Scan barcode
A review by lpm100
One People, Two Worlds: A Reform Rabbi and an Orthodox Rabbi Explore the Issues That Divide Them by Ammiel Hirsch, Yaakov Yosef Reinman
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Book Review
"One People, Two Worlds"
5/5 stars
"Books like this make me know that the sparkling Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence is not just a myth."
*******
This is a series of letters between two rabbis--one Reform and a former tank commander in the IDF and one an Orthodox Talmudist --from January of 2000 to October of 2001 that were so good that they could be stapled together to make a book. (I would have to say that the word ratio between the two is probably about three to one, in favor of the Orthodox rabbi. But the content of the reform Rabbi is more pithy and non-desperate.)
Part I- introduction and commentary on Reform versus Orthodox Judaism
Part II- (Mostly) discussion of the feminist aspects of Judaism..
Part III- Discussion of biblical criticism and the J/E/P/D hypothesis. Also, Darwinism, free will, Zionism.
Good index. Embedded references.
*******
Who am I?
First: I moved to this out-of-town US community about 10 years ago, and converted about 7 years ago.
Second: I spent my earlier years after conversion living around a bunch of knuckle-dragging Haredim (and I moved on because of mistreatment-- the same way a lot of black people do.)
But, quite frankly, I've heard everything in this book already. (At least twice.)
Sample familiar arguments:
1. (p.133) In just a couple of generations, Reform people are going to go extinct and Haredim are going to take over the world. (You can find this argument since the 1970s. But, Orthodox people manage to stay about 10% of all Jews because of a high attrition rate.)
Reform are still with us, as they have been for two centuries. And they are much larger in number than Orthodox people.
2. (p.90) The secular world is just a den of iniquity and it just can't be people actually living their lives in a matter of fact way. (85% of secular men are unfaithful to their wives, according to the Orthodox Rabbi. Who knew?)
3. (p.27) If somebody reads A Source in English, then it's not good enough. It has to be read in Hebrew. And then if it is read in Hebrew, it has to be an "unfamiliar, unpunctuated, unvowelized page of Talmud and Aramaic." And so on, ad infinitum. (This is in spite of the fact that it has been my experience that the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of Haredim do not go word-by-word in their Chumash. (If you don't believe me, ask somebody what is a "meteg" or what is the difference between "infinitive absolute" and "infinitive construct.") That is the trick that this talmudist says when it becomes apparent that the reform Rabbi has in fact read some talmud and that he cannot be fobbed off with these "go check and see if it's raining around those corner" type answers.
If this argument goes on long enough, it will turn into: "You don't know the argument because you did not gather it by poking a pin into one side of the paper and finding the relevant argument on the obverse of the page."
4. Lots of No True Scotsman fallacies. So, if I point out that sexual abuse rates among Black Hats are at least two times higher than what they are among the rest of the Orthodox world, then those particular Boy Butt Pirates are "just not Orthodox."
5. Lots of confusion about time and change. Moshe Rabbeinu never wore a shtreimel, but nothing has EVER changed since the destruction of the Second Temple by Orthodox lights. Ritual authority changed from a hereditary priesthood to communal rabbis, who earned their positions by merit (p.239). (Ironically, the Samaritans still hold to this idea, and there are about 600 of them left in the world, and none of them are recognized as Jews and have not been for about 25 centuries.)
6. There seems to be a lot of mentioning of Jews for J****. (In every case, this was for the Orthodox Rabbi to make a point, specifically about delineating what is and is not Judaism.) And that's strange, because the bad news is that there are no Jews - - genetic or otherwise - - in that Southern Baptist movement for white hicks.)
7. Typical Haredi mind-blindness.
a. No problem to accept subsidies from the Israeli state, but then also no problem to not recognize it or not recognize the Israeli flag.
b. (p.174) "In the traditional model of Jewish Family life, the man has primary responsibility for the livelihood and the woman for household and children." I'm sorry, but not a few times have I seen Kollel Bums who have 5 to 10 children and have never filled out a job application. Not. One. Time. But, their wives get up and go to work. In fact, I have seen entire kollels where the men laze about and all of their wives work.
c. (p.192) Misinterpretation of American slavery to make a point--and it would be a nice argument if it was not based on empirically false assumptions. No, slaves were not abducted. (The climate of Africa is so harsh that white people of that time would die before they even made it 50 miles inland.)
Slaves were bought from other tribes.
d. If a lady is described as a "jug full of excrement whose opening is full of blood, yet men chase after her" [Shabbat 152a] (p.200), no matter how much context you provide, the sentence does say what it says. And this is a running theme throughout the text when the Orthodox Rabbi writes: Context, context, context. Apparently NOTHING can mean what it plainly says. (Too many examples to even get into here.)
8. Lots of reductio ad Hitlerium here. The Reform Rabbi says that people who think they are in possession of The Absolute Truth come up with things such as The Final Solution. The Orthodox Rabbi says that if enough time passes, people can question the historicity of the Torah the same way people could question the historicity of the Holocaust
9. Disagreement about changes in the law. If Haredim do it, then it's ok. If Reform do it, then it's heresy. (As an example of the first case: conversion /geirut used to be something that was one and done up until yesterday; now, people who are converts exist always and everywhere in a provisional state. As an example of the second, pork used to not be okay. Now it is.)
10. Baba Metzia 59b:5 ("my children have defeated me") shows up in here AGAIN and AGAIN. If there are three Reform against ine Orthodox, why does the principle of "majority rules" not work? It works everywhere it doesn't work?
*******
-Great quotes
(p.170): "They know everything. Unfortunately, they don't know anything else."
(p.275): "Any person who would have been sent to the gas chambers by °°°°°°- - a person with a Jewish grandparent - - has an open invitation to breathe the free air of the Jewish state. This is the ultimate victory over °°°°°°."
-For any Everyday Pulpit Rabbi, there is lots and lots of material here for drasha'ot.
What is the practical significance here?
EXAMPLE 1: In the case of the Reform Rabbi, he would accept evolution as true, but should the discussion turn into an evolutionary reason for the obvious difference in IQ/intelligence between Jews and blacks, then that would be a forbidden issue..... For the Orthodox Rabbi, he would assume that all human beings were made in the image of Gd (and of course that Charles Darwin / Richard Dawkins were completely false). But, I'm pretty sure if it came time to introduce his daughter to a black guy, then that would be a forbidden issue. For that matter, if it even came time for reciting responsive amen's in behind the black guy who was davening for the amud.... Then that would be another issue entirely.
What is a black guy to do? (I haven't figured it out yet.)
EXAMPLE 2: My experience with the law (halacha) has been that it can be reinterpreted enough times to be anything at all. So, it is something about 36 times that is repeated to not harass/opressed the convert. (For the record, that is 12 times more than the repetition of not boiling a kid in its mother's milk.) There are only a small minority of people who act as if they believe that. So now what?
EXAMPLE 3: If you have a group of 100 guys, and 75 of them act as if they don't believe that Gd is watching them and 25 do, then you come up with a Gd value of about 0.25. How is that substantially different to Reform people who treat the Bible as "divinely inspired"? The first set, if they acted like they really believed in Gd would imagine that he actually wrote the 5 books of Moses. The second set says that He "kind of" wrote them.
Verdict: Some interesting arguments, but the book is 22 years old. Not worth more than $5.
"One People, Two Worlds"
5/5 stars
"Books like this make me know that the sparkling Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence is not just a myth."
*******
This is a series of letters between two rabbis--one Reform and a former tank commander in the IDF and one an Orthodox Talmudist --from January of 2000 to October of 2001 that were so good that they could be stapled together to make a book. (I would have to say that the word ratio between the two is probably about three to one, in favor of the Orthodox rabbi. But the content of the reform Rabbi is more pithy and non-desperate.)
Part I- introduction and commentary on Reform versus Orthodox Judaism
Part II- (Mostly) discussion of the feminist aspects of Judaism..
Part III- Discussion of biblical criticism and the J/E/P/D hypothesis. Also, Darwinism, free will, Zionism.
Good index. Embedded references.
*******
Who am I?
First: I moved to this out-of-town US community about 10 years ago, and converted about 7 years ago.
Second: I spent my earlier years after conversion living around a bunch of knuckle-dragging Haredim (and I moved on because of mistreatment-- the same way a lot of black people do.)
But, quite frankly, I've heard everything in this book already. (At least twice.)
Sample familiar arguments:
1. (p.133) In just a couple of generations, Reform people are going to go extinct and Haredim are going to take over the world. (You can find this argument since the 1970s. But, Orthodox people manage to stay about 10% of all Jews because of a high attrition rate.)
Reform are still with us, as they have been for two centuries. And they are much larger in number than Orthodox people.
2. (p.90) The secular world is just a den of iniquity and it just can't be people actually living their lives in a matter of fact way. (85% of secular men are unfaithful to their wives, according to the Orthodox Rabbi. Who knew?)
3. (p.27) If somebody reads A Source in English, then it's not good enough. It has to be read in Hebrew. And then if it is read in Hebrew, it has to be an "unfamiliar, unpunctuated, unvowelized page of Talmud and Aramaic." And so on, ad infinitum. (This is in spite of the fact that it has been my experience that the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of Haredim do not go word-by-word in their Chumash. (If you don't believe me, ask somebody what is a "meteg" or what is the difference between "infinitive absolute" and "infinitive construct.") That is the trick that this talmudist says when it becomes apparent that the reform Rabbi has in fact read some talmud and that he cannot be fobbed off with these "go check and see if it's raining around those corner" type answers.
If this argument goes on long enough, it will turn into: "You don't know the argument because you did not gather it by poking a pin into one side of the paper and finding the relevant argument on the obverse of the page."
4. Lots of No True Scotsman fallacies. So, if I point out that sexual abuse rates among Black Hats are at least two times higher than what they are among the rest of the Orthodox world, then those particular Boy Butt Pirates are "just not Orthodox."
5. Lots of confusion about time and change. Moshe Rabbeinu never wore a shtreimel, but nothing has EVER changed since the destruction of the Second Temple by Orthodox lights. Ritual authority changed from a hereditary priesthood to communal rabbis, who earned their positions by merit (p.239). (Ironically, the Samaritans still hold to this idea, and there are about 600 of them left in the world, and none of them are recognized as Jews and have not been for about 25 centuries.)
6. There seems to be a lot of mentioning of Jews for J****. (In every case, this was for the Orthodox Rabbi to make a point, specifically about delineating what is and is not Judaism.) And that's strange, because the bad news is that there are no Jews - - genetic or otherwise - - in that Southern Baptist movement for white hicks.)
7. Typical Haredi mind-blindness.
a. No problem to accept subsidies from the Israeli state, but then also no problem to not recognize it or not recognize the Israeli flag.
b. (p.174) "In the traditional model of Jewish Family life, the man has primary responsibility for the livelihood and the woman for household and children." I'm sorry, but not a few times have I seen Kollel Bums who have 5 to 10 children and have never filled out a job application. Not. One. Time. But, their wives get up and go to work. In fact, I have seen entire kollels where the men laze about and all of their wives work.
c. (p.192) Misinterpretation of American slavery to make a point--and it would be a nice argument if it was not based on empirically false assumptions. No, slaves were not abducted. (The climate of Africa is so harsh that white people of that time would die before they even made it 50 miles inland.)
Slaves were bought from other tribes.
d. If a lady is described as a "jug full of excrement whose opening is full of blood, yet men chase after her" [Shabbat 152a] (p.200), no matter how much context you provide, the sentence does say what it says. And this is a running theme throughout the text when the Orthodox Rabbi writes: Context, context, context. Apparently NOTHING can mean what it plainly says. (Too many examples to even get into here.)
8. Lots of reductio ad Hitlerium here. The Reform Rabbi says that people who think they are in possession of The Absolute Truth come up with things such as The Final Solution. The Orthodox Rabbi says that if enough time passes, people can question the historicity of the Torah the same way people could question the historicity of the Holocaust
9. Disagreement about changes in the law. If Haredim do it, then it's ok. If Reform do it, then it's heresy. (As an example of the first case: conversion /geirut used to be something that was one and done up until yesterday; now, people who are converts exist always and everywhere in a provisional state. As an example of the second, pork used to not be okay. Now it is.)
10. Baba Metzia 59b:5 ("my children have defeated me") shows up in here AGAIN and AGAIN. If there are three Reform against ine Orthodox, why does the principle of "majority rules" not work? It works everywhere it doesn't work?
*******
-Great quotes
(p.170): "They know everything. Unfortunately, they don't know anything else."
(p.275): "Any person who would have been sent to the gas chambers by °°°°°°- - a person with a Jewish grandparent - - has an open invitation to breathe the free air of the Jewish state. This is the ultimate victory over °°°°°°."
-For any Everyday Pulpit Rabbi, there is lots and lots of material here for drasha'ot.
What is the practical significance here?
EXAMPLE 1: In the case of the Reform Rabbi, he would accept evolution as true, but should the discussion turn into an evolutionary reason for the obvious difference in IQ/intelligence between Jews and blacks, then that would be a forbidden issue..... For the Orthodox Rabbi, he would assume that all human beings were made in the image of Gd (and of course that Charles Darwin / Richard Dawkins were completely false). But, I'm pretty sure if it came time to introduce his daughter to a black guy, then that would be a forbidden issue. For that matter, if it even came time for reciting responsive amen's in behind the black guy who was davening for the amud.... Then that would be another issue entirely.
What is a black guy to do? (I haven't figured it out yet.)
EXAMPLE 2: My experience with the law (halacha) has been that it can be reinterpreted enough times to be anything at all. So, it is something about 36 times that is repeated to not harass/opressed the convert. (For the record, that is 12 times more than the repetition of not boiling a kid in its mother's milk.) There are only a small minority of people who act as if they believe that. So now what?
EXAMPLE 3: If you have a group of 100 guys, and 75 of them act as if they don't believe that Gd is watching them and 25 do, then you come up with a Gd value of about 0.25. How is that substantially different to Reform people who treat the Bible as "divinely inspired"? The first set, if they acted like they really believed in Gd would imagine that he actually wrote the 5 books of Moses. The second set says that He "kind of" wrote them.
Verdict: Some interesting arguments, but the book is 22 years old. Not worth more than $5.