Hashem is Hashem, there is one Hashem.” But this is not what it says. It says, “Hear Israel, Yahweh is your god, Yahweh is one.”

It’s read the first way and not the second way because Yahweh and elohim are thought of as synonyms for “Hashem” when in fact Yahweh is a name and elohim is the equivalent of the English little “g” god. Shema is not monotheistic statement about the singular magnificence of God, but a monolatrous definition of a god named Yahweh. It is telling the nation of Israel that Yahweh is their god, and that Yahweh is only one god despite the widespread practice of worshipping his different aspects under different names.

This is something that would never have occurred to me when reading Shema with a frum worldview. It was only after learning about ancient religions that I realized how strangely Shema is worded – which then led me to the realization that it’s not strangely worded at all if you accept that it means exactly what it says.

You may not have noticed, but the post’s title forms the acronym ESP. Too bad I couldn’t think of a clever way to relate that to the post’s subject.