Don’t know if you saw it, but my last comment posted here last week was supposedly marked as spam. Did it show up in your filter?

Thanks,

Maya

Thanks for linking to Ariel Beery’s proposal on my website. I am very glad to have discovered your blog and will certainly be returning.

Shai, no doubt that the proposal is a long read, which takes away from it in the world of blogging as you lose some of its power and meaning. The Talmud and the Internet is a great read. I too was thinking of it when reading these proposals.

Maya

I can’t summarize what he said. That’s not good a good sign — cause he’s definitely trying to sell something, and this customer doesn’t know what it is.

Have you read the Talmud and the Internet by Jonathan Rosen? It’s fantastic. A totally bizarre title, contrived by the publisher since memoir-writing was not “in” when the book was published, Rosen overlays the two very different stories of his grandmothers with a meditation, mediated by a literary view of Jewish history, on change and alienation.

What is so compelling about the book is that Rosen gets you “there” via the micro, the details of his memories about the life and death of his thoroughly Reform born-in-America grandmother who he knew very well, contrasted with family tales of his other grandmother, a victim of the Holocaust whom he never met.

Beery’s ideas are big ideas that don’t sit in my gut. Rosen has small ideas that make me feel. But of course I’m turning fifty and Beery is not.

Whether it’s regarding Judaism or understanding economics, I believe that it is the particular that points to the universal. I want to re-claim my tribal identity - living according to Jewish tribal customs, not because they are better, but because I am a Jew. To stand fully in my own Jewishness without any claim to superiority is, I think, a redemptive act. And it’s what I want every other group to do for themselves. A healthy cultural ecosystem is one where people flock to be themselves.

Is this a vision that is compelling to others? I don’t know.

But I do know that there seems to be a piece of Beery’s “new” creative Zionism which feels very old. He writes:

To put it plainly, most Jews do not see the added value in being part of the Jewish People – and therefore would be hard-pressed to answer the question, “Why are you Jewish?” This is a strategic threat, an existential threat, one we as a People are facing for the first time in a very long time.

Did he answer the “Why be Jewish” question for himself in the article? Is the reason to be Jewish to fight off the existential threat? If I have to convince someone to become a tribal Jew because our survival is at stake, I’m not interested.

Come stand next to the Torah and simply witness those really cool letters, hand written while all kinds of crazy laws were followed. Come have a Shabbat meal where all game-boys and computers will be turned off –awesome– and we’ll tell jokes and eat too much good food and sing, until we have to take the dog for walk.