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An End Must Come for All Things

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Note: I wrote this 2 years ago but somehow forgot to push the “publish” button…

Wednesday, August 31, will be my last day as a member of the faculty of University of Tennessee. It wasn’t supposed to be, but that’s how things worked out.

Several months before the start of the semester, I became concerned that I was seeing much lower than typical enrollment in my beginning Biblical Hebrew course. I notified the department Head (at U of Tennessee we have “Heads” rather than “Chairs” at most other schools) and she sent my concern along to the faculty member leading our Judaic Studies group. Together we put together a bit of a poster which was tweeted out via some sort of established publicity framework. To little avail. As the semester drew closer, enrollment rose from 3 to 5.

There is no hard-and-fast minimum enrollment at UTK, but any course under 12 can be canceled for that reason should the Powers-That-Be make that decision.

One complication for me is that the first course in Biblical Hebrew is the first in a four-semester sequence. That creates something of an obligation to provide all four semesters to any students who wish to complete the sequence. Over my 11 year career, this had never been an issue, because after the second time it was offered, I exceeded minimum enrollment every year. Still, most students do not want the full four semester sequence. Some want as little as a single semester because that is sufficient to satisfy several University breadth requirements. Others just want the two semesters during which we cover all of Biblical Hebrew grammar as well as two complete books: Jonah and Ruth.

As you can imagine, I was quite anxious as opening day loomed. I sent a memo to the Head stating my concerns and wondering if she might prefer to cancel the course. But as it turned out, I was wrong about one critical point. My course was not unusual within the group of foreign language courses at UT. Rather, there were many in the same situation. While it can be difficult to assess why any given situation might arise, one factor was very clear: the decision by one of the University’s largest schools, the School of Business, to end a degree requirement of four semesters of a foreign language, had crippled enrollments in many courses. When the dust had settled, it turned out that foreign language enrollments in the various departments that offer them had dropped by five hundred students.

You might wonder why Biblical Hebrew would have been affected–after all, how many Business majors register for Biblical Hebrew? But that misses the point. Classes are offered at various times during the day, and students try to get into the classes when they want to be on campus. So if the Spanish classes at that hour are full, they look around for other classes meeting at that time. That’s why almost every year my courses did not fill until late in the enrollment process. But this year, those Spanish classes and other more popular language classes, did not fill and there was therefore less reason for students to look deeper into the catalog.

Another significant point is that there are only a few foreign language courses where students can learn a great deal about a language but not need to actually speak the language. All ancient language, not just Biblical Hebrew, fall into this category. So the student who might have been shy about enrolling in Spanish or French might find a more comfortable place in Greek, Latin or ancient Hebrew.

The College of Arts and Sciences could see what was happening, and felt a strong need to preserve the strength of our language programs. They therefore had a meeting in which all the Heads were informed that the College would back their decisions to continue low-enrollment classes. One Latin class is running with just one student. The Heads of all the foreign language departments contacted the College and every request to allow the course to proceed was granted. Had my Head contacted the College, she would have been granted the same privilege. But she didn’t bother and instead canceled my course. I know that this was contrary to the wishes of the College, because not knowing that she had already acted, the Associate Dean in charge of such things wrote to her and assured her that my course could run.

I found out that I didn’t have a class when I showed up to teach it and there was just one student in the room. I asked him to check his email and sure enough, he had a message from the Registrar notifying him that he had to find another course because Biblical Hebrew had been cancelled.

This gave me the “honor” of being the only foreign language teacher at UTK to lose a course over enrollment issues. Every other instructor with similar issues is continuing, including as I mentioned, a Latin course with one student.

This did not end my appointment at UTK because I still had a functioning Intermediate Biblical Hebrew course. But this meant that I now had to arrange my life around a job that required my presence on campus for just 1 hour, three days per week. And while it might seem all that important to some folks, in one push of a button my Head had literally cut my salary by 50%.

As my friends know, I recently exceeded 70 years of age and I have some health issues. I’m not willing to go to campus for just one course, and I’m also not willing to take a salary cut of 50% to continue.

As I said at the outset, it’s not the way I would have chosen to do it, but as of the end of August, I have retired from the University of Tennessee. Not that as a part-time lecturer the University will give me any status as a retiree. I’ll simply disappear from the campus as if I had never been there.

Capital Punishment: The View from Judaism

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There is not the slightest doubt that throughout the historical period when the Bible was composed that capital punishment was an accepted and indeed commonplace fact of life. Not only does the Bible authorize capital punishment, but prescribes and demands it for many offenses. Lift a stone on the Sabbath? The Torah requires a death sentence. Commit adultery? Death to all parties. And adultery is hardly the only sexual offense for which the death penalty is meted out–incest, bestiality, male homosexual relations. Leviticus 20 details all these and adds such things as consulting with a ghost–some sort of communion with a supernatural being. Apparently seeking your fortune from a Gypsy could be a capital crime in the eyes of Leviticus. Oh, and be careful what you say to your parents, insulting one is another capital crime. All this is in Leviticus 20, but there are references to the necessity for capital punishment in every book of the Torah and throughout the rest of the Hebrew Bible.

One might have expected change with the introduction of Christianity, after all, it would not be any kind of exaggeration to suggest that the most infamous case of capital punishment in human history is the execution of the man Christians claim was the Messiah, the anointed of God and later celebrated as God’s son. But nowhere do we find any suggestion that the execution of Jesus was anything but the legitimate exercise of government power. As described in the Gospels, Jesus was accused of a capital crime, received a fair trial by the standards of his time, and executed according to the dictates of the law. But far from resulting in any condemnation of capital punishment, nations adopting Christianity accepted capital punishment for an ever widening set of infractions. In nineteenth century England, wags noted that spectators who came to see the public hangings of pick-pockets often discovered that their own pockets had been picked.

The history of capital punishment takes a major turn with the meditations of the post-Biblical rabbinic movement. It is easy to say that this resulted from the fact that Jews by and large ceased to be self-governing in the wake of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. If a Jew were charged with a capital crime, they would be at the mercy of a non-Jewish legal entity. Confronted with what were almost certainly many executions for such crimes as “blasphemy”–or simply because gentiles wished to confiscate their belongings–such circumstances might well lead to a questioning of the fairness of capital punishment.

But how could the rabbis of that post-Temple era question the legitimacy of capital punishment? Did we not begin this discussion by noting that capital punishment is quite literally demanded by every book of the Torah?

What we find is that they found a weak spot in the logic of capital punishment: the legitimacy of the courts which are required to mete out the sentence. How does anyone know that one of the enumerated crimes has occurred? In most cases, it could only happen by the testimony of witnesses. In various texts the rabbis found ways to undermine relying on such testimony. They enacted such protections as requiring the testimony of at least two eyewitnesses to a capital crime. They admonished the witnesses that they could themselves be charged with a capital crime if they lie or distort the truth. And in one text they declared that any court which sentenced more than one person to death within 70 years is a homicidal court and must be disbanded (Makkot 7a).

The modern State of Israel has experienced a wide variety of crimes which surely merit the death penalty, but Israel has executed just one person in the more than 70 years of its existence: Adolph Eichmann.

Most western democracies and many American states have outlawed the death penalty out of a recognition that certainty will always elude us. But elsewhere in the world, and among many US states, the death penalty remains. As I write this, two Americans have been executed in two different states who may very well have been innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted. And a man in Texas is awaiting execution for a crime he almost certainly did not commit.

This barbarism simply must end.

O Hanukkah Bush, O Hanukkah Bush!

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Time to remind ourselves about this chestnut (roasting on an open fire).

One of my dear friends on social media after peering at a photo I posted while at my daughter’s family exclaimed, “Is that a Hanukkah bush?!” Indeed it is, I replied, and why not?

A few facts. It can’t be denied that Jews of my parents’ generation saw “Christmas trees” as Christian and discouraged their use within their communities. While that can’t be denied, in fact, there is nothing I can think of that makes a Christmas tree Christian other than the sorts of ornaments one might hang on one–such a cross, or placing a Nativity scene somewhere in the display. The tree itself is just a tree, and almost certainly represented some form of Winter worship or expectations of Spring among the Pagan communities of northern Europe long before they were Christianized.

We can’t be exactly sure about when Jesus was born, but we can say that according Christian Scripture, it was not on Christmas. The correct date cannot be known without additional evidence appearing, but almost all of those who have written on the topic place the event either in the Fall or Spring. From a Jewish perspective, that would suggest either at the time of the Fall or Spring festivals. December 25 was not chosen until centuries after the lifetime of Jesus. A historian and religious skeptic such as myself would argue that this was important to take people’s minds off of a very popular Pagan celebration, namely Saturnalia.

Now, many of my Jewish friends are convinced that the date of Hanukkah is reliably the 25th of Kislev, roughly December. As always, it’s much more complicated than that. First of all, those Jews who would become the basis for modern Judaism despised the Hasmoneans. Far from “liberators” they saw this dynasty as the very embodiment of “Greek” civilization–the very culture against whom Judas Maccabeas supposedly fought! It appears that they invented the story of the oil which lasted for 8 days to replace a festival honoring the Maccabean kings which they had decreed to usurp the authority of Solomon who Scripture says celebrated the dedication of the first Temple with a week-long celebration. 1 Kings 8:66 describes this event and says that the people were dismissed on the eighth day. And so we get eight:

 בַּיּ֤וֹם הַשְּׁמִינִי֙ שִׁלַּ֣ח אֶת־הָעָ֔ם וַֽיְבָרֲכ֖וּ אֶת־הַמֶּ֑לֶךְ וַיֵּלְכ֣וּ לְאָהֳלֵיהֶ֗ם שְׂמֵחִים֙ וְט֣וֹבֵי לֵ֔ב עַ֣ל כָּל־הַטּוֹבָ֗ה אֲשֶׁ֙ר עָשָׂ֤ה יְהוָה֙ לְדָוִ֣ד עַבְדּ֔וֹ וּלְיִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל עַמּֽוֹ׃

And on the 8th day, (Solomon) released the people and they praised the king and returned to their God glad and rejoicing in the all the good that the LORD had done for David his servant and for Israel his people.

I would suggest that the placement of this holiday in December was, just like their Christian contemporaries, a way to usurp the Pagan festivals common at the time of the year when the Sun mysteriously signals it’s triumph over Winter by lengthening it’s days. December 25th, by the way, is probably the date when most people could notice a change after the Winter Solstice.

Personally, I don’t see much danger of a return by either Jewish or Christian religious communities to Paganism, and therefore I don’t have much of a problem with either or both groups celebrating the return of the Sun by decorating a tree.

Now, in my family, we have to add another, important fact. Clara and Alexander’s dad is a renowned expert on trees. So much so that as I write this he has the position of Assistant Director of the National Forest Service for the region of the USA from Maine to the Mississippi river, north of the Ohio. So of course there is going to be a decorated Winter tree in their home!

Having said that, take a look at the ornament that tops this tree. Hint: it’s not a cross. But if you choose to have a cross on yours, good for you!

I hope all my Christian friends will have the most joyous of holidays, and if my Jewish friends want to steal the idea of a tree, nothing wrong with it! Merry Hanumas!

Hanumas Tree

Love Malcolm Tree of Life

Honoring RBG

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Today on Facebook I’d like to publish a fundraiser to honor the memory of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. There are many charities that you can choose to do this, but I’m suggesting that this one has special meaning in several aspects of RBG’s life: The National Tay-Sachs and Allied Disease Foundation (NTSAD).

Tay-Sachs disease is a 100% fatal disease that is concentrated in two populations, Jews of Eastern European ancestry like RBG, and the Cajuns of Canada and Louisiana. TS does occur more generally, but those two groups see it the most often.

Tay-Sachs disease is a nightmare. Because it is rare, physicians do not generally test pregnant women for it, and even in the main populations where it is more common, it is often not detected until late in a pregnancy. If a child is born with it, that child is doomed to a maximum of 4 years of life. Every day of that life will be filled with pain. The child will often scream in agony for hours on end, and the signs of their discomfort never stop. There is no possibility of anything resembling a normal childhood, or a normal life for the family.

Tay-Sachs disease also has terrible social consequences. Parents who cannot afford round-the-clock nursing care have to do it themselves. Over half the parents with a Tay-Sachs child wind up in divorce proceedings. You might be able to imagine what this might mean for the other children of those marriages.

I have a personal connection to Tay-Sachs: I am a carrier of the gene. The disease occurs when both parents are carriers and a child is born with a double dose of the gene. If one parent has the gene, they can pass the gene to a child, but the child then becomes a carrier rather than a victim. Even if both parents have the gene, there is just a 25% chance that a child will actually develop it. My grandmother lost the lottery. She bore 6 children in the WW1 era Europe, and 3 of them died before age 2. When I asked my father and one surviving aunt what killed them, all they would say is that they died of a horrible disease. Although it is not possible to say with certainty that this was Tay-Sachs because this preceded genetic testing, given that we are carriers and the family had decent economic status (so there was no malnutrition at that point), TS is a reasonable surmise.

There is another connection to Ruth Bader Ginsberg here. Tay-Sachs disease is one of the conditions that makes it imperative to preserve Roe v. Wade. Parents should have a choice about whether to bring a Tay-Sachs baby into the world. As I watch various states pass anti-choice bills, I look at their provisions to see what would happen if parents discover they have a Tay-Sachs fetus in the 3rd trimester. As of yet, I haven’t seen a single one of these bills that would allow a termination under these circumstances. Some of those bills allow for termination for rape or incest, but not a one to spare parents from a child’s agony, family bankruptcy and divorce.

And please understand that while Cajuns and Ashkenazi Jews suffer disproportionately from this scourge, it (and similar genetic disorders) can and does hit everyone.

[This article was posted as a Facebook fundraiser.]

Please consider a donation to this wonderful organization today. When Facebook tells me that the donation period has concluded, I’ll try to make sure the Foundation knows that it was in honor of Ruth Bader Ginsberg. And Terri and I will start the ball rolling with a $75 contribution.

Happy Birthday, Mary Love

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One of the most important people in my life was born this date, August 6, 1915, so this is 104th anniversary of her birth. Mary was my father’s first wife, he married my mother after he divorced Mary. They remained on a friendly basis and we made the occasional pilgrimage from our home in the Bronx to Mary’s apartment on 112th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam, not far from Columbia University. Mary was Mary_Loveimportant to me among many reasons because her apartment was a place of tranquility in the tempest of my life.

My father was impatient and my mother was mentally ill–not a good combination. Arguments were frequent and loud in my own living space, and I longed to be someplace else. When I was about 7 years old, I walked across the hall to the apartment where my cousin Marty lived and begged him to tell me how to get to Mary’s apartment. Marty was about 5 years older than I was and wise to the ways of the New York City Transit Authority. He gave me directions.

One weekend day soon after, during a robust disagreement between my parents, I walked the two blocks to Southern Boulevard and then another 4 blocks to the IRT 174th Street Station. I didn’t need to pay a fare, because in those days the rule was that anyone who could walk under the turnstile could ride free. And for better or for worse, I’ve always been short for my age. I boarded the Southbound IRT train and watched for the Grand Central, 42nd Street stop according to Marty’s directions. From there, I took the Shuttle Train one stop to Times Square. Being careful to look for the Uptown side, I made sure to take the Number 1 Broadway Local. I disembarked at 110th Street and headed up to street level.

From 110th St., I stayed on Broadway and walked two blocks north to 112th Street. I recognized the street well. The church of Saint John the Divine filled the end of the street. I walked past Tom’s Restaurant (the facade used for the Seinfeld show), the Goddard Space Institute, and the next building was Mary’s. The front door was locked, but someone opened the door for me, and I walked up the stairs to the second, Mary’s floor. I quickly found Apt 2G and rang the door bell. I could hear some rustling around behind the door, and soon Mary was peering through the peephole, but she couldn’t see me–I told you I was short. I knocked, and she said, “Who’s there?” “It’s Jackie, I replied.” “Jackie?!!!”

The door opened and she was completely astonished. The first thing she did after inviting me in was call my parents. She made me a grilled cheese sandwich and something to drink and chatted the hour or so it took before my father arrived to fetch me. He would have been apoplectic were it not for the fact that both he and my mother were just relieved that I had been found safe and unharmed after the few hours I had been gone. We returned home by taxi.

That trip lasted only a few hours, but it was the first of too many to count. After that, I returned to Mary’s house almost every weekend, often sleeping over.  In Mary’s house I found good literature. We went to the movies together, Broadway shows, off-Broadway shows, and off-off-Broadway shows. We went to every museum that Mary could find, and Manhattan had a lot of them. We ate all over the Village, Midtown and the Columbia district. If I am somewhat normal today, I owe all that to my life with Mary Love. I miss her every day, but this day I celebrate the day she was born.

Health Care in Post Revolutionary America

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We’re coming up on the first anniversary of my encounter with the American system of health care, so I think it’s worth doing a little recap and asking a few questions. I’ll keep this as short as I can, but health care is a complicated topic, so I hope you can spare a few minutes to read it in full.

Back in 2010 I retired from the University of Michigan a few years earlier than most people can consider such a thing. The largest obstacle many of you will face in taking early retirement if you are US citizens living in the US is the question of how you are going to obtain health care. And let me explain that I didn’t take early retirement so that I could play golf or sit on my butt, my object was (and is) to see if i can do something with my life more in line with what I set out to do after college. For my first year out I spent time trying to help folks living with a mental illness and now I am engaged in teaching Biblical languages and literature at the University level. With a little help from the Almighty and my friends I might see the day when I complete the Ph.D. I started to write in 1979.

Back to health care. Shortly after I agreed to the terms of the early retirement, the University of Michigan informed me that I could continue to receive their health care plan, but the cost would be $1,400 per month. As generous as the retirement offer was, there would have been no way that I could have afforded to pay that out of pocket. The reason I could consider taking the University of Michigan up on an offer to retire early was that I have a supportive spouse who agreed to carry me on her health plan. And so, with health care presumably under control, I took the offer.

A year after I retired, my wife received an attractive offer from the University of Tennessee Knoxville (UTK). Since I was retired, it was easy to give the offer serious consideration and we ultimately decided to take it. I arrived in Knoxville slightly before Terri just after Thanksgiving 2011. And just after I arrived, I suffered a pretty severe injury to my left knee brought on by all the moving activity. I wound up in the ER of UT where they spent some time making sure that I wasn’t going to bleed to death or need an amputation, and then they sent me home with a referral and advice to follow up with x-rays, etc. That’s when the “fun” began.

At that time (late November 2011) I was fully covered by the health plan of the University of Michigan. Beginning on January 1, 2012 I was fully covered under the health care plan of the University of Tennessee. At no time, not one day, was I lacking health care insurance. Nevertheless, I found myself effectively deprived of health care for about six weeks. This is how that happened.

As soon as I returned from the ER, I did what I was supposed to do under the terms of my Michigan insurance. I called the plan to inform them of the injury and to request that they authorize the recommended care. They cheerfully informed me that less the deductible, my ER visit was fully covered. They also said I was welcome to obtain all the follow-up care recommended by the ER with my “primary physician.” I pointed out that I was living in Knoxville and the primary physician was in Dexter, Michigan. They recommended that I fly or take the bus so I could receive my health care. When I pointed out that the health care was supposed to be covered when I was living outside Michigan, they replied, yes, that’s true, but you have to prove that you have lived outside the state for three years before that kicks in.

I wasn’t going to leave my spouse to deal with all the moving issues as she settled into her new position in Knoxville, so I just “toughed it out” reasoning that I would soon be covered by health care via the University of Tennessee. On January 2, now legally covered by UTK, I called a physician who had been recommended to me here in Knoxville. His appointments secretary looked me up “in the system” and informed me that since I wasn’t listed (yet) she could not offer me an appointment. I was flabbergasted. Really? She went on to explain that the UTK policy was that claims have to be filed within two weeks of the appointment or they would be automatically denied. It can take two or three weeks for the coverage to show up, and so in the past they have lost the ability to collect their fee for service because of this policy. As a result, they adopted their own policy which is not to see anyone who doesn’t appear on the claims list.

I did not have to wait the month or so this would have meant. I had made a physician friend in the community and he called to ask me how things were going. When I explained all this to him, he called the physician directly and the following day, the appointments secretary was back on the phone to me offering me an appointment. Altogether, I was unable to see a follow-up physician after my accident for six weeks.

This is how it was for a person with some of the best health care insurance in America. And all of the barriers to care that I experienced can be chalked up to insurance companies. Had I lived in Canada, England, New Zealand or tiny Israel I would have received prompt, good attention to my medical needs without fuss or muss. But in America, with our vaunted health care as available to those lucky enough to have insurance, I was treated like a pauper begging for care. Actually worse, because a pauper might have been eligible for indigent care.

The political silly season is now upon us. I am unconvinced that the problems I have experienced will be ameliorated by Obamacare because I don’t think Obamacare does much to reign in insurance abuse. What I would like to know is what precisely Romney/Ryan will do to improve this situation. I understand they oppose Obamacare (as I do). But that’s not good enough. While I dislike Obamacare, I think it is better than the nothing we had before Obamacare. Getting rid of Obamacare only puts us back to an even worse situation. What is the solution to this insanity we have in our country? Under what clause of what Romney/Ryan plan would I have been able to receive medical attention in less than the six weeks it took?