two more recipes (both kosher as always)
A "red-red" bean and tomato dish.

A very gooey honey cake (if it even counts as cake at all!)

Dvar Torah- Vayetze
A few quotes of interest:

When evening came, he [Laban] took his daughter Leah and brought her to him [Jacob]; and he cohabited with her….When morning came, there was Leah! So he said to Laban, “What is this you have done to me? I was in your service for Rachel! Why did you deceive me?” Laban said, “It is not the practice in our place to marry off the younger before the older. [Genesis 29:23-26]

Meanwhile Laban had gone to shear his sheep, and Rachel stole her father’s teraphim [household idols]. [ibid. 31:19]

In the evening they came to lead her [Leah] into the bridal chamber and extinguished the light. … The whole of that night he [Jacob] called her ‘Rachel’, and she answered him. In the morning, however, “there was Leah” Said he to her: ' What, you are a deceiver and the daughter of a deceiver! ' ‘Is there a teacher without pupils,’ she retorted; ‘did not your father call you " Esau ", and you answered him! So did you too call me and I answered you! “So he said to Laban What is this you have done to me? I was in your service for Rachel! Why did you deceive me?” Laban said, “It is not the practice in our place to marry off the younger before the older. [Genesis Rabbah 70:19]

My former rabbi, Arnold Goodman, points out that Jacob and Rachel seem to be part of a cycle of deception. Jacob deceives Israel by pretending to be Esau, and in return he is deceived by Leah. Rachel is also victimized by her father (who "dumps" her by substituting Leah as Jacob's bride) and, perhaps in retaliation, deceives him by stealing his idols and lying about it (Gen. 31:33-35).

Jacob, Leah and Rachel are all occasionally economical with the truth (to put it charitably). Yet they are the parents of the Jewish people, constantly mentioned in our prayers. The Torah is trying to tell us that nobody's perfect - that even our great leaders can be dishonest once in a while. By giving us this message, perhaps the Torah is creating an extra safeguard against idolatry, reminding us that no leader, spiritual or political, is infallible.

another link

Dvar Torah-Toldot
This week's Torah portion has one of the more familiar Torah stories- Jacob (after being mercilessly egged on by his mother Rebecca) deceives his father Isaac to get a blessing, thus making his brother Esau extremely mad (and in fact a bit homicidal).

A few things leap out at me.

1. Why was Isaac's blessing (assuming it really was just a blessing of words and/or spiritual leadership rather than a tangible gift of
property)* worth deceiving Isaac and sundering a family over? To the extent anyone other than Jacob is responsible for Jacob's destiny, only God can really affect Jacob's destiny. His father's predictions are about as important as my predictions as to who's going to be elected President in three years - valid insofar as he knows his children, but not something that can actually affect their fate.

One possible (but not very traditional, I think) spin: Rebecca was just benighted and superstitious. If so, maybe the story is trying to tell us to trust God and to ignore superstition.

2. After Isaac learns that he has been deceived, he tells Esau that he has made Jacob "a lord . . . over you" (Gen. 27:37, Artscoll translation) and then he gives the following blessing: "Behold, of the fatness of the earth shall be your dewlling and of the dwe of the heavens from above. By your sword you shall live, but your brother you shall serve; yet it shall be that when you are aggrieved, you may cast your yoke from upon your neck." (Id., 28:39-40).

S.R. Hirsch points out that none of this really happens till Messianic times, when Esau's descendants serve the Jews.

So why couldn't Isaac have just been a bit more tactful, by substituting a personal prophecy for a national one? He could have just told Esau about what would happen during Esau's life (i.e. that Esau would be filthy rich, have lots of kids, and basically have a pretty good life)** and just let it go at that?***

*Which may not be the case. Shlomo Riskin suggest that the "blessing" was really a double portion of property traditionally given to the firstborn. If this is so, the story of course makes more sense.

**As far as I can tell from Gen. 36, which states that Esau's "wealth was too abundant for them [Jacob and Esau] to dwell together." (Gen. 36:7)

***Of course, he would have had to explain what made Jacob's blessing better. But anything he said would have been more tactful than Gen. 27:37- for example, that Jacob would be a great spiritual leader or something.

a neat story
I spent this Shabbos reading the writings of Israel Salanter, a 19th-century East European rabbi who was very involved in the Mussar movement.

One story struck me: the Talmud cites a story about a man "vexed" by his wife who goes to sleep in a cemetery that night.

Why a cemetery? Salanter explains that the man "felt indignant." Such indignation is "a weakening of the trait of humility [because] . .. The mark of true humility is to not feel any effrontery or indignation whatsoever." (p. 273)

The man realized his flaw, and thought that sleeping in a cemetery would make him more humble by reminding him that he will wind up in the cemetery as "food for worms."

I'm not sure that I want to spend my nights in cemeteries (or even know where the nearest one is) but do think many people (including me) could do with a little less righteous indignation in their lives.

a few things I am thankful for
I was at a Thanksgiving lunch at a local shul today, and we were asked to name something we are thankful for.

Of course, I am thankful for all the things most Americans of my age and social class are (e.g. good health, not living in the Third World, family, etc.).

But I am also thankful for a few more me-specific things, including but by no means limited to:

1. That I can afford to live two blocks from work;
2. That my apartment hasn't had any roaches (at least not yet);
3. That I can live in a neighborhood with a vibrant Jewish life and STILL live two blocks from work;
4. That I like my job.

Yet another of my old articles available online
on sprawl as a conservative issue.

great article on Israel
Some American Jews talk about Israel as if everyone there is either a haredi (aka "Ultra-Orthodox") or completely irreligious.

This article is a welcome corrective to that illusion, pointing out that most Israel Jews are somewhere in between. For example, the majority aren't regular shul-goers- but 69% of Israeli Jews have kosher homes, and 63% never eat pork or shellfish. In short, the average Israeli Jew is not a complete secularist, and in fact is more observant than most American Jews.

Dvar Torah- Vayera
In this week's Torah portion, the city of Sodom is destroyed for its evil deeds (Gen. 13:13). According to the Talmud, Sodom's most common problem was hostility towards charity for the poor and hospitality towards non-natives. The Talmud writes:

The men of Sodom waxed haughty only on account of the good which the Holy One, blessed be He, had lavished upon them...They said: Since there cometh forth bread out of (our) earth, and it hath the dust of gold, why should we suffer wayfarers, who come to us only to deplete our wealth. . .[an overly charitable maiden suffered the following punishment:] they daubed her with honey and placed her on the parapet of the wall, and the bees came and consumed her. Thus it is written, And the Lord said, The cry of Sodom and Gomorrah, because it is great (rabbah): whereupon Rab Judah commented in Rab's name: on account of the maiden (ribah)."(Sanhedrin 109a)

In other words, the Sodomites wanted to prevent outsiders from coming in and burdening them, and were quite willing to use the coercive power of the state to meet this goal.

Sound familiar? It should. American local governments use the coercive power of the state to keep out outsiders, through the miracle of exclusionary zoning. If a landowner wants to increase the housing supply or build cheaper housing, the neighbors will squawk (because less expensive housing might weaken the community's tax base and/or bring in less affluent residents), and the politicians will keep out newcomers by refusing to rezone property.

In other words, just as the inhabitants of Sodom sought to use the coercive, punitive power of government to keep out outsiders, so do American suburbs. (Thankfully, Americans don't use "death by bees", or even less painful forms of capital punishment, to enforce their selfishness).

Of course, a few liberals and civil rights types condemn this practice- but of course, few Americans care what THEY link.

One would think that economists devoted to the free market would condemn this practice- but some don't.

A book I recently read (Zoned Out, by Jonathan Levine)* describes one economist's view: "households would seek to locate in communities with average housing consumption higher than their own and, by keeping their property tax burden lower than their neighbors, would effectively enjoy a subsidy- high-level schools, police protection, and the like at a discount . . . the route out of this bind ran via exclusionary zoning policies. [The commentator's] main assumption was that each community is authorized to enact a zoning ordinance which states, 'No household may reside in this community unless it consumes at least some minimum amount of housing."

In other words, some argue that bureaucratic interference with property rights is terrible when it helps the poor or the environment, but is somehow "efficient" because it keeps out people who don't buy big houses, that is- "wayfarers, who come to us only to deplete our wealth" (in the words of the Sodomites quoted above).

The city of Sodom comes and goes, but its ideology lives on. Can't America do better?


*To purchase this book go to
http://www.rff.org/rff/RFF_Press/CustomBookPages/Zoned-Out.cfm

amusing
Thanks to Baraita:

Aleph for Abihu, struck down by the Lord
Bet is for Balaam, cut off by a sword

Gimel for Gomorrah, dissolving in fire
Dalet for Dathan, sucked into a mire
Drat! See comments --

Gimel for Gad, who died out in Goshen
Dalet for Dathan, buried in slow motion

Hay is for Haran, who merely died young
Vav is for Vofsi's son*, plagued by his tongue

Zayin for Zimri, impaled in mid-bout
Chet is for Chur, who's just written out

Tet is for Tovia**, dead on the last page
Yud is for Yitzchak, who reached his old age

Kof is for Kozbi, whose prince was at fault
Lamed is for Lot's wife, turned into salt

Mem is for Miriam, healed before dying
Nun is for Nadav, in strange fire frying

Samech is for Sichon, slain by martial might
Ayin for Og -- same deal, different fight

Pay is for Pharaoh, who got in some licks
Tzadi for Tzelophehad, who gathered some sticks***

Kuf is for Korach, devoured by earth
Reish is for Rachel, dying through birth

Shin is for Shelomit's son who was stoned;
Taf is for Talmai, slain in Hebron.****


* -- Nahbi the son of Vofsi was one of the ten spies who reported falsely on
the land of Canaan and who, according to Numbers 14:37, died in the
resultant plague God sent against them. There aren't a heck of a lot of
"Vav" names out there, y'know.
** -- According to assorted medieval commentators with too much time on
their hands, a clever reading of Exodus 2:2 yields "Tov" or "Tovia" as the
original Hebrew name of Moses. As I noted above, there are even fewer "Tet"
names than "Vav" names.
*** -- At least, the midrashic tradition links the nameless man who is put
to death for gathering sticks on Shabbat (Numbers 15) with the deceased
Tzelophehad whose daughters sued for their father's portion of land in
Canaan (Numbers 27).
**** -- This is also cheating, as Talmai appears in Numbers but is not
killed till Joshua and is not identified as killed until Judges.
Unfortunately, "the elders of Taberah" doesn't fit the meter -- and "Hebron"
looked like my best rhyme for "stoned" in any case.

Dvar Torah- Lech Lecha
This week's Torah portion begins with God saying to Abraham (then Abram):

"Go for yourself from your land, from your relatives, and from your father's house."

In other words, sometimes to change your life you have to move around a bit. As someone who has moved around quite a complete, and am interviewing with law schools* on Friday so I can have the opportunity move around yet again, I can relate!

*I am interviewing at the AALS faculty hiring conference, and so far none of my interviews are with schools here in Washington.

And one minor outrage....
Rybczynski's article (a favorable review of an apparently pro-sprawl book) calls that book "iconoclastic."

There is nothing iconoclastic about defending the status quo.

And in particular, there is nothing iconoclastic about defending a status quo supported by $100 billion in state and federal highway money, virtually every zoning board in America, the real estate lobby, and the highway-building lobby. "Iconoclastic" means fighting the status quo.

If the book in question said we should stop building highways in places without bus service, so that people without cars could get to work after rush hour ... well, THAT would be iconoclastic.

But of course, the "we're the underdogs" claim is a scam pulled by every defender of every elite sooner or later. In normal democratic politics, both Ds and Rs pretend to be the horny-handed sons of the soil oppressed by the corrupt Big Business (to Ds) and Media (to Rs) Elites, even as their palms are greased by every concievable lobby.

Sometimes this scam takes more ominous forms. The history of anti-Semitism is the history of majorities pretending to be oppressed by the Jews (even though, like today's Christians in America and today's Muslims in half the world, they hold every conceivable lever of power).

Similarly, the history of anti-Zionism is the history of dozens of Arab dictators surrounding one Jewish state- and filling their subjects' heads with fantasies about being oppressed by that tiny state.

The European excuse for sprawl
In yesterday's Slate, Witold Rybczynski apparently defends the sprawl status quo on the ground that Europe has sprawl, so it must be inevitable. He asserts:

suburbs now constitute the bulk of European metropolitan areas, just as they do in America. We marvel at the efficiency of European mass transit, but since 1950, transit ridership has remained flat, while the use of private automobiles has skyrocketed.

In other words, his argument runs:

Premise: Europe is becoming more like America.
Conclusion: Europe will become just like America.
(Thus)
Conclusion 2: American-style sprawl is inevitable.

The flaw in this argument is that Europe is NOT just like America. Are there European cities as deserted, dangerous and decrepit as Detroit? Are there European cities as automobile-dependent as Oklahoma City (where the buses don't even run after 6:00 or so?) I don't know, but I suspect not.

The argument relies on a trend- but a trend in one direction (here, the direction of sprawl) is not an indication that the trend will continue ad infinitum.

For example, let's suppose that in virtually crime-free Japan, crime has risen over the past decade or so. (I have no idea whether this is the case; this is just a thought experiment). Does that mean that Japan's crime rates will eventually equal those of Detroit? If you adopt the assumption that current trends always continue, it would- obviously an idiotic result.

Indeed, a reliance on recent trends could lead to conclusions very different from Rybczynski's. In recent months, transit ridership in America has been rising due to increased gas prices. If you followed trend-worship, you would inevitably have to conclude that America will eventually become just as transit-oriented as Europe.

Moreover, the conclusion that sprawl is the inevitable result of the free market assumes that no European public policies favor sprawl. I don't know that this is the case; I assume that most European cities have highways and commuter rail lines extending out into suburbia, so I suspect that the opposite is true.

(To be fair, I've read other stuff Rybczynski has written, and usually he's much more moderate and reasonable.)

Dvar Torah: Noah
This week's Torah portion contains not just the story of Noah and the Flood, but also the story of the Tower of Babel. The first-grade version of this story (Genesis 11) is as follows: a city* decides to build a big tower to the sky. God gets mad and as a result, everyone is suddenly speaking a different language: one onlooker is suddenly speaking Hebrew, another Japanese, another Swahili, etc.

Samson Raphael Hirsch (a 19th-c. German commentator) had a slightly more sophisticated spin.

He begins with Gen. 11:1: "The whole earth was of one language and uniform words." (Needless to say, I am using Hirsch's own translation).

Hirsch interprets "one language and uniform words" to mean social conformity- in his words, that "uniformity in the formation of words and sentences" came from "atttitudes shared in common." In other words, the residents of the tower-building city thought alike.**

Hirsch thinks this conformity, and the resulting time and effort wasted on the tower, was part of the city's sin. Communal effort is fine if directed to a useful purpose- but the purpose of the tower was apparently to "make a name for ourselves" (Gen. 11:4)- in other words, purely for glory. Hirsch writes: "All of subsequent world history tells of towers of imaginary glory which [rules] knew how to entice, or force, their nations" - for example, the Egyptian periods.

So how does this adventure in proto-totalitarianism end? Not with physical, Divinely-inspired punishment, but when the city's language "wither[s] away so that the one will no longer understand the language of the other." (11:7). Hirsch interprets this phrase not as a sudden bolt from the blue, but as a gradual withering away of the city's social consensus. He writes that when a society makes an individual "obedient not to God but only to itself, then the individual must rise up and say 'I do not recognize this community, I recognize only myself.'" So in the city of tower-builders, people gradually got sick of community pressure, followed their own individual passions, and as a result "no longer understood one another . . . this conflict of opinions subsequently drove men utterly apart from one other."

In other words, the "Tower of Babel" story is a kind of allegory suggesting that a dictatorial society with no religious common purpose will eventually fall apart. Human beings will eventually become sick of being bossed around, and the totalitarian society will eventually turn into an anarchic society where there is no common core of values.

Hirsch's vision seems eerily prescient. The rise and fall of the Soviet Empire seems to parallel Hirsch's interpretation of the Tower of Babel story. First a nation rallies around a (in retrospect) foolish objective. A social consensus is created, as even the less enthusiastic members of the society are too scared and/or brainwashed to do more than mouth its leaders' platitudes.

Eventually, the enthuasiasm of both the oppressors and the oppressed lags.*** The people decide they have more interest in drinking vodka than in building Utopia. The totalitarian dictatorship degenerates first into a less oppressive dictatorship, and then into a corrupt and somewhat anarchic society.

The good news for North Korea and Cuba: the local tyrants can't last forever, just like the tyranny that led to the Tower of Babel****(or as the whole affair might be called today, Babelgate).

The bad news: what follows Communism may not be pretty. A people oppressed by too much government is not likely to find the perfect middle ground between liberty and authority. (Certainly Iraq's lapse into anarchy is evidence of that problem.)


*I find it hard to take the Torah's "whole earth" language all that literally. But if you assume that Gen. 11 refers to something that actually happened, whoever was present might have thought they were the "whole earth" if they were the descendants of survivors of a huge regional flod.

** Even today, we see that people with identical attitudes use identical phrases. For example, leftists will often use the word "progressive" while conservatives use that word only to describe an insurance company.

***To the (limited) extent you can even separate the two groups: Stalin exterminated rival Communists at least as vigorously as he exterminated other human beings.

****By the way, the word "Babel" implies a quite different interpretation of the whole story: that it is meant to poke fun at Babylonian paganism.

Mini-Dvar Torah: Bereshit
"In an environment where no attention is given harmony and beauty, man can easily run wild. The emotion that enables man to derive pleasure from order and harmony is closely akin to man's sense of order and harmony also in the sphere of ethics."

-Samson Raphael Hirsch, commentary on Genesis 2:9 (mid 19th c.)

"We created a landscape of scary places, and we became a nation of scary people."

James Howard Kunstler, "The Geography of Nowhere" (about suburban sprawl) (1992)

how to find out what I've been reading
My amazon.com book reviews at

my amazon.com book reviews

interesting web page
Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld of a local shul has an interesting webpage of articles on Jewish customs.

Most relevant to this time of year, he has an article on Tashlikh (the custom of spreading bread upon waters), emphasizing that it is not historically been that popular with rabbis.

Europe actually has more minor crime than USA
check out this

International Crime Victimization survey

Though the survey shows that most European countries are finally heading in the right direction.

codes I am linking to
Blog Flux Directory

Technorati Profile

your government at work
From the Washington Post:

A "Katrina Reconstruction Summit," hosted by Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) and sponsored by Halliburton, among others, brought some 200 lobbyists, corporate representatives and government staffers to a room overlooking the Capitol for a five-hour conference that included time for a "networking break" and advice on "opportunities for private sector involvement."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) sent his budget director, Bill Hoagland, who cautioned that federal Katrina spending might not exceed $100 billion. But John Clerici, from a law firm that helped sponsor the event, told the group that spending would "probably be larger" than $200 billion. "It's going to be spent in a fast and furious way," Clerici said.

Sipping coffee from china cups and munching on doughnuts, the corporate crowd heard Joe McInerney, president of the American Hotel and Lodging Association, predict: "I think we'll see Mardi Gras in New Orleans to some extent this year."