Animal rights group files lawsuit comparing Kapporos ritual to Wuhan "wet markets," linking it to COVID19

As readers of this blog know, I oppose using chickens for the  kapporos ritual, and have been outspoken on this issue for years. But I also oppose using antisemitic tropes to get publicity in the fight against it. 

This year, the Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos has sunk to a new low.  They have re-opened a lawsuit from 2018 opposing the ritual, now linking it to COVID19. 

When I first heard about this, I assumed they were referring to social distancing and the danger of gathering in large crowds.  A concern I would agree with. But the Alliance takes it a step further, evoking, however unintentionally, an old trope about Jews being the source of plagues and diseases. This I must condemn as tone-deaf and dangerous.

 In their lawsuit, they compare pop-up kapporos centers to "wet markets" in Wuhan, China, where it is believed COVID19 mutated, and implying the same thing can happen with Hasidic Jews slaughtering chickens in New York.

This theme been picked up by animal rights groups all over the internet, resulting in posts like this tweet:

The implication here, as I read this post, is that COVID19 will jump from humans to chickens, mutate there, then jump back to humans in a more virulent form and wipe out New York City.  Not only is this an irresponsible, inflammatory scare tactic, it is scientifically impossible. Chickens do not get COVID19. The pop-up kapporos centers may be messy and cruel, but they are not incubators for a new form of coronavirus.  (Chickens can, however, give you a case of salmonella, which is why the CDC recommends not kissing or snuggling them.)

COVID19 is a mammalian virus, believed to have originated in wild bats that were being sold as food.  Isolated cases have been reported of cats and dogs getting COVID19 from humans, including a tiger in Central Park Zoo, but birds, including chickens, cannot carry or transmit it. 

The Chinese in Wuhan might eat bats, but Hasidic Jews do not, nor do they eat other kinds of wild "bush meat."  The chickens used at kaporos centers come from the very same commercial sources as the chicken sold in your local grocery.  Unless you are a vegetarian, you probably have some in your freezer. 

There is a very big difference between handling domestic species that humans have interacted with for centuries, and "wet markets" selling wild-captured exotic species with possible viruses against which humans have no resistance. 

Nevertheless, the animal rights groups are now using #wetmarket in their Tweets and posts, purposely causing kapporos to turn up in searches about COVID19 and primitive meat markets in Wuhan and elsewhere.  Making such a comparison at this point in time, when people are already panicked and angry, is bound to have negative consequences. Especially since the people involved are Jews, a group that has been falsely accused of spreading diseases in the past.

There are already antisemitic memes online, linking Jews with plagues, like this sign seen at a recent white supremacist protest. Conspiracy theories blame George Soros,  the Jewish billionaire who is everybody's scapegoat. QAnon claims the Democrats worship Satan, another accusation sometimes leveled at Jews. Adding fuel to this fire is a bad idea. 

Rina Deich, a founding member of the Alliance, has tried to assure me in a text conversation that their intent was not to say that COVID19 will mutate in chickens. Rather, they are referring to crowds of people gathering in the unsanitary conditions, where some sort of new mutation of viruses in chickens might happen. In her words to me:

 "There is a toxicologist who has spent hours with the lawyer discussing the potential dangers of kaporos, especially the way it is practiced. Just because it hasn't happened yet does not mean that in the right conditions it wouldn't happen. It's a distinct possibility."

Just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean it can't?  I suppose that is true of just about anything.  Hard to disprove a negative, they say.  

But even if this unnamed toxicologist is right, and some other virus in chickens could mutate, linking kapporos and COVID19 in a publicity stunt right now is still irresponsible. And publicity stunt it is. The first thing the Alliance did was send out a press release. Whatever their original intent, it has now gone viral.  And not everybody is making fine distinctions between Wuhan bush meat and chickens in New York.  Just read the headlines.

Deich tried to reassure me that, "When we are interviewed by the media, if we handle it the correct way, it should not fuel anti-semitism. In fact, people seeing that Jews are opposed to this practice takes away their ammunition."

Brave words. And if Deich does the interviews, it might well be true, although I doubt whether antisemites will care if Jews protest it or not.  However, if Karen Davis, their primary spokesperson, is the one giving those interviews, I do not trust it will be handled "in the correct way."  She has a bad record for saying insensitive things about Hasidic Jews, a culture she does not like or respect. (Read more on that.)

As of this writing, it is not even clear if the judge will re-open the case, which was denied back in 2018. But that doesn't really matter, because the Alliance already got what they wanted: lots of free publicity.  They have also set the stage, come October, for the public to see Orthodox Jews as a bunch of dangerous, disease-ridden people spreading the Plague.  They didn't intend it that way, but there are always unintended consequences.  I only hope it does not result in violence against the community like it did in the past, heaven forbid, when Jews were burned at the stake for supposedly causing the Black Plague. 

As I said at the beginning of this article,  I oppose the use of chickens in this ritual. I would love to see it shut down forever.  I encourage my fellow Hasidim to avoid these gatherings, not because of chickens who don't carry COVID19, but because of people who do. At the same time, I cannot, and will not, endorse this latest mutation of the anti-kapporos campaign.

Orion launch: One small step toward Mars, one big nostalgic moment for me

This morning I woke up at 5:50 AM, just in time to tune in and watch the launch of the Orion spacecraft at 6:05 (Central time).  This was both a big moment for NASA and a nostagic one for me.  The newscaster said this was the farthest out in space that the USA had sent a spacecraft since the last Apollo mission in 1973.  The thing is, I'm old enough to remember those Apollo flights, as well as the earlier Mercury and Gemini programs.

I grew up in the space era.  The sound barrier was broken by Chuck Jaeger on October 17, 1947, just 13 days before I was born.  (That was also the year of the supposed alien landing at Roswell in July.  It has always been a family joke that I'm weird because I got zapped by an alien mind beam.  I was in my mother's womb in California at the time, so who knows?)

Ten years later, Sputnik orbited the earth.  I can still remember the day that my father showed me the story in the morning paper.  The same paper had times listed for when you could see the tiny satellite cross the sky.  That was a big deal back then, as we went into the backyard to look for that pinpoint of light.

Then the space race was on, and every kid I knew (and a lot of adults, too) were tuned in to the space program.  Like everyone else, I went through a phase of wanting to be an astronaut.  That never happened, but I still fulfill my love of outer space with Star Trek and movies like The Right Stuff and Apollo 13.  (I've lost track of how many times I've watched that movie, but I will say that Gene Kranz's line, "Failure is not an option!" has become a watchword around our house.  It's my favorite movie for how a group of people working together can achieve the seemingly impossible.)

"Earthrise" by Frank Borman

One of the interesting things about space flight back then was that the famous picture of Earth rising over the moon wasn't even on the original agenda.  Until the Apollo 8 astronauts actually saw that from the lunar orbit, nobody had thought to include it in the list of photographic goals because nobody could picture it.  But Frank Borman knew a good picture when he saw one, so he pointed the camera and clicked.  That photo -- as well as many others of the "blue marble" -- has become a universal symbol of the unity we might one day have on our planet.  It was no accident that the first Earth Day happened in April 1970, less than a year after the Apollo moon landing.

I was 22 and living in South Dakota when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969.  People today who claim the moon landing was faked don't know what they are talking about.  Sure, the pix are fuzzy, but that's because the cameras and transmissions back then weren't a good as today.  But for those of us glued to our TV sets during the live transmission, there was no doubt it was real.  Cynics ask who was taking the photos of that first step, but the answer is simple:  The Eagle lander took them, the same as there was a camera on board Orion that took pix of the earth receding as the craft rose into the sky, etc.  No, my conspiracy theory friends, the Apollo moon walk was very real.

Photo of Mars showing a thin atmosphere.
What else will we discover there?

Today's Orion mission was a test flight for new equipment -- including a heat shield and a re-design of the Mercury-type capsule -- that may eventually be used for a trip to Mars.  A lot of people will ask, why go there?  It's so expensive, what do we get from it?

True, it is expensive.  But the technological  advances we got from previous space missions have long since paid for themselves.  One example being those thin, light, but very warm materials we now use for so many things.  (I've got a pair of winter boot liners made of the same stuff as astronaut space suits.)  Learning to put satellites in orbit has given us GPS, cell phones, global communications.  Etc.  And the quest for lighter payloads has given us smaller and smaller electronics.

So who knows what we will learn from the Mars mission?  I say, let's go!

Voting for Darwin, Evolution, and Modern Science

One of the more bizarre events in the contentious 2012 election occurred in Athens-Clarke County, Georgia, where 4000 people wrote in "Charles Darwin" against unopposed creationist Congressman Paul Broun (R).  More info on that...)   Broun had denounced evolution and other scientific theories, including embryology and the Big Bang Theory, as "lies straight from the pit of hell."  Opponents of his ideas wrote in "Darwin" in protest.

Charles Darwin, 1809-1882

While there was little chance of Darwin actually being elected (Broun got more that 209,000 votes and was declared the winner) it does raise the question in my mind:  Why are fundamentalist Christians so threatened by science?

And while it is true that there are some creationists among us Jews, they are in the minority.  By and large, most Jews find no problem in reconciling scientific discoveries with religion.  Even in the 12th century, Moses Maimonides (a major Jewish philosopher still studied today) wrote in his Guide for the Perplexed: "The account of Creation given in Scripture is not, as generally believed, intended to be literal in all its parts." (section 2:29)

In his introduction to the same work, Maimonides also said: ""Now, on the one hand, the subject of Creation is very important, but on the other hand, our ability to understand these concepts is very limited.  Therefore, God described these profound concepts, which His divine wisdom found necessary to communicate to us, using allegories...  It has been outlined in metaphors so that the masses can understand it according to their mental capacity, while the educated take it in a different sense."

One of my teachers, Rabbi Moshe Adler, once explained it this way:  "God could have sent down Carl Sagan to explain how the universe was created, but the people of that time would not have understood him.  So God gave them a story."

And indeed, the Genesis version of Creation does seem to follow the basic order of evolution:  Light/energy; land & atmosphere; green plants; egg-laying animals; mammals; and finally, humans.  The only part out of order is the creation of the heavenly bodies, which comes on the 4th day, right in the middle of the process.  Some Jewish commentators have suggested that this was not a chronological statement, but, rather, a theological one:  Putting the sun in the middle meant it was neither a solar god starting the process nor a deity finishing it. It was merely one more physical thing on the list of items being created.  (See Slifkin, Nathan, The Challenge of Creation:  Judaism's Encounter with Science, Cosmology, and Evolution, pp. 235-37.)

What Maimonides was saying is still true today, perhaps even more so in this age of quantum physics and string theory.  Many scientific theories are very complex, and require a high degree of intelligence and many years of study to fully understand them.  For the average person, a simpler explanation will often suffice.  Given that the Bible was passed down orally at a time when science was in its infancy and most people were illiterate, it makes sense that many things were told in simple stories, without going into great detail about how the process actually worked.

Moses Maimonides, 1138-1204

And let me add that Maimonides was an Orthodox Jew, as were many other commentators who sought to reconcile science and religion down through the ages.  So it is definitely possible to be both Orthodox and scientific.  Maimonides even went so far as to say that, when it came to statements by the Talmudic sages that contradicted later discoveries in science, "Do not ask of me to reconcile everything that they (the Sages) stated from science with the actual reality, for the science of those days was deficient, and they did not speak out of traditions from the prophets regarding these matters."   So, we are not required to believe in spontaneous generation, a geocentric universe, the heavenly spheres, or the sometimes strange folk cures described in the Talmud.   (see The Dirt Mouse, the Sweat Louse, and the Dong Chong: A Study of Spontaneous Generation in Jewish Law).

Christianity, on the other hand, has often felt threatened by science.   There was a period in medieval Europe when popes were forbidding Christians to go to Jewish doctors, condemning "Jewish medicine" as being from the devil.  (On the other hand, church officials themselves often went to Jews for healing, because they had a better success rate than the Catholic priests who were offering chunks of the "true cross" and other holy relics for cures.)  One might laugh at this, but, as noted above, Congressman Broun still believes modern science comes from the devil, although he is not so crass as to call it "Jewish."  Even more scary, this is a man who sits on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology!  How can you make legal decisions and policies on science when you don't even believe in it?  (See Bill Nye: Paul Broun 'unqualified to make decisions about science, space and technology')

Among the theories denounced by Broun is embryology, a science that is pretty well established in the modern world, much to the benefit of human babies.  Which raises the question:  Does Broun still believe that the father plants a homunculus (fully-formed miniature adult) into the mother?  Does he reject what we see on ultrasound tests?  Tracking of genetic diseases through DNA?  Effects of drugs on the development of the fetus?  Surgical correction of birth defects while still in the womb?

If you reject embryology, how do you account for any of these things?

Years ago, I heard a Chabad Hasidic rabbi say that when scientists first looked through their early microscopes, they actually saw the homunculus, but later suppressed this knowledge.  I find this absurd. What more likely happened is that they saw the nucleus of the sperm cell for the first time but, not understanding what it was, projected their beliefs onto that dark spot and thought they saw a tiny person.  As microscopes improved, it became obvious that this early assumption was wrong.  The vast majority of Jews today accept embryology as proven fact.  Even very Orthodox Jews use in vitro fertilization to try and conceive when natural methods fail.

All of which brings me back to my original question:  Why are Christian fundamentalists so threatened by evolution?  I think the answer lies in how they construct their theologies.   For them, it is absolutely essential for every single word of the Bible to be literally true.  Why?  Because they rely upon those words to prove that Jesus was their messiah.  If you start questioning the literalness of Bible verses, you run the risk of the whole house of cards tumbling down.  In Paul Broun's words, the so-called "lies" of science were intended to "keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior."

We Jews, on the other hand, do not believe we need a human sacrifice to be forgiven, nor do we rely upon the literalness of biblical stories as the foundation of our faith.  We are more focused on actions rather than beliefs.  A sin, in Judaism, is a specific negative act committed against Torah laws in the physical world, not merely a belief.  Just thinking about something -- even a seemingly heretical idea -- does not make it a sin.  (Although it could make you seem odd to your neighbors.)

So yes, we take the laws of Judaism literally -- a pig is a pig and must not be eaten, nor can it be allegorized away -- but when it comes to personal beliefs about God and religion in general, there is a great deal of latitude.  Thus we find multiple interpretations of biblical stories in Judaism, existing side by side.  We may argue and debate them (and how we do love to debate!), but in the end, what matters most is how we are living our lives.  Two Jews may be equally strict in observing the Sabbath, but may also have very different interpretations as to why they are doing so.  And both can be correct on some level.

So, for example, one can literally believe that the Noah Flood covered the entire planet, or that it was a more localized mid-east phenomenon as suggested by modern science.  (See William Ryan and Walter Pitman, Noah's Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries about the Event that Changed History, which presents a very strong case for it taking place around the Black Sea.)  Either way, the moral lessons of the story remain the same.  It teaches us, among other things, that God values every species on our planet, and so should we.  Similarly, we can say that whether or not the Exodus happened exactly as described in the Torah, it still contains valuable teachings about freedom that are relevant today.  (There are also Christians who think this way.  See The Bible and Congressman Broun by Adam Hamilton.)

In closing, I find myself still agreeing with Maimonides, again from Guide for the Perplexed:

When I have a difficult subject before me -- when I find the road narrow and can see no other way of teaching a well established truth except by pleasing one intelligent man and displeasing ten thousand fools -- I prefer to address myself to the one man, and to take no notice whatever of the condemnation of the multitude."

Amen.

Vote Romney-Ryan and Kill the Planet!

I don't usually do a lot of politics on this blog, but Mitt Romney is so dismissive of clean energy initiatives, and Paul Ryan's record on environmental issues is so shockingly abysmal, I feel I must speak up in defense of the natural world.  Because if the Romney-Ryan campaign has its way, there won't be very much nature left for our descendants to see or enjoy. 

Paul Ryan, Conspiracy Theorist

Ryan is as clueless about environmental science as he appears in this photo.  In a  December 2009 op-ed  that he wrote during international climate talks (and still proudly displays on his official Washington website), Ryan made reference to the hacked University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit emails (so-called "Climategate") and accused climatologists of a “perversion of the scientific method, where data were manipulated to support a predetermined conclusion,” in order to “intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change.” Because of spurious claims of conspiracy like these, several governmental and academic inquiries were launched, all of which found the accusations to be without any merit.  (See Debunking Misinformation about Stolen Climate Emails in the Manufactured Climategate Controversy for further detailed information.)

There was no "climate conspiracy" outside of Paul Ryan's head.  Nobody was perverting the scientific method, they were using the scientific method to peer review and critique various articles that had already been published in respectable journals.  Granted, some scientists were rude to each other in their emails (and who among us hasn't done that?) but Emily Post has nothing to do with the accuracy of the science.

Climate change denial and the Ryan "snow" argument

The problem is, Ryan himself doesn't understand climate science.  In the same op-ed, he stated, "Unilateral economic restraint in the name of fighting global warming has been a tough sell in our [Wisconsin] communities, where much of the state is buried under snow."  He and other climate deniers who use snowstorms as proof that the planet is not getting warmer do not understand a basic fact of physics, namely, that warm air holds more moisture than cold air.  This is why the worst storms usually come in March-April, when the northern hemisphere is warming up.  Warm air from the south hits cold fronts from the north and bam!  We get buried.   When the Jet Stream abnormally dips all the way south to Texas and the Gulf of Mexico, it will pull lots of moist air northward, resulting in even more snow.

Yes, it is true that the winter of 2009-2010 had record snowfall in Wisconsin (and also here in Minnesota, Ryan's neighbor state) but it is ALSO true that the average temperatures have been getting steadily warmer for decades.  When I first moved to Minnesota in 1973, I regularly saw temps of 40 below zero (F) on the winter weather map -- something I have NOT seen on any map around here for at least two decades.  Instead, the winters have been so warm -- with or without snow -- that the lakes no longer freeze hard enough for safe ice fishing in many parts of Minnesota and Wisconsin.  This, in turn, is hurting tourist industries that rely on snow and ice for winter sports.

I am wondering if Ryan is still sticking by this snow argument now that climate patterns have shifted again. Wisconsin is in the midst of a severe drought that is devastating crops across the Midwest.  Neither Minnesota nor Wisconsin had much snow at all this winter (2011-2012).   Instead, it all went south and buried places like Tennessee that normally don't have much snow.  And how does Ryan explain all the record 100-degree temperatures we had across the continent this summer, and the thousands of broken heat records every day?

Climate change is not the only area where Ryan fails on the environment.  He has voted to eliminate the EPA regulations on greenhouse gases, to block the US Department of Agriculture from preparing for climate change, to eliminate light bulb efficiency standards and slash clean energy investment.  On the other hand, he voted FOR keeping oil industry subsidies and is a big supporter of coal.  (For refs in the congressional record on all these issues, click here.)

Mitt Romney, Energy Luddite

Mitt Romney isn't any better.  He not only comes down 100% on the side of Big Oil and Big Coal, he ridicules developing new energy technologies.  On the campaign trail last week, while speaking to coal miners in Ohio, he said that Obama "is only interested in energy above the ground," by which I assume he meant solar and wind energy -- something he has previously mocked by saying "you can't drive a car with a windmill on it."  (Although you can drive a car with a dog kennel on it -- something he has personally demonstrated.)

On that same day, Obama was campaigning in Iowa, which gets 19% of its electricity from wind power, ranking second in the nation for that industry.  Wind farms, Obama pointed out, have already generated 7000 new jobs in Iowa. 

With all his focus on jobs, you would think that Romney would applaud that achievement.  But no, he retorts that wind turbines -- he called them "whirlybirds" -- won't generate energy when the wind is not blowing.  (Maybe not -- but when we run out of coal and oil, nothing will be generating energy if we do not plan ahead.  And hasn't Romney ever heard of storage batteries?)

"We have 250 years of coal," Romney says, "Why in the world wouldn't we use it?"   Even if better technologies are developed?  After all, the Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of rocks.  And there were probably flint-chippers who objected to using metal-tipped spears because it would put them out of work.  "We have tons of rocks, why in the world wouldn't we use them?"  But the smarter cavemen embraced the new technology and the rest is, well, history.

In that same speech, he apparently thought it more effective to use sensationalism rather than science, misquoting Vice President Biden as saying that "coal is more dangerous than terrorists."  Biden never said that!  What he did say, in a 2007 interview, was that "hundreds of thousands of people die, or their lives are shortened, by coal plants."  Which, when you consider the pollution these plants produce (not to mention black lung disease among coal miners and other unsafe conditions), is perfectly true.  Asthma and lung cancer may not be as dramatic as a terrorist attack, but they kill far more people in the long run.  And guess what?  When Romney was governor of Massachusetts, he said much the same thing, stating that a coal plant "kills people." (Yet another flip-flop.)

I could go on and on, but I'll end with this thought:  Is Mitt Romney really a man you would want in the White House?  And do you really want Paul Ryan to be one heartbeat away from the Presidency?

* * *

(If you happen to be a Republican and still think climate change is a hoax, please read this excellent article by Republican meteorologist Paul Douglas (founder of the WeatherNation Channel) about how he came to believe it is true -- and it had nothing to do with Al Gore, just science:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-douglas/republican-climate-change_b_1374900.html? )

"Who Stole My Religion?" -- rescuing Judaism from Right-wing politics

I haven't been blogging much the last few weeks, because my energy has been going into the final stages of publishing a book with Richard H. Schwartz, author of Judaism and Vegetarianism, as well as other works. Schwartz's new book is called "Who Stole My Religion?  Revitalizing Judaism and applying Jewish values to help heal our imperiled planet.  I'm in the process of doing the formatting and layout for self-publishing on Lulu.com.   His regular publisher (Lantern Books) did not think they could get it out in time for the 2012 election, so we went the self-publishing route.  The back cover reads:

Richard Schwartz, author of
"Who Stole My Religion?"

"In the five decades since Richard Schwartz first became a religious Jew, he has watched the mainstream Jewish community shift more and more to the Right, often abandoning the very values that originally attracted him to Orthodox Judaism. In this soul-searching book, Schwartz examines the ways in which he believes his religion has been “stolen” by partisan politics, and offers practical suggestions for how to get Judaism back on track as a faith based on peace and compassion. Tackling such diverse issues as U.S. politics, Israeli peace issues, the misuse of the Holocaust, antisemitism, U.S. foreign policy, Islamophobia, socialism, vegetarianism, and the environmentalism, Schwartz goes where many Jews fear to go — and challenges us to re-think current issues in the light of positive Jewish values."

And yes, if you looked closely at the cover (which I designed, by the way) you will see my name there under his -- in much smaller print, because although I did help with a lot of research, editing and in some sections ghostwriting for this book, Richard Schwartz is indeed the primary author. We started out doing it co-authored in dialogue form (sort of the Jewish version of the "City Mouse and the Country Mouse" -- he has spent all his life in the New York City area) but that didn't work out.  So I decided to pull back and let it be his book, for the good of the project.  Still, he generously wanted to give me credit on the cover.   A couple of our original dialogues did make it into the Appendix area, along with a section on kapporot that we had previously co-authored.  And we did include both of our bios.

As for the cover, here's my explanation of the design:

The background photo (#ISS028-E-020072 from the NASA files) was taken aboard the International Space Station on July 31, 2011, when the sun was just below the horizon. When observed from space, the palette of gaseous layers of our atmosphere reminds us of the fragility and tenuousness of the thin cocoon that shelters life on Earth from the cold harsh vacuum of outer space. Without this precious envelope of air, life on Earth could not exist.

A thin crescent of the new moon appears to hang above the Earth, although in reality it is more than 238,855 miles away. On the Jewish calendar, the important holiday of Rosh Hashanah, which begins the High Holy Days season of repentance, always begins on a New Moon. Perhaps the message of this photo is to encourage us to think about how we are treating our planet’s fragile atmosphere, and to change our polluting ways before it is too late.

 Where to order:   

Who Stole My Religion?  is available in both print and ebook versions on Lulu.com.  If you order the print version by February 17, use the coupon code FLIGHTLESS at checkout to get free ground shipping in the USA (and maybe elsewhere, too -- not sure about that, but give it a try):

Due to the urgency of his message, Professor Schwartz has also made the PDF ebook version is available as a FREE DOWNLOAD (click here).  However, if you can afford it, you are encouraged to buy a download for $5 on Lulu.com to help support his efforts to help heal our planet.  Either way, in addition to getting your book super-fast, the download has the advantage of seeing the photos in color:

Will there be ebook versions for Kindle, iPad and Nook?

Not unless those programs are vastly improved for handling academic works.  Epub, the program used on iPad and Nook, completely reflows the text -- which means it does not respect page numbers, indented paragraphs for long quotes, footnotes, and other academic formats.  Every time the reader changes the font size, the pages are all renumbered.   Kindle does the same thing, plus the feedback on it's handling of footnotes is horrendous!  The fact is, these new e-reader formats are mostly suitable for novels and non-fiction works with plain prose text, but just can't handle the more complex layout of  an academic work.  Until such time as the program developers solve these problems, the format best suited to Who Stole My Religion? is PDF, which preserves the original layout and can be read on your desktop or laptop computer.

To collect or not to collect -- is that really the question?

A while back, I had a conversation with a vegan who thought it was wrong for children to catch fireflies in jars.  Her reasoning was, that the flashes were mating signals and we would be interrupting their love lives.  "How would you like to just fall in love and then somebody grabs you and puts you in a cage?"  Interesting anthropomorphism, and a perfect example of how our society confuses sex with love.  But I highly doubt that fireflies actually fall in love.   A Black Widow spider certainly doesn't -- she EATS her mate.  So does a praying mantis sometimes. Nature in the raw is often far from romantic.

Still, the question remains:  Is it ethical to allow children to collect living things from nature?  My vegan friends say no, we don't need zoos or bugs in jars, the kids can learn from watching nature videos.  But TV just isn't "real" in the same way as seeing the actual live animal.  Things happen fast on nature shows because they edit out the long hours of waiting for the "action."  But actually stalking a frog takes focus and patience!

Thinking back to my own childhood, we regularly caught fireflies, watched them flash in the jar in our rooms after lights out, then released them in the morning.  I can't say what effect this had on the fireflies, but I do know that my sister and I learned a lot from watching the various bugs, toads, snakes, and other things we caught and kept in captivity for a while.   From our "catch and release" activities, we discovered a lot about nature firsthand.

We learned that you can't just throw any old leaves in with the caterpillars, you need the right species of plant and a way to keep the leaves fresh (which we accomplished by covering the mouth of a small jar of water with foil, then poking holes for the plant stems.  The food stayed fresh without caterpillars falling into the water and drowning.)   We learned what toads, snakes and turtles eat, and how they eat it, where to find it.   And we also learned how to look up and identify the things we found.  By 5th grade, I was reading college-level biology books.   And I must admit that I also collected insects in the usual way, mounting them on pins in boxes and attracting the attention of the high school biology teacher, who invited me to go on a museum entomology field trip.   Although I no longer collect, I still love entomology.

So I find myself wondering if kids today, who are often  forbidden by well-meaning parents to do this kind of hands-on learning, are  really discovering very much about the outdoors.  Have we gotten so politically correct about nature that we are defeating the purpose by creating a barrier between children and nature?  Lately there has been a public service ad running about "discover the forest," where two kids wander into the woods, turn over a log and look at some bugs, and then Shrek come along and eats one (a bug, that is, not a child!)  A cute fantasy, but in real life, how many parents would let their kids turn over a log in the first place?  (If you do, please teach them to put it back as it was when they are done, so you don't destroy the homes of things that live there.)

When I was a kid, there would have been no need for such an advertisement.   You could hardly keep me out of the small suburban woodlot we called our "forest."  Contrast that with my 8-year-old grandson, who has been spending daycare time with us in the country this summer, and who, although he has 15 acres here to play and explore in, rarely goes outside on his own.   Too boring.  When he first came, he could not tell a daisy from a sunflower, but has gradually learned some basics about the outdoors.   Today, we both looked up an unfamiliar purple flower and learned it was a species of vervain.  When we are outside, we watch things happening in nature, such as bees pollenating squash flowers or wasps hunting caterpillars among the broccoli -- things he would never stop and watch on his own.   One day, I took him into the back woods and then told him to lead me home.  He did -- by following the sound of our roosters crowing and our geese honking.  "See?" I said, "You won't get lost if you pay attention to what is around you."

So is it ethical to catch and collect things?  I think it depends on how you do it.  Certainly it is wrong to pull wings off flies or leave animals starving or dying of boredom in cages.  But I see nothing wrong with letting kids keep a toad for a few days, then release it back into it own environment.  When I find a snake or turtle, I bring it in the house for the kids to see.  Who knows?  Maybe the snake benefits spirtually from having helped a child learn more about the world.   In the long run, maybe a little reptilian inconvenience now might well save that snake's home in the future.

On bird migration, modern science, and Jewish theology

The Canada geese are coming back now -- I've seen several flocks heading north.  With all the flooding going on here in Minnesota, there's plenty of open water for them to swim in.  (Luckily we are not in a flood zone, but my domestic geese are having a good time wading in puddles and honking at their migrating brothers.)

Speaking of migration, did you know that until the late 1700s, it was commonly thought that birds hibernated in the mud in rivers and lakes during the winter?  The British doctor Edward Jenner, who is best known for discovering the smallpox vaccine, was also interested in hibernation, and conducted extensive studies on hedgehogs and other hibernating mammals.  He was among the first to remark that birds were not dirty or muddy when they reappeared in the spring.  Nor were they thin and hungry like other hibernating animals when they emerge in spring.  So where did the birds go? 

Jenner dissected spring-returning birds and examined the contents of their stomachs, to see what, if anything they had been eating.  He found seeds of plants not native to Britain. He also noted that these species of birds had been seen flying far out across the oceans. So he hypothesized that the birds were leaving Britain to go someplace else in winter. Unfortunately, Jenner died before he was able to write up his studies on bird migration, but his family published them after his death. Modern research has confirmed his theory:  birds do not hibernate in mud, they migrate.

That such a basic scientific fact was not discovered until the late 18th century raises the question of various "scientific" statements made by the early Jewish sages.  When I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, it was taken for granted among Jews that when it came to science and medicine, the modern discoveries take precedence over any folklore that might be in the Talmud or other earlier writings.   We went by the opinion of Maimonides, one of the greatest Jewish philosophers and a medical doctor, wrote in the 12th century: "Do not ask of me to reconcile everything that they (the Sages of old) stated from science with the actual reality, for the science of those days was deficient, and they did not speak out of traditions from the prophets regarding these matters... " (Guide for the Perplexed, 3:14)  In other words, when it comes to science, the Sages were not divinely-inspired prophets nor were they infallible.

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, a major 19th-century German Jewish theologian, later wrote: "...We find that the Sages themselves considered the wisdom of the gentile scholars equal to their own in the natural sciences. To determine who was right in areas where the gentile sages disagreed with their own knowledge, they did not rely on their tradition but on reason. Moreover they even respected the opinion of the gentile scholars, admitting when the opinion of the latter seemed more correct than their own." (From a letter written in 1876  to Rabbi Pinchas M.E. Wechsler.)

That was the attitude I grew up with: science was science, no matter who discovered it.  But more recently, with the rise of the Haredi (post-WWII fundamentalist Orthodox Jewish) movement, there are those among my Jewish brethren who expect us to take absolutely everything the Talmudic rabbis said as literal scientific fact, trumping anything the secular scientists might since have discovered.  I find this impossible to do without having to turn my brain off -- an option I doubt God would want.  After all, God gave us brains to learn with.  The rabbis of the Talmudic era were very wise, but when it came to science, they were limited to what was commonly known around them. 

Thus, you find  things like the curious statement that "lice come from sweat" and  it is therefore permissible to kill them on the Sabbath  (Shabbat 107b)  when we normally do not kill living things.  At the time of this ruling, "spontaneous generation" of insects and other creatures was taken for granted by the whole known world, not just the rabbis.  Aristotle wrote that certain lower animals “are not produced from animals at all, but arise spontaneously: some are produced out of the dew which falls on foliage... others are produced in putrefying mud and dung, others in wood, green or dry, others in residues, whether voided residues or residues still within the living animal.”   Eels and fishes were commonly believed to come from the foam of the sea and flies from rotten meat. 

But today we know that lice come from the eggs of other lice, and are indeed living things.  The same goes for the Talmudic mice that are "half dirt and half flesh" (Chullin 9:10, Sanhedrin 91a), another biological impossibility.   For that matter, DNA wasn't even discovered until 1962 -- when I was still in high school.   Yet look how much  -- in my own lifetime! --  that discovery has fundamentally changed our entire perspective on the natural world!  All the "ancient wisdom" about passing down characteristics through "blood" is now rendered obsolete.

These may seem like trivial issues to some people, but for many Orthodox Jews, they are serious challenges to our faith.  If the Sages were wrong about lice and mice, are they also wrong about other things, too?   Can we trust anything the Talmud says in the face of these absurdities?

If you see Judaism (or any other religion) as a house of cards that will tumble with even the slightest question or error, then science can seem very threatening.  But if you can make a distinction between science studying the "how" of the  natural world and theology dealing with the "why" of human existence, there is no conflict between science and religion.   Science tells us how things work, but it is neutral on questions about God, the soul, and religious laws.  Scientifically, there is no reason I should not eat pork or mix meat with milk, because these laws are not about science per se.   I don 't keep kosher because is is more healthy or more natural,  but because it is the will of God for me as a Jew.   And if I had lice (which I thankfully do not!) it would still be permissible to kill them on the Sabbath, even though we now know they do  not spontaneously generate from sweat.  This is also why, when I see birds migrating, it is no challenge to my faith.

(For an in-depth discussion of spontaneous generation and Jewish law, see  The Sweat-Louse, the Dirt-Mouse and the Dong Chong.)

Geese migrating over my land in Minnesota, 2011