I would like my second daughter to be married by a rabbi like Yehoshua Shapira. A Zionist who in his yeshive's celebration of Israel 62nd Anniversary, he said that we are living not in the beginning of the Redemption (Geulah in Hebrew) but that we have already been redeemed. Unlike American "White Nationalist" bloggers, he practices what he believes: four of his children married at age 18 and the others are growing up. (In the pic he is writing - probably a marriage contract (ketubah) with the traditional goose feather pen).
18 comments:
Is the real incentive for Israel to keep the "occupied territories" because all of the fertile Religious people live there and that is the future of world Jewry?
You've got to be kidding, J. If and when control of Israel falls to the Jewish Taliban, it's the beginning of the end. Israel will become a backward Jewish hellhole quite similar to all of the other backward hellholes in the Middle East. No more prosperous technological powerhouse because their crazy restrictive religious ideology will scare all the seculars away, and they strongly discourage non-religious learning among their own. No more Einsteins, Feynmans or von Neumanns. Secular Jews in the U.S. would feel minimal attachment to such a place, and that could carry over into intergovernmental relations. Not to mention that orthodox Judaism's claims aren't true, and you know they aren't true. Real hypocrisy. I respect your work, J, but you're deluded on this issue.
I agree with most of what Anon. said above - religion is a regressive force. In America religion is needed because the remaining Jews will melt into the general population in a couple of more generations, but in Israel people are Jews even if they never set foot in a synagogue.
But, " No more Einsteins, Feynmans or von Neumanns" is just not true. Who do you think were the grandfathers of these guys if not Rebbes with big beards like Shapira? Going into the Yeshiva does not destroy the native Jewish intelligence of the students and their descendants.
K
K,
None of the set of Einstein, Feynman and von Neumann were religious, although their ancestors certainly were. Had it not been for the Jewish enlightenment in Europe that followed the gentile enlightenment, they would never have been able to obtain the secular educations and to develop the subsequent careers that they did.
The Haredis in the U.S. and Israel already do nearly everything that possible to deny secular education to their young so that they cannot escape that life. If they occasionally lose a few adherents, it's only because of the secular governments and communities around them that exhibit some attraction for the more rebellious. If the Haredis ever have control of Israel's national government and enforce their religious and educational standards, it will be much more difficult (all but impossible) for those born into haredi Judaism to escape. I don't expect them to tolerate secular non-observance in their midst.
This is an interesting discussion, but I will respectfully remain mute, except to note the tight connection between religious observance and high reproduction.
Anon.
"No more Einsteins, Feynmans or von Neumanns."
I am not sure. The Einstein, Feynman and Neuman you mention left no Jewish descendants if they left any at all.
Pious (Orthodox) Jews are thriving and I assure you there are many Einsteins, Feynmans and Neumans among them.
Woody Allen (himself a secular Jew with no Jewish offspring that I know of) once said that 80% of success is just showing up. The secular Jews of our generation will just not show up in the future population (mostly not at all, very few as "purebred" Jews) so they are out of the future genius game, more so than the Orthodox who will conserve the Ashkenazi gene pool for future Einsteins to emerge.
K
Even if there are geniuses among the ultra-Orthodox, they will never express that capability in anything more meaningful than useless talmud study. Therefore, they will never have any impact on the world, nor will they provide good P.R. for the Jews.
Something I didn't consider in my last response is the fact that even Ashkenazi IQ is lower in Israel than in the diaspora. Could it be that after the mass defections, the Jews who are left in the ultra-orthodox fold are on average less intelligent and that this IQ difference reflects the greater proportion of ultra-orthodox Jews in the population there?
Ultra-orthodox Jews are "thriving" in part because they are located in first-world places where they can free-ride. They don't have to produce water engineers or serve in the Israeli military because of that. However, long term, if they ever come to power in Israel, I'm very skeptival that they or that country will thrive.
From your response, it's clear that you care more about numbers of descendants and that those descendants are Jews than about those descendants as individual people.
In a few years, you will find persons whose family name is Einstein, Feynman or Neuman only among Orthodox Jews. The secular Einsteins are having few children and those surely will anglicise their names to Stonewell or somelike that.
J,
The days of Anglicizing names are over. Nowadays in America the big $ is in "diversity" so Barry Obama (as he was universally known growing up) becomes "Barrack" again. There's a joke about this - a Jewish grandmother is showing pictures of her grandchildren to another lady. She says "this is my grandson Shmuel. He's named for his grandfather, Scott."
K
I think, sadly, that very high IQ is incompatible with religion of any sort, except a vague sort of pantheism such as that espoused loosely by Einstein in an attempt, I believe, to mollify his relatives.
Anon.
Anon - this is simply not true. It is true that many high IQ people, when exposed to a secular environment, conclude that they cannot justify magical thinking. But many high IQ Hasidim are deeply immersed in their culture and never question its assumptions. They use their high IQ to expound on the Talmud, etc.
K
I don't think religion is totally incompatible with above average intelligence, but getting the two together is really rare.
It is a paradox, very intelligent people practicing meaningless rituals. In the case of judaism, education starts very early, so praying and eating kosher becomes part of one's personality. REgarding believing in God and the angels and so on, I suspect most Jews do not normally believe in those things, as many debates in the Talmud go like that: "Let us assume that ...".
Yes. I think that high IQ is compatible with ritualistic observation, since these people (some of them anyway) have social needs like anyone else, but I do not think it is compatible today with belief in the magical components and incantations.
Nonetheless, very high IQ people tend in my experience to exhibit a kind of deeply spiritual agnosticism, manifesting as a highly developed sense of the deep mystery of it all, and tend not to be crudely atheistic in the aggressive, militaristic sense.
Anon.
If a "pulsa de nura" ceremony terrifies one political oponents, very smart people should use it. In fact, they do.
IQ and rationality may not be as linked as you think. Some people have fast brains to quickly solve problems more quickly than average but they do not reflect rationally on anything. I know of a mensa memebr who reads the horoscope. GW bush's IQ is actually quite high, but we all know he does not think profoundly on important issues. This idea was put forward in Keith Stanovich's 'What intelligence tests miss'. I haven't read it, but I certainly intend to pick up it sometime.
Reading the horoscope is a good way of focusing in the day that is starting.
Post a Comment