A good friend jogged my memory a week or two ago at the tail end of a post on his blog. Well, it was more like a jolt than a jog. It was something about the Declaration of Independence. Which I suppose we’ve all been taught nothing but respect, awe and reverence in the face of that hallowed document. But suddenly something about it felt wrong. Massively wrong. And I don’t think it was ’cause I was in a bitchy mood, because I’m pretty sure that was not the case.
It was those words. Those words we just spout off and don’t even hear anymore. Suddenly, those words really pissed me off.
We hold these truths to be self-evident —
Now, it really doesn’t matter what follows after that, does it? You could say anything, really, and the implication is that whatever follows must be true, and that that truth is self-evident. And you can’t question it.
The word ‘truth’ is bad enough, in my book especially when it started it’s life, as this one did, as a capital ‘T’ Truth.
But self-evident? Self-evident means no evidence at all. It is hyperbole.
No, it is worse than that. That which cannot be questioned wreaks of tyranny.
All ‘truths’ require a) evidence, b) the ability to test and question that evidence, and c) independent verification. But what follows here is not that kind of real truth at all — it is an aspiration. We aspire to equality, perhaps, but we are not ‘created’ that way. And this is apart from the fact that we are not ‘created’ at all — not in the sense that the Declaration of Independence has in mind.
that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights —
You know where I’m going with this: it’s that bloody Creator thing again, for starters.
So the whole set up here is to make what follows unassailable, unquestionable, and emphatic. but these words do not make any of it actually true. And of course, the whole bit is preceded by the winning combo of ‘the Laws of Nature’ and ‘Nature’s God’ — more stuff you can’t argue with.
It’s not that I think the sentiments here aren’t admirable. Well, while we’re questioning, maybe we should question these sentiments as well:
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
I don’t actually have evidence that we have these Rights. Let’s take them one by one:
Life: This sounds reasonable, if we don’t think about it. But right from the beginning, I think about unequal prenatal care, a woman’s ability to ‘choose’ whether her unborn child lives or dies, whether that child if born, has access to sufficient good nutrition and health care (oh, and safe neighborhoods) to keep that Life sustained…
Liberty: Surely, I don’t understand this word at all. When I lived in Brussels there was a law that prohibited folks from borrowing more than a certain proportion of their income. The idea was that to become overly indebted would make us unfree. In Belgium, too much liberty was equated with very poor decision making, leading inevitably to no liberty at all. In which case, it is the role of the State to intercede on our behalf. In our country, on the other hand, Liberty seems to mean just the opposite: we are at liberty to be as self-destructive as we like — immersing ourselves in debt, weaponry, foods, and habits that lead to greater not lesser suffering. So. Liberty. Too much brings about too little.
Pursuit of Happiness: Gevalt. It’s a very fuzzy concept — it could mean anything, anything at all. Does that really belong in the Declaration of Independence?
Much of the rest of the Declaration consists of complaints against the then King of Great Britain — and that part seems a whole lot more rationally considered, if a bit whiney. It is, at least, specific, and makes the case.
But the part we like so much? The self-evident truths?
There’s something just terribly wrong with it.
Or maybe I’ve just graded too many papers in my life. The thing needs a much bigger editing job than it actually got. This is definitely not an A+ document.
I invite you to a re-writing party. Right here, right now. How would you phrase it? Would the sentiments be the same? Or are you just plain happy (sic) with something as sloppy as ”self-evident truths’ that are not self-evident at all.
What would you really like to see in there?
For me, I’d ditch the ‘created equal’ bit in favor of a right to ‘equal opportunity.’ Which was another thing that struck me living in Brussels. Tuition there was a small nominal fee per year. At the time, it was about ten bucks. Anyone, whether citizen or not, could get a higher education for next to nothing. And if you failed, you had the opportunity to try it all again… No student loans. No three jobs just to stay afloat. No debt into the hereafter. Anyone, anyone could study and learn…
But the most important thing I’d change, is I’d add responsibilities. For rights do not stand alone. They go with an obligation to serve the system that provides those rights. Taxes. Military service. Voting. Scraping graffiti off the walls. Sweeping the sidewalks. Planting trees…
Rights are always accompanied by Responsibilities — even if our hallowed document is too busy complaining about the King, or espousing the self-evident to remember this vital part of establishing any viable new order.
Mira: Yes! Absolutely let’s rewrite it. (Like any of us has time. But that’s why this is both asynchronous and slow.)
But I have a different approach to foundational texts, I think, than what you’ve used here. (I know nothing about how Beit Malkhut studies, nor what, only what’s written above; so I write in profound ignorance of you and what you do with text, and only reply to what struck me here.) I ask: What values were they trying to express, in language that doesn’t work for us but clearly worked for them? Which of those values can we embrace? And because I’m working with Torah text, not historical text, I additionally am free to ask: How can we interpret this so that our own values are found in it? Eisegesis, not just exegesis. (The internal spell-checker doesn’t recognize eisegesis, guys!)
I’m not going to sit down and do that right now, and I hope I remember to come back to it; in real-time, there are pressing things to accomplish in the next half hour. But I wanted to begin.
Rewriting will be play and fun. But here’s what really struck me about your post: The final paragraph.
In celebration of the 62nd anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (http://www.rhr-na.org/files/UDHR2009%20NewLogo.pdf), Rabbis for Human Rights – North America (www.rhr-na.org) is celebrating Dec. 10-11 as “Human Rights Shabbat.” (http://www.rhr-na.org/hrs2010) What a year, 1948!
And Rabbi Baruch Leff wrote a drash about Human Rights and Human Responsibilities, which see: http://www.rhr-na.org/files/Rabbi%20Leff%20Israel%20HR%20Shabbat%202010.pdf [For those who don’t know: sermon, but sermon tends to be off-putting and drash implies exploration and seeking.] I think you’ll like it.
Plus they published a wonderful contrapuntal text of the Universal Declaration with Jewish texts: http://www.rhr-na.org/files/MZA%20for%20Web%202.pdf
And in that, I think, are all the texts and values that I would use to rewrite the intro to our Declaration of Independence.
Except, of course, for the God part. I don’t know enough to know how it troubles you, though I’m curious about the “definitely not created” part. It doesn’t trouble me; I don’t take God too literally, though I don’t discount the use of the word either. For most people in my congregation, for instance, saying that our inherent human worth originates in each of us being created “in God’s image” expresses something that they find real (especially if you would quibble with “true.”) We have only our words — the realities are out there, and we try to understand and express them as best we can.
Last thought: The place that one can get one’s fingernails under the seamless construction of “self-evident truths” is in “We hold.”
When I was in college I had an independent study with a prof in the Religion Dept who was a nun or former nun, and I remember her saying to me that, whatever the origin of revelation, it is all mediated by human beings. Internal religious claims of perfect transmission aside, whatever we think we have understood, we have understood it.
So that’s where you get to argue with the signers. “You hold? OK, so that’s what you think. Well, here’s what I think!”
Two more comments from the book of Face:
Zoe: The ‘self evident truths’ in this post reminded me of a number theory professor I had in college, who told his students to be particularly vigilant (and in so doing, informed us that he was particularly vigilant) whenever we encountered a line item in a proof that was found to be true ‘by inspection.’ The ‘by inspection’ phrase, he pointed out, is often used when something seems obvious to the proof writer, but yet they find it maddeningly hard to actually prove. These ‘self evident truths’ seem suspiciously similar to lemmas proven ‘by inspection.’
Jonathan: If a truth is self-evident, then there is nothing to argue about. Very un-Jewish. No fun to be had if there is no argument.
I had a math prof who pointed out in our real analysis class that “Clearly…” is another sign of a shaky proof. He later suggested that when we were writing the exam, if we did nothing else in a proof, we should “Let epsilon greater than zero be given…,” show some inscrutable scratch work, state a “clearly,” and finish with “QED.” He promised partial credit for having these basic elements. How big a part? Well, let epsilon greater than zero be given…
In one of my Bible classes I learned that whenever a text finishes with chukat olam ldoroteyhem, [this is] an eternal law for your generations, its a signal that its a new piece of legislation.
“Clearly” I’m with Jonathan on this one. But to address RebDeb on how I read Jewish sacred text and approach it at Beit Malkhut, my approach is similar to what Zoe describes above. If we assume we know what a word means, then we do not look it up. The word becomes one of those self-evident truths. We make assumptions, pass it by and just keep going. But Hebrew gives us the opportunity to quite literally get to the root of the matter. Take את for example. If we say, “Oh, it doesn’t mean anything in English—all it does is introduce a direct object” which is what so many Hebrew School teachers say without thinking—then we lose the opportunity for exploring an entirely different Creation cosmology — the creation of the letters themselves (which my Beit Malkhut partner equates to the particles he studies in physics). We miss aleph-bet mysticism, the Sefer Bahir, Sefer Yetzirah, and chunks of Zohar.
Just holding that one gate open, gives us a multitude of paths we can follow. So. That’s the approach I take. It’s very very grammatical. Roots and letters. And the letters inside letters. And the roots of roots — going back to pre-Biblical times, to the fabric of proto-Semitic languages. Arabic, while a younger language, holds some more archaic grammatical forms, and provides us with hints we would miss otherwise. Akkadian and Phoenician, and even Tamazight inform us in ways that we can begin to get to the heart of the matter. I do not hold that Jewish sacred text is wholeheartedly and thoroughly ‘Jewish’ and that only Jewish midrash is appropriate. Instead, I go further and further back. Into Ugaritic archaeological records. Into Babylonian mythos. Into architectural forms at Knossos. Going deeper and deeper until we ferret out the earliest Tree of Life, say, or the original animistic ideographs behind Hebrew language itself.
And the ‘so what?’ of it all? Well, I hate it when religions think they hold ‘self-evident’ truths — yes, we’re back to that again. Or unalienable rights (to anything — like oh, say for example, LAND, that the good ‘Lord’ gave to Abraham ). Do we not need to question such things? Or do we just pick up an uzi and defend it?
Apropos nothing—time for the shikse/jwannabe in this to ask a question. Back in the early ’90s when I last made an effort to learn Hebrew, I got curious about aleph vs. ayin. Both silent, there to carry vowels along, undistinguished in the (very unsatisfying) texts I had available. But there must have been ways to distinguish them. I speculated that back in the day, one of them began with a glottal stop and the other did not. (I was rooting for ayin to have the glottal, if anyone cares.) I am still troubled by this mystery. Anyone care to illuminate?
Anyone care to suggest how “Erin” should be transliterated? ערינ or ארינ?
Oh my god! I have just discovered in my stack of papers shoved inside the hideous Barrons/Foreign Service Institute text “Mastering Hebrew” a sheet explicating the Hebrew aleph-beit, handwritten by my rebbe, with transliterated letter names, mnemonics, script, block, and plume letter forms. I suspect that it dates from 1986, but I could be off by a year or two.
Treasure!
Transliteration into Hebrew letters is not what your name is all about (but FYI, you need a nun sofit up there at the end, no matter which you choose!).
No. Instead, you’ve got to discover the Erinness of Erin (which surely you do actually know) and translate that to the concept that most approximates it. You are thereby freed of the ayin / aleph problem. Next issue, is then to not think of these wondrous letters as silent. Yes, the aleph is characterized by the glottal stop, but it’s not just a carrier of vowels (vowels being, by the way, the souls of the letters). Ayin is something else entirely. Very dynamic and powerful. But not the Sufi dancing Adam Kadmon that aleph is. Done right, ayin is very much pronounced.
Oh, right—so ארין or ערין , right? I would have done that correctly without thinking in script, but I was distracted by the unfamiliar Hebrew-QWERTY input. Also, my much lesser comfort with block/plume characters means that it just didn’t register as wrong-looking in the same way as it would have had I written it by hand.
I’d better sign up for the “on up to forever” option. Do you offer work-study scholarships?
As for my name, yes, I’m pretty sure I know the Erinness of Erin, but that doesn’t get me any further. Another commission for you it is, then. Reb Deb, if you’ve already got it all figured out, please share.
Sorry for the delay — it was written, just didn’t get here for a couple of weeks. Erin, my approach to letters and words and names is quite different from Mira’s. Ayin, as you hoped, was/is guttural, and Jews from Arabic countries retain a difference in pronounciation between Alef and Ayin that Ashkenazi Jews have lost. From that point of view, you’d use Alef. (From Biblical PoV if you wanted a short “i,” you’d have to ditch the Yud, but then the pronounciation would be ambiguous, so don’t.)
Yiddish has its own set of spelling rules in which vowels are indicated by letters; Ayin is the “eh” vowel marker and the Yud would not be optional.
And Modern Hebrew specifies which of the pairs of letters with the same sound (originally distinct, but same in Ashkenazi pronounciation) are used for transliteration, and Alef is used when a silent letter is needed. (“University” contains all the choices except the “k” sound, I believe.) Again, Yud would probably be specified in Modern Hebrew.
So take your pick of paradigms.
And of course Mira is also right — were you to have the opportunity and necessity of taking a Jewish name, merely transliterating Erin wouldn’t even be on the table.
Translating names is an interesting topic in itself. My name has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, and Korean for business purposes, and each of those projectlets was an education for me.
In Japanese, my favorite translators said there was really nothing at all close in Japanese names to my name and instead recommended transliterating a Japanization, “Erinu Vannu” I think. They offered to create something entirely new for me but said that in Japanese business, what’s generally preferred is just a katakana transliteration of your Western name to help Japanese colleagues with figuring out how to pronounce it.
My Chinese translators recommended choosing a “beautiful” Chinese name, by all the traditional rules of Chinese naming, that sounds as close as possible to my name. The name they found for “Vang” (which in Norwegian is sort of like “mountain”) a homophone for mountain and king, which they said was auspicious. They gave me a “first” name that sounds like Erin (which refers to the “Emerald Isle”) and means “Little Jade.” Whenever I’ve given my business card to a Chinese colleague, I’ve received delighted comments on my beautiful name, and once eight Chinese men at lunch talked about that alone until well after the food arrived.
My Korean translator admired the Chinese rendering and basically respelled that in Hangul in a way that, he said, preserved its poetry.
Speaking of names, here’s a tip for the shy or sociophobic: if you’re ever stuck in an awkward silence with anyone, anywhere in the world, just ask what his or her name means. Their reply will buy you at least fifteen minutes to think of another question, and if you can manage to make yourself listen to the fifteen-minute answer, you’ll get plenty of hints.
“The soul of the letters”: Reminds me of Merle Felds poem about the consonants and vowels at Mt. Sinai. http://www.ritualwell.org/holidays/shavuotreceivingtorah/primaryobject.2009-03-31.8206389174
Curiously, the sociophobe isn’t shy. She’s counterphobic when stuck in the unanticipated presence of others. So. There are almost never awkward silences — and I’m close to incapable of letting someone go without delving into his or her names, or admonishing their lack of knowledge (or interest) in their own story. Collecting stories is something I’m good at.
Anthropologist, remember? Contact with humans is something I get paid to do — and I do it well. I was serious in my Sociophobe post. I really do use those strategies and they really do work.
There was another bit I wanted to respond to in Reb Deb’s comments above. That thing about values. As an anthropologist, I phrase it quite differently. I look at how humans have used text, especially sacred text, to validate their individual and collective behaviors. They do this claiming that their values are derived from the text — or worse, that the text ‘made me do it.’ And of course that text might give examples of exactly the same kind of justification. Take the Akedah, for example. So. The ‘values’ part is actually the part that annoys me the most, when I’m not being gracious enough to keep my anthropological hat on. But even my anthropological hat is not sympathetic to the values derived. Instead it is analytical: this is what people DO and here’s how they justify it. Personally, I can’t stand many of the values espoused in foundational texts! As is ‘self-evident’ above.
Mira, at first writing, I thought that what you do as an anthropologist is, indeed, look at what I do as a rabbi: I do use texts to validate, to en-value, personal and collective behaviors. Yes. Definitely. (I also care about the history of interpretation, but primarily as part of my own interpretation.)
But it turns out that that’s not my primary use of text. My primary use of text is as story, as collective memory. As massechet, as webbing, to knit a community together through time as well as through space. As narrative. I think that narrative is one of the most powerful forces in the human universe.
(Just today I read this where narrative figures prominently in healing: http://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2010/12/22/meet-the-ethical-placebo-a-story-that-heals/)
And as a liberal/progressive/grumpy independent person/rabbi/Jew, I refuse in any case to be bound by what the texts say if I disagree with them. It’s why I have never had any trouble being a lesbian (and a rabbi to boot); if something in the texts has been construed to say that I shouldn’t exist, it’s always been obvious to me that the text (or the construing) is wrong, not my existence. (Not everybody has that fortitude, I know, and the texts have been used to hurt, I acknowledge.)
What I *am* constrained by, by choice, is that I don’t throw certain texts out of the canon. They are part of the webbing and deleting them would leave a hole. I reinterpret. I dig deeper. I try to understand them in the context of their time(s). I see how they shifted values from, for instance, the ANE texts that they are clearly based on. If necessary I declare them invalid (hoo! what authority I have!) but they remain.
BTW, my grandfather’s first cousin was Cyrus Gordon, so although I don’t have any of those languages at my command, I was raised with a bit of knowledge and respect for their existence. Though I admit to not recognizing Tamazight. And I had a great prof undergrad who opened me to comparative legal analysis of Torah and ANE legal texts, and in rabbinical school I took a class comparing bits of Mishnaic and Torah legal codes which also pointed out how Mishnah sometimes codified extant ANE legal practices. So although that kind of textual analysis (some of what you do at Beit Malkhut) isn’t what I do day to day, it’s not foreign (!) to me either. And I do use the word “proto-Semitic” at least a few times a year in teaching my Adult Hebrew students.
Back to the topic. Take the Akedah, for instance. [Binding of Isaac, Genesis Ch. 22.] In learning to leyn (chant) that portion, a long time ago, a huge silence jumped out at me. Between verse 2 and verse 3. God gives Abraham this absurd, outrageous command. And Abraham gets up bright and early the next morning to carry it out!
Where’s the argument? Where’s the challenge? This man who stands up to God so eloquently on behalf of the strangers of Sodom and Gomorrah is utterly silent on behalf of his own son.
Sometimes you preach against the text, because sometimes it teaches you what not to do.
Actually, I do that sometimes when I introduce Kaddish, and sometimes for funerals when there were difficult relationships: Ideally, those who came before us leave a legacy which we put into practice by carrying on the best of what they did. But sometimes by their actions they taught us instead what not to do.
I guess I’m saying, don’t blame the texts for their values; blame the interpreters. The texts are what they are, but we can make midrash on anything, we human beings, and our job is to do so from our strong ethical center. Just because the text says “God said” doesn’t mean that people who take that text seriously must take it as gospel. Taking the text seriously requires neither taking it literally nor kowtowing to whatever it says on the face of it. And I do take text seriously, as you can probably tell.
All the moreso when it’s with music; it reaches different places.
The Biblical parallel to “clearly” and “self-evident”: In one of my Bible classes I learned that whenever a text finishes with chukat olam l’doroteyhem, “[this is] an eternal law for your generations,” it’s a clear signal that it’s a new piece of legislation.
Kevin Vang commented on the book of Face:
i think jefferson is showing some mathematical training here. he certainly would have studied euclid’s elements, in which an entire geometry is derived from a handful of definitions and 5 postulates (ie, statements assumed to be self-evidently true.) when jefferson declares the intention to build a new society based on the postulate that all men are created equal, the european aristocracy would have found that as heretical as mathemeticians found it when bolyai and lobachevski discovered non-euclidean geometry 50 years later.