How I spent my Yom Kippur, and What I Found Out

[xiphias]

So, Lis and I usually just go to services in the morning on Yom Kippur, and don't leave all day.

Basically, roughly speaking, services on Yom Kippur go in three chunks. You've got stuff at nightfall, when it begins. Then you go home and sleep, and come back for the morning section, and the Torah reading, and the service to remember dead friends and family, and the service to remember martyrs, and the service to remember how we Used To Do Yom Kippur Sacrifices Back In The Good Ole Days When We Had A Temple.

Then there's a break. If you have kids, that's a good time to take them home and feed them. And you come back for the afternoon service, the closing service, the evening service, and finishing off the day.

During the break, most people go home to rest. But some people don't.

In most communities I've been in, during the break, you find people resting in shul -- a couple people sacked out on benches; maybe someone asleep on the bima, or in the classrooms -- you've basically got people stretching out wherever there's a reasonably comfortable piece of floor or chair, and taking it easy until it's time to pray again.

Now, Lis, of course, gets her superpowers from libraries. The bigger and more impressive the library is, the more power she gets from them, but ANY library will recharge and energize her. And, downstairs in the shul is a room where we have books, and a card catalog system, and a sign saying "Library."

It's not a BIG library, but it's enough for Lis's superpowers to work. So, we just sacked out there, so Lis could soak up enough energy to make it through the fast.

She spent the afternoon reading various Jewish books from the library; I'd brought Lis's Tanakh from home.

There are three major parts to the Jewish Scriptures. You've got the "Torah", which is Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, (or, as we Jews say, B'reishit, Sh'mot, Vayekra, Bamidbar, and D'varim). Then you've got the Nevi'im, or Prophets -- Joshua, Judges, I Samuel, II Samuel, I Kings, II Kings, Isaiah, Jerimiah, and Ezekiel, and the Twelve Minor Prophets: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. The third part is the Ketubim, or "Writings" -- Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, I Chronicles, and II Chronicles.

Torah, Nevi'im, and Ketubim: you take the first letters of those, in Hebrew, and you get Tav, Nun, Chet, which you can pronounce "Tanakh." Lis has a book with all these in translation; I took it with me to read and study in the afternoon.

See, this is embarrassing to admit, but I've not read most of the Tanakh. I mean, I've read bits here and there, but not anywhere near as much as I should have. My plan was to read psalms for the afternoon, and I did that, some.

But see, um, I'm supposed to be teaching Prophets this year.

So I figured it was about time I actually READ it.

I mean, I know some stories from it -- the ones that everyone knows -- Jericho, Samson, Yael (or Jael in most English translations -- you know, the one with the tent peg), the anointing of Saul, David and his lyre, David and Goliath, that sort of thing.

But I don't know them in context. I've never just sat down and read Prophets.

And I learned something important.

The Book of Joshua is maybe a little messed up, but the Book of Judges is just totally fucked. I mean, it's just twisted.

It's just people attacking defenseless towns, slaughtering the inhabitants, worshiping false gods, sacrificing their own children, murdering people and stealing their clothes because they lost a bet . . . and that's all the good guys.

I have no fuckin' CLUE how I'm going to teach this stuff. . .

Comments

[nextian.livejournal.com]

It was one of the big questions for me in Sunday school every year; how do you reconcile all of this "he brought us out of Egypt" with "to massacre the inhabitants of a peaceful country"? How do you reconcile "it's our birthright" with "because we killed everyone else who wanted it?"

Tricky and more than a little fucked up.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Heck, that's the LEAST of it. I was PREPARED for that bit.

It's just what a fuck-all job they DO of killing everybody, and it just gets WORSE from there.

[nextian.livejournal.com]

*weakly* Someone once suggested J was a dynastic novel and so therefore Judges is about the end of it, the ... corrupt part? The part you're meant to compare with Jacob and so forth and see, you know, the seeds of what the kings would become. You know, with the "lay with his father's wife" and the betrayed son becoming the favorite and I really, really forget the parallels, but they made some sense at the time.

It's interesting...

[msmidge.livejournal.com]

In the Survey of Jewish History course I'm TAing this semester, we looked at these accounts of conquest and then observed that there is no archaeological evidence that shows any conquest ever happened. Many scholars think that these tales of conquest were composed so the Israelites could show that they had a right to the land because they'd conquered it fair and square, which was what counted for legitimacy at the time.

I don't think we can just say the stories don't mean anything because they never actually happened--they still got canonized into the Tanakh, so obviously Jews have seen them as important for a long time. But it adds an interesting dimension to the problem of dealing with these stories pedagogically and ethically.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

One of the lessons I teach is "Historical/Scientific True" vs. "Mythological/Torah True." The important lesson I'm able to dig out of that is the mythological lesson that, if the Jews lose, it's because someone worshipped idols, picked up loot when they were told not to, or SOMETHING like that.

It's just not entirely a lesson I WANT my kids learning.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Our vicar and lay preacher say to treat it as a historical novel and not to assume that we are meant to approve of any of the characters.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Including G-d?

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Including G-d as presented as a character in that particular novel, yes.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much what my Tenth Grade Literature Teacher said (he taught us the Bible as Literature, and spent the time entertainingly pointing out awfulnesses).

[dancing-kiralee.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine once read all the major religious texts - the Bible, the Koran, and the Torah (I don't know if he read the whole Tanakh, or not). And he came away with this observation: All religious texts say things that are just wrong, and have to just be ignored by the current practitioners of the religion. Naturally these bits are in the parts that people don't read very often...

I'm most familiar with those pieces of the Bible and the Koran that fall into this category; but I'm not entirely surprised to find out that this is also true for the Tanakh.

I'm not sure how that helps with teaching it though, other than as a warning of what to look out for.

Kiralee

[richardf8]

There's one thing I want to say about Judges. Pay careful attention to the number of years that pass between horrific thing it narrates. Kind of like a contemporary news cycle, it dismisses decades, sometimes centuries, of peace and prosperity in a single line. Thus, I think, it tends to paint things as worse than they were, because then, as now, if it bleeds, it leads.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

"And the land was at peace for forty/eighty years."

Yeah, I noticed those.

I just don't think a forty-year stretch of peace is good enough. . .

[geekosaur]

40 is one of those magic "whole" numbers that means "a long time", and 80 is therefore "a really long time". As such it could well mean hundreds of years.

[geekosaur]

I generally take Shof'tim/Judges as "we were really, really f*cked up, and G-d punished us for it even when he was helping us".

The recent VBM course-by-email on Shof'tim suggested an interesting explanation for Yiftach's sacrifice, btw: he might have been Jewish by descent, but culturally he was K'na`ani and as such his sacrificing his daughter was expected when asking (G-d | the Ba`al) for victory in a tough battle. The odd way he phrased his vow was to hide it from the Jews around him.

(I may be able to find this in the VBM archive if you ping me later: I may have to be online during Shabbat, but I won't force indirect m'lakhot on shomer-Shabbat Jews.)

[geekosaur]

And one more: if you track uses of 40 and multiples vs. 7 and multiples, you'll find that in general the former is used negatively (for example, Noach's flood) and the latter positively (Shabbat, Shavu`ot, Yoveil (+1), 70 elders) — so the author/redactor (depending on approach) of Shof'tim was arguably encoding condemnation of the Jews' behavior into even the peaceful parts.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

the Book of Judges is just totally fucked

Word. You didn't even mention the guy and his concubine whom he handed over to be gang-raped! Or the bit where the Tribe of Benjamin (IIRC) basically enacted the Rape of the Sabines! Or...

I remember when I was 12, sitting in Religion class at my parochial junior high school, reading Judges and realizing what you have said above as my mouth literally fell open.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

To be fair, it may have been the owner of the house where the guy was staying who pushed the concubine out into the streets to be gang-raped to death. By the Benjaminites. Which is why the war started where most of the Benjamanites were killed. And all the other tribes swore that they wouldn't let the Benjaminites marry their daughters. Which is why the Benjamanites had to kidnap and rape women, with the consent of the other tribes, in order to rebuild their tribe.

. . . yeah.

[goljerp]

I remember someone whose thesis was that Judges is purposely an over-the-top book, showing how awful things were before there was a King in Israel.

But how to teach it? Well, you could punt: skip most of Joshua & Judges, and skip straight to Samuel. I mean, there's lots of stuff that's more "prophetic" than Joshua & Judges -- I mean, other than Devorah, who's an actual "prophet" in the book of Judges?